Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeFeminist Epistemology and Philosophy of ScienceFirst published Wed Aug 9, 2000; substantive revision Tue Mar 13, 2007Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways inwhich gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge,the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. Itidentifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices ofknowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematicallydisadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reformthese conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests ofthese groups. Various practitioners of feminist epistemology andphilosophy of science argue that dominant knowledge practicesdisadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying themepistemic authority, (3) denigrating their “feminine”cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories ofwomen that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only inthe ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of socialphenomena that render women's activities and interests, or genderedpower relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science andtechnology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, orthat reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feministepistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions ofknowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offerdiverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to(1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into differentacademic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences,has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how genderhas played a causal role in these transformations, and (3) defend thesechanges as cognitive, not just social, advances. The central concept of feminist epistemology is that of a situatedknower, and hence of situated knowledge: knowledge that reflects theparticular perspectives of the subject. Feminist philosophers areinterested in how gender situates knowing subjects. They havearticulated three main approaches to this question: feminist standpointtheory, feminist postmodernism, and feminist empiricism. Differentconceptions of how gender situates knowers also inform feministapproaches to the central problems of the field: grounding feministcriticisms of science and feminist science, defining the proper rolesof social and political values in inquiry, evaluating ideals ofobjectivity and rationality, and reforming structures of epistemicauthority.1. Situated Knowers2. Feminist Standpoint Theory3. Feminist Postmodernism4. Feminist Empiricism5. Feminist Science Criticism and Feminist Science6. Feminist Defenses of Value-Laden Inquiry7. Feminist Critiques and Conceptions of Objectivity8. Epistemic Authority 9. Trends in Feminist Epistemology10. External Criticisms of Feminist EpistemologyBibliographyOther Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. Situated KnowersFeminist epistemology conceives of knowers as situated in particularrelations to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and theway that it is known, thereby reflects the situation or perspective ofthe knower. Here we are concerned with claims to know,temporarily bracketing the question of which claims are true orwarranted. Situated knowledge in general. Consider how peoplemay understand the same object in different ways that reflect thedistinct relations in which they stand to it.Embodiment. People experience the world by using theirbodies, which have different constitutions and are differently locatedin space and time. In virtue of their different physical locations,observers who stand in front of an object have different informationabout it than observers who have a distant but bird's eye view ofit.First-person vs. third-person knowledge. People havefirst-personal access to some of their own bodily and mental states,yielding direct knowledge of phenomenological facts about what it islike for them to be in these states. Third parties may know thesestates only by interpreting external symptoms, imaginative projection,or obtaining their testimony. People also have knowledge de seabout themselves, expressed in the form “I am Fhere, now.” This is distinct in character andinferential role from propositional knowledge having the same content,which does not use indexicals.Emotions, attitudes, interests, and values. People oftenrepresent objects in relation to their emotions, attitudes andinterests. A thief represents a lock as a frustrating obstacle whileits owner represents the lock as a comforting source of security.Personal knowledge of others. People have differentknowledge of others, in virtue of their different personalrelationships to them. Such knowledge is often tacit, incompletelyarticulated, and intuitive. Like the knowledge it takes to get a joke,it is more an interpretive skill in making sense of a person than a setof propositions. (The German language usefully marks this as thedistinction between Erkenntnis and Wissenschaft.)Because people behave differently toward others, and others interprettheir behavior differently, depending on their personal relationships,what others know of them depends on these relationships.Know-how. People have different skills, which may also be asource of different propositional knowledge. An expert dog handlerknows how to elicit more interesting behavior from an a dog than anovice does. Such know-how expresses a more sophisticated understandingof dogs on the part of the expert, and also generates new phenomenaabout dogs for investigation.Cognitive Styles. People have different styles ofinvestigation and representation. What looks like one phenomenon to alumper may look like three to a splitter. Background beliefs andworldviews. People form different beliefs about an object, invirtue of different background beliefs. In virtue of the differentbackground beliefs against which they interpret a patient's symptoms, apatient may think he is having a heart attack while his doctor believeshe just has heartburn. Differences in global metaphysical or politicalworldviews (naturalism, theism, liberalism, marxism) may also generatedifferent beliefs about particulars on a more comprehensive