Epistemology Flashcards
hooks introduction
While it is evident that many women suffer from sexist tyranny, there is little indication that this forges ‘a common bond among all women’. ‘We share a common oppression’ can be an excuse for rich/white women to ignore the unique struggles that other women face.
Examines the outsider-within position, and how ‘living on the edge’ allows one to develop a particular way of seeing reality
Butler introduction
Is there some commonality among ‘women’ that preexists their oppression, or do ‘women’ have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone?
Hartsock introduction
‘A standpoint is not simply an interested position, but an engaged one’
Zack introduction
Reclaims the idea that all women share something in common, namely ‘historical and socially constructed, disjunctive category of female birth designees [F], biological mothers [M], or [primary] heterosexual choices of men [P]— category FMP’
Main theorists of feminist standpoint theory
Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins and Sandra Harding
Central thesis of feminist standpoint theory
Argues that women’s experience of oppression is epistemically advantageous, putting them in a position to collectively disclose something about the realities of patriarchy;
Vs the experience of being a man under patriarchy being epistemically disadvantageous, leading to ignorance and ideological entrapment
Central thesis of general standpoint theory
It is those in subordinate social positions eg. women, people of colour, working class individuals, who are poised to gain full consciousness because of their differential relationship to reality:
1. Knowledge is socially situated
2. Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized
3. Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized
Hegel
Consciousness becomes self-consciousness. It is the slave who goes on to develop fully liberated consciousness. Hegelian and Marxist traditions provide the genesis of standpoint theorists’ claim that the ‘double vision’ afforded to those who experience social relations from a position of marginality can, under certain circumstances, offer them epistemic advantage
Terri Elliot
Example of epistemological privilege of disabled individuals - Person A approaches a building and enters it unproblematically. As she approaches she sees something perfectly familiar which, if asked, she might call ‘The Entrance’. Person X approaches the same building and sees a great stack of stairs and the glaring lack of a ramp for her wheelchair.
Harding
- Whereas a perspective is occupied as a matter of the fact of one’s socio-historical position and may well provide the starting point for the emergence of a standpoint, a standpoint is earned through the experience of collective political struggle (which requires both science and politics). The ‘moment of critical insight’ needs struggle because it is obscured by dominant ideologies which make them appear normal
- In becoming occupants of a standpoint, they also become knowing subjects in their own right, rather than merely objects that are known by others.
- Quotes MacKinnon - a commitment to objectivity defined as maximising social neutrality in the social sciences was not socially neutral in its effects
Briana Toole short thesis
Rejects traditional epistemology (in particular intellectualism) for standpoint epistemology, specifically ‘pragmatic encroachment’
Toole: what does she rebut against?
Intellectualism - that knowledge does not depend on non-epistemic features, including 1) the atomistic view of knowers, which means epistemic agents have to be epistemic and interchangeable, and 2) aperspectivalism, which means an epistemic agent’s justification for some proposition must be accessible to other epistemic agents who are exposed to the same epistemic features of a situation.
Example: if you think water boils at 100C other people must also have access to it too.
Toole: what does she propose?
Solution - ‘pragmatic encroachment’, which takes social identity rather than stakes, to be what makes a difference to what a person is in a position to know.
Examples:
1. in psychology - failure to consider alternative hypotheses or plan experiments with certain things in mind eg. female research participants may feel uncomfortable,
2. Fricker’s example of women coining the term ‘sexual harassment’
3. cultural narratives about sex and gender can impact which hypothesis scientists propose to interpret a body of data, even when all other evidence is shared.
Toole example and explanation
The ‘pragmatic encroacher’ - low stakes vs high stakes lead to different things that individuals know (in example, this is whether the bank will be open tomorrow), even if they share the same epistemic features
Standpoint epistemology - black woman knows the other black woman has been sexually assaulted. The non-epistemic differences are differences in background beliefs and in how they evaluate the evidence
The ‘pragmatic encroacher’ takes the non-epistemic feature to raise the threshold required for knowledge. The standpoint epistemologist takes it [ie social identity] to affect how one reasons with the evidence they have
Permissivism
Toole - the view that sometimes there is more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. Beliefs about p are understood relative to some set of epistemic standards. June and Moira have different standards, affecting beliefs about p. Eg. due to placing differing value on acquiring true beliefs (being right) and avoiding false ones (not being wrong)
There is a tendency among dominantly situated knowers to be overly cautious, to favour avoiding false beliefs, as a type of ‘status quo bias’
BUT this means that agents are not interchangeable, so this still conflicts with intellectualism
De se knowledge
Personal knowledge that one expresses or grasps using first-personal concepts, such as I/me/mine. Premises:
1. Epistemic agents are able to first-personally grasp the first-personal perspectives of other agents, such that they can know what they know; this involves the agent possessing an imaginative capacity allowing them to do so
2. This imaginative capacity is more difficult the greater the social distance between agents
Eg. Moira can understand why the black woman does not want to
Marxist influence on standpoint theory
- Marx created the idea of a standpoint (the Proleterian standpoint), arguing that the dialectical situation between the bourgeoisie (the property-owning class) and the proletariat (those who sell their labour to survive) is similar to that of Hegel’s master and slave. The proletariat, though oppressed and exploited, is still better positioned as a class to understand and grasp social reality, because they are in contact with material reality through their labour
- Proletariat standpoint - workers can realise that their labour is being exploited, and is a coercive transaction between master and wage slave
- BUT this is something to be achieved, because working class people may resist a Marxist diagnosis of their situation eg. by harbouring a fantasy they may be a boss one day. To achieve the proletarian standpoint, you need collective consciousness raising and political struggle - it is not automatically conferred on a worker because you are a worker
- Members of the bourgeoisie are not precluded from the proletarian standpoint! Eg. Marx himself. The proletariat standpoint reveals bourgeois ideology
- Hence, not all social positions are equally good for revelations of the true nature of the social world. To grasp the objective truth, one needs the proletarian perspective/ standpoint
Fricker
Defines hermeneutical injustice:
1. Some area of the social experience of the agent is obscured from social understanding, due to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource
2. this lacuna is a product of hermeneutical marginalisation, and
3. it is strongly in the interests of the agent to have this area of their experience understood
Example: Carmita, the woman who was sexually assaulted but who could not articulate this, reflects a ‘lacuna’ (gap) in her society’s hermeneutical resources. An agent is hermeneutically marginalized, where she is ‘prevented from generating meanings pertaining to some areas of the social world’
Tesimonial injustice: unreliable source of testimony because of negative stereotypes eg. women not believed because they only have ‘female intuition’. Echoes Collins, where hegemonic standards for knowledge preclude the possibility of knowledge by less powerful people
Kristie Dotson
Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. It cannot be reduced to social and political forms of oppression. There are three different forms of epistemic oppression:
