Epistemology

Question 1

hooks introduction

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Butler introduction

Answer 2

Is there some commonality among ‘women’ that preexists their oppression, or do ‘women’ have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone?

Question 3

Hartsock introduction

Answer 3

‘A standpoint is not simply an interested position, but an engaged one’

Question 4

Zack introduction

Answer 4

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’

Question 5

Main theorists of feminist standpoint theory

Answer 5

Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins and Sandra Harding

Question 6

Central thesis of feminist standpoint theory

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Central thesis of general standpoint theory

Answer 7

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

Question 8

Hegel

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Terri Elliot

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Harding

Answer 10

1. 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
2. In becoming occupants of a standpoint, they also become knowing subjects in their own right, rather than merely objects that are known by others.
3. Quotes MacKinnon - a commitment to objectivity defined as maximising social neutrality in the social sciences was not socially neutral in its effects

Question 11

Briana Toole short thesis

Answer 11

Rejects traditional epistemology (in particular intellectualism) for standpoint epistemology, specifically ‘pragmatic encroachment’

Question 12

Toole: what does she rebut against?

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

Toole: what does she propose?

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Toole example and explanation

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Permissivism

Answer 15

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

Question 16

De se knowledge

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Marxist influence on standpoint theory

Answer 17

1. 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
2. Proletariat standpoint - workers can realise that their labour is being exploited, and is a coercive transaction between master and wage slave
3. 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
4. Members of the bourgeoisie are not precluded from the proletarian standpoint! Eg. Marx himself. The proletariat standpoint reveals bourgeois ideology
5. 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

Question 18

Fricker

Answer 18

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

Question 19

Kristie Dotson

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Langton short thesis

Answer 20

1. ‘Assumed Objectivity’ is bad because it hurts women and gets in the way of knowledge
2. Feminism contributes to epistemology by identifying sins of omission and commission
3. 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

Question 21

Langton analysis (1)

Answer 21

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)

Question 22

Langton analysis (2)

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

Rachel Fraser

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Fraser examples

Answer 24

1. ‘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).
2. ‘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

Question 25

Hartsock

Answer 25

1. Develops feminist standpoint theory based on Marxist thought. In the same way workers are privileged because of their connection to sensuous material reality, women are privileged because of their relationship to the means of reproduction.
2. Women’s socially constructed role as social reproducers (creating/sustaining human life, caring for children, managing the home, especially for working class women) puts women in touch with the material reality of human need
3. They do not see things in terms of the price they fetch in the market, but their use in sustaining and generating human life.
4. They diagnose the pathologies of male supremacy and see how patriarchy depends on women’s labour while devaluing and erasing it (not work but feminine love)
5. Marilyn French - women are ‘in touch with necessity’

Question 26

Donna Haraway

Answer 26

1. ‘Situated knowledge’ and ‘partial perspective’ are important and contribute to ‘objective’ knowledge.
2. There is a third choice to the dichotomy of totalitarian, objective universal truth and relativism - ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’.
3. There is no single feminist standpoint ‘because our maps require too many dimensions for that metaphor to ground our visions’

Question 27

Uma Narayan

Answer 27

1. Integrating women’s contribution into the domain of science and knowledge will not constitute a mere adding of details; it will not merely widen the canvas but result in a shift of perspective enabling us to see a very different picture.
2. Outsider groups can never be oppressed, such as men who are lauded for helping with housework
3. Oppressed groups may derive an ‘epistemic advantage’ from having knowledge of the practices of both their own contexts and those of their oppressors.
4. The practices of the dominant groups govern a society; the dominated group must acquire some fluency with these practices in order to survive in that society eg. those who were colonised had to learn the language of the coloniser, and not vice versa

Question 28

Narayan - downside of feminist epistemology

Answer 28

1. Alienation - the price of developing epistemic advantage is that it requires one to engage with both perspectives, and thus lack roots, or a space where one is truly or entirely relaxed/at home. May be minimised if this critical perspective is widely shared in society as part of an ongoing perspective, as one will have access to support by understanding others
2. Some systems of oppressions enable greater (local) epistemic advantage than others, but some contexts strip the oppressed of the capacity to meaningfully criticise in terms that supported and strove for change
3. Oppression is also conducive to ignorance - eg. exclusion from academic institutions like Oxford where knowledge is created and disseminated

Question 29

Alison Whiley

Answer 29

Standpoint theory objects to being ‘objective’ or totally neutral between social perspectives; instead, objective truth is achieved by people embedded in particular social perspectives which allows them to see what is going on

Question 30

Can people automatically attain the truth or do so by ‘thinking hard enough’?

Answer 30

1. There is no automatic attainment - it is an achievement. Women are generally better poised to see through patriarchal ideology than men but there is no guarantee, and this does not give individual women absolute authority over their own experiences.
2. This is NOT identity politics - being a woman/working class/black does not give you absolute or final authority over the workings of gender, class or racist oppression
3. Hartsock rejects that anyone can know moral truths by thinking hard enough, because 1) may not always be rewarded with knowledge, 2) some people are too entrenched in bad ideology, and 3) a profound, political gestalt shift may not be possible without objective material shifts

Question 31

Hartsock: women of colour

Answer 31

1. Hartsock herself worries she makes invisible the experience of lesbians or women of colour, because she assumes there are things common to all women’s lives in Western class societies. She needs this commonality to explain why a feminist standpoint is possible, as it is insufficient to say that women as a class enjoy a potential epistemic privilege over men. Epistemic privilege has to be grounded in socially constructed position
2. Different from Marx, who defines the working class in terms of its relationship to the means of production; feminists are less willing to define women in terms of their relationship to the means of reproduction (because the definition of working class is built in!)