scale.Relations to other inquirers. People may stand in differentepistemic relations to other inquirers — for example, asinformants, interlocutors, students — which affects their accessto relevant information and their ability to convey their beliefs toothers.These kinds of situatedness affect knowledge in several ways. Theyinfluence knowers' access to information and the terms in which theyrepresent what they know. They bear on the form of their knowledge(articulate/implicit, formal/informal, by acquaintance or description,and so forth). They affect their attitudes toward their beliefs(certainty/doubt, dogmatic/open to revision), their standards ofjustification (relative weights they give to different epistemic valuessuch as predictive power and consilience, amount, sources, and kinds ofevidence they require before they accept a claim, etc.), and theauthority with which they lay claim to their beliefs and can offer themto others. Finally, they affect knowers' assessment of which claims aresignificant or important.Social situation. Many of these ways in whichknowers' physical and psychological relations to the world affects whatand how they know are familiar and extensively studied by cognitivepsychology, naturalized epistemology, and philosophy of science.Feminist epistemology takes such studies a further step by consideringhow the social location of the knower affects what and how she knows.It can thus be seen as a branch of social epistemology. An individual'ssocial locations consists of her ascribed social identities (gender,race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, kinship status, etc.) andsocial roles and relationships (occupation, political party membership,etc.). Partly in virtue of their different ascribed identities,individuals occupy different social roles that accord them differentpowers, duties, and role-given goals and interests. They are subject todifferent norms that prescribe different virtues, habits, emotions, andskills that are thought to be appropriate for these roles. They alsoacquire different subjective identities. Subjective identification withone's social groups can take several forms. One may simply know oneselfto have certain ascribed identities. One may accept or endorse theseidentities, actively affirming the norms and roles associated withthem. Or one may regard one's social identities as oppressive (if, say,one's identity is cast by society as evil, contemptible, ordisgusting), yet see one's fate as tied with the groups with which oneis identified, and commit oneself to collective action with othermembers of those groups to overcome that oppression.Gender as a mode of social situation. Most feministtheorists distinguish between sex and gender. Sex comprises thebiological differences between males and females. Gender is whatsocieties make of sexual differences: the different roles, norms, andmeanings they assign to men and women and the things associated withthem on account of their real or imagined sexual characteristics.Gender thus has several dimensions (Haslanger 2000).Gender roles. Men and women are assigned to distinct socialroles. For example, most societies reserve political and militaryoffices mostly for men, and assign women most childrearingresponsibilities.Gender norms. Men and women are expected to comply withdifferent norms of behavior and bodily comportment. For example, menare expected to be assertive and athletic; women, deferential andmodest. Gender norms are tailored to gender roles: men and women areexpected to conform to those norms that make them fit for their genderroles (whether or not they actually occupy those roles).Gendered traits and virtues. Psychological traits areconsidered “masculine” and “feminine” if theydispose their bearers to comply with the gender norms assigned to menand women, respectively. “Masculine” traits are thereforeregarded as virtues in men and (often) vices in women, while“feminine” traits are regarded as vices in men and virtuesin women.Gendered performance/behavior. Many feminist theorists,often influenced by postmodernism, have come to stress the contextualand performative aspects of gender (West & Zimmerman 1987; Butler1990). Rather than viewing masculinity and femininity as fixed traits,expressed in every social context, these theorists represent humanbeings as more flexible and disposed to enact both“masculine” and “feminine” behaviors indifferent contexts. The man who avoids tenderly comforting a cryingbaby in the presence of women may do so when alone. Rather than viewingmasculinity and femininity as manifested only in behavior within fixed,distinct gender roles, they can be seen as contrasting styles ofperformance in almost any role. Female body builders strive to show offtheir muscles in a “feminine” way.Gender identity. A person's ascribed gender identity— how others identify him or her — may not match his or hersubjective gender identity — the sense that one is“really” a man or a woman. Subjective gender identityincludes all of the ways one might understand oneself to be a man or awoman. One could identify with any subset of gender norms, roles, andtraits ascribed to the gender of which one sees oneself as a member,while repudiating others. One could even repudiate them all, but stillidentify oneself as a man or a women in terms of what one sees asdistinct roles men and women ought to play in bringing about a justfuture (one that may or may not include gender distinctions). Onecould, as many feminists do, understand one's gender identity as apredicament shared by all with the same ascribed identity, and thus asa basis for collective action to change the very basis of one's genderidentity. One could embrace an “androcentric” identity,including both “feminine” and “masculine”roles, norms, and traits, decline to view oneself in gender polarizedterms at all, or play with gender identities in a postmodernistspirit.Gender symbolism. Animals and inanimate objects may beplaced in a gendered field of representation through conventionalassociation, imaginative projection, and metaphorical thinking. Thus,the garage is regarded as “male” space, the kitchen,“female”; male deer are said to have “harems”;pears are seen as “womanly”, assault rifles as“manly.”Gendered knowledge. By bringing together