1. Inefficiencies in shared epistemic resources
2. Insufficient shared epistemic resources leading to hermeneutical injustice
3. Inadequate dominant, shared epistemic resources.
The first two are reducible to historical formations and are based on credibility and relations of epistemic power, while the third is not reducible. Meta-inquiries are difficult because though the prompt for inquiry comes from the ‘outside’, the inquiry always remains ‘inside’ in challenging ways. The main inertia is prompting recognition of a third-order epistemic oppression at all
Langton short thesis
- ‘Assumed Objectivity’ is bad because it hurts women and gets in the way of knowledge
- Feminism contributes to epistemology by identifying sins of omission and commission
- The world has come to fit beliefs about women - for example, that women are submissive by nature. Some also become self-fulfillingly true beliefs, like women becoming the traits they are assumed to have
Langton analysis (1)
Sins of omission:
1. Women get left out as objects and subjects of knowledge eg. economic analysis of labour and capital leaves out women who do unpaid work at home.
2. Women fail 1) to be known, 2) to be knowers, or 3) to count as knowers eg. barriers of access to knowledge
3. Marilyn Frye - calls subjective authority ‘the first and most fundamental act of our own emancipation’
4. Carol Gilligan - moral knowledge is defined by some theorists in a way that women and girls are made to seem ignorant or immature, and the remedy is not to change women but the conception of knowledge. Once it is recognized that women have a ‘different voice’ when it comes to moral knowledge, which speaks in an idiom of care rather than justice, and that this voice is as good if not better than its male
5. How do women get hurt? Getting left out in medical research, viewed as essentially mysterious and unknowable, lack of credibility undermines their job prospects, women not knowing about themselves (sins of omission)
Langton analysis (2)
Sins of commission:
1. Women get hurt as ‘objectivity objectifies’ (MacKinnon)
2. Anscombe - epistemological assumptions of objectivity suppose an objective direction of fit, where belief of women has come to fit the world
3. Haslanger - looks at ‘objectivity’, a ‘non-situated distanced standpoint’ as an epistemological norm. There exists ‘assumed objectivity’ with a collection of norms, including
a. Epistemic neutrality: take a genuine regularity in the behavior of something to be a consequence of its nature;
b. Practical neutrality: constrain your decision‐making and action to accommodate things’ natures;
c. Absolute aperspectivity: count observed regularities as genuine regularities just in case the observations occur under normal circumstances;
d. Assumed aperspectivity: if a regularity is observed, assume that circumstances are normal
4. Women are objectified and there is no constructive direction of fit: the world has come to fit belief. Beliefs may conform to how the world is, OR the world might conform to the belief eg. if you believe that something is the case
5. Objectification is when the world conforms to mind - eg. self-fulling perception, when men seeing women as subordinate helps make women subordinate. Objectification is a process of projection supplemented by force.
Rachel Fraser
Argues against metaphors, especially rape metaphors which have sexual violence as their source domain. In metaphors, certain properties and inference patterns are brought to salience, whereas others are suppressed and alienated
Fraser examples
- ‘Germany raped Brazil!’ in football games. Germany is 1) superior in terms of strength and prowess and 2) triumphing over Brazil. This means the inference from ‘Ella was raped’ to ‘Serious injustice has been done to Ella’ will become less accessible and less widely licensed, because we do not tend to think that an agent who has lost a competition has suffered an injustice (although we may think them unlucky).
- ‘Industry is raping the planet’, showing that 1) rape victims are helpless, and 2) they are objects, not subjects.This creates hermeneutical injustice by (i) drawing to salience certain inference patterns already embedded in the source domain’s inference network and (ii) suppressing or displacing others. It works to trivialize rape by suppressing inference patterns which reflect the moral gravity of rape.
There is also a mismatch in domain - for example, you cannot ‘rape’ a nation-state, because there is no clear, psychically unified subject who inhabits the metaphorical ‘nation-body’, nor is there an agent with a sexuality, or with distinctively sexual interests