Question 32

Narayan: women of colour

Answer 32

Does not disavow standpoint epistemology, but challenges what its promises mean to women of colour:
1. It is difficult to communicate honestly the bad experiences of non-western women without reinforcing the superiority of western feminists (eg. talking about religious oppression)
2. The converse is celebrating women’s perspectives may accidentally collude with the celebration and romanticisation of traditional culture of women’s designated roles eg. midwifery, craft-making
3. Women of colour have to inhabit two mutually incompatible frameworks which provide differing perspectives on social reality, and may respond to their double vision of reality not by being critical, but by splitting themselves and creating two unreconciled selves appropriate to two different contexts - eg. middle class women in the global south who are Westernised in public life, but traditional in the context of private family life, women who present themselves in public as aggressive, confident and masculine, but who lives private lives characterised by dependency and submissiveness. This sense of alienation can be minimised if there is ongoing critical politics and support. If not, it can generate uncertainty and despair

Question 33

Collins: women of colour

Answer 33

1. Multiple systems of oppression combine and collude in the shaping of knowledge. Black women’s knowledge is subjugated knowledge - possessed by subjugated people, with knowledge of subjugation which has been destroyed by white patriarchy.
2. Black women know things in virtue of their social position - the lives of white people whose houses they clean, whose guns and police they have to protect themselves from, and how to appear unthreatening to white people
3. Black people have to understand the white social world better than white people understand it themselves, or they will simply not survive
4. This is ‘wisdom’, and Black women cannot afford to be fools (compared to White, ‘educated fools’) because being Other denotes them the protection that White skin, maleness and wealth confer. Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate. Hence survival as a basis of feminist standpoint
5. While US black women are endowed with a specific standpoint their wisdom and knowledge is not recognised or tolerated by white society. Example of Sally Hemmings, who was ‘owned’ by Thomas Jefferson and insisted her six children were fathered by him. Public (white) opinion deferred to Jefferson’s white descendants who denied this, when DNA testing finally confirmed it. Black women are unable to validate their knowledge according to dominant white male standards of knowledge; black women’s beliefs are justified by private forms of evidence, which is not accepted by white people
6. People of colour are treated as unreliable testifiers so white people are protected from truths eg. police racism, legacy of slavery, colonial domination

Question 34

Collins vs Hartsock

Answer 34

Hartsock - the feminist standpoint, like the proletarian standpoint, offers a privileged view of reality
Collins - does not entirely embrace relativism about knowledge, but argues that no marginalised standpoint is totally complete. Instead, Black women, Latina lesbians etc all have distinctive standpoints → use epistemological approaches from their unique standpoint, sharing their own partial situated knowledge. Black women’s experiences serve as one specific social location for examining points of connection amongst multiple epistemologies’

Question 35

Charles Mills

Answer 35

The claimed neutrality of epistemology is based on assuming the standpoint of a privileged class, where white is no longer a race but represents racelessness. Ignorance afflicts certain groups because of their social position, eg. white ignorance, which doesn’t only affect white people - non-white people can internalise white ignorance, while white people can overcome white ignorance. The ignorance of the oppressor produces a mirrored ignorance in the oppressed. Eg. in black nationalist circles in the US civil rights movement, the belief was spread that white people are melanin deficient and therefore physiologically inferior to black people

White ignorance is shaped by the politics of racial subordination:
1. Perception - psychological studies that show a white person is more likely to see an indistinct image as a gun if they have been primed first with a black face
2. Concepts - heuristics like riot or thug produced by white supremacy, laying groundwork for racist belief and action
3. Collective memory - eg. Oxford reluctant to confront its historical entanglements with slavery and empire. John Rawls not discussing racial exploitation at the heart of the American political project

Question 36

Jose Medina thesis

Answer 36

1. Analyses the epistemology of resistance, arguing that epistemic oppression is not an equal opportunity institution: it affects all of us, but not all of us equally.
2. Looks at active ignorance (epistemic vices) vs subversive lucidity (epistemic virtues) - new forms of lucidity which enrich social cognition.
3. ‘Meta-lucidity’ is the capacity to see the limitations of the dominant ways of seeing while ‘meta-blindness’ is being unable to detect one’s inability to understand certain things.

Question 37

Alison Wylie

Answer 37

1. Explains why the early (wrong) accounts of automatic epistemic privilege, which were partly based on gender essentialism, was due to a misreading of Marxist theory
2. Standpoint theory is concerned not just with the epistemic effects of social location, but both the effects and emancipatory potential of standpoints that are struggled for
3. Objectivity is not compromised by the non-neutrality of the agent; in fact knowledge itself may be enhanced and widened