thegeneral account of situated knowledge with the account of gender as akind of social situation, we can now generate a catalogue of ways inwhich what people know, or think they know, can be influenced by theirown gender (roles, norms, traits, performance, identities), otherpeople's genders, or by ideas about gender (symbolism). Each mode ofgendered knowledge raises new questions for epistemology.The phenomenology of gendered bodies. People's bodies arenot just differently sexed; they are differently gendered. Early childsocialization trains boys' and girls' bodies to different norms ofbodily comportment. In the U.S., these norms stress physical freedom,aggressive play, large motor skills, informal and relaxed posture, andindifference to clothing, neatness and appearance in boys; physicalconstraint, subdued play, small motor skills, formal and modestposture, and self-consciousness about clothing, neatness and appearancefor girls. Once internalized, such norms profoundly affect thephenomenology of embodiment. They inform men's and women's distinctfirst-personal knowledge of what it is like to inhabit a body, toexpress capacities unique to one sex or another (e.g., breast feeding),and to have experiences that are manifested through different bodyparts in differently sexed bodies (e.g., orgasm). They also cause men'sand women's experiences of gendered behaviors that both can perform todiffer — in comfort, fluidity, feelings of“naturalness” or novelty, self-consciousness, confidence,awkwardness, shame, and so forth. One question these facts raise forfeminist epistemology is to what extent dominant models of the world,especially of the relation between minds and bodies, have seemedcompelling because they conform to a male or masculine phenomenology(Bordo 1987; Young 1990).Gendered first-personal knowledge de se. It is one thing toknow what sexual harassment is, and how to identify it in a casedescribed in third-personal terms. It is another to come to therecognition “I have been sexually harassed.” Manywomen who are able to see that women in general are disadvantaged havedifficulty recognizing themselves as sharing women's predicament(Clayton & Crosby 1992). The problems of de se knowledgeare particularly pressing for feminist theory, because it is committedto theorizing in ways that women can use to improve their lives. Thisentails that women be able to recognize themselves and their lives infeminist accounts of women's predicament. Feminist epistemology istherefore particularly concerned with investigating the conditions offeminist self-understanding and the social settings in which it mayarise — feminist consciousness-raising sessions, women's studiesclasses, and so forth (MacKinnon 1989).Gendered emotions, attitudes, interests, and values.Feminist theory defines a representation as androcentric if itdepicts the world in relation to male or masculine interests, emotions,attitudes or values. A “male” interest is an interest a manhas, in virtue of the goals given to him by social roles that aredesignated as especially appropriate for men to occupy, or in virtue ofhis subjective gender identity. A “masculine” interest isan interest a man has in virtue of attitudes or psychologicaldispositions that are thought specifically appropriate to men. Suchattitudes and interests structure the cognition of those who have them.For example, a representational scheme that classifies women as either“babes,” “dogs,” “whores,” or(grand)mothers reflects the androcentric attitudes, interests, andvalues of single heterosexual adolescent men who view women in terms oftheir fantasized eligibility for sexual intercourse with them. Arepresentation is gynocentric if it depicts the world inrelation to female or feminine interests, emotions, attitudes orvalues. When a man is described as an “eligible bachelor,”this reflects the gynocentric perspective of a heterosexual, singlewoman interested in marriage. An interest, emotion, attitude, or valuemight be symbolically gendered even if men and women do not manifest itdifferently. For example the ethics of care represents moral problemsin terms of symbolically feminine values — values culturallyassociated with women's gender roles (Gilligan 1982). It thus canqualify as a symbolically gynocentric perspective, even if men andwomen do not differ in their propensity to represent moral problems inits terms, and are equally able to act accordingly. From a performativeperspective, this shows that men can behave in “feminine”ways, too. Feminist epistemology raises numerous questions about thesephenomena. Can situated emotional responses to things be a valid sourceof knowledge about them (Diamond 1991, Jaggar 1989, Keller 1983)? Dodominant practices and conceptions of science and scientific methodreflect an androcentric perspective, or a perspective that reflectsother dominant positions, as of race and colonial rule (Merchant 1980;Harding 1986, 1991, 1993, 1998)? Do mainstream philosophicalconceptions of objectivity, knowledge, and reason reflect anandrocentric perspective (Bordo 1987; Code 1991; Flax 1983; Rooney1991)? How would the conceptual frameworks of particular scienceschange if they reflected women's interests (Anderson 1995b, Waring1990)?Knowledge of others in gendered relationships. Gender normsdifferentially structure the social spaces to which men and women areadmitted, as well as the presentation of self to others. Asperformative theories of gender stress, men manifest their maleidentity, and women their female identity, differently alone than inmixed company, and differently in these settings than ingender-segregated contexts. Male and female inquirers therefore haveaccess to different information about others. Male and femaleethnographers may be admitted to different social spaces. Even whenadmitted to the same social spaces, their presence has differenteffects on those being observed, because they do not stand in the samesocial relationships to their subjects. Physical objects do not behavedifferently depending on whether a man or a woman is observing them.But human beings do behave differently according to their beliefs aboutthe gender of who is observing them. Research that elicits informationabout others through personal contact between the researchers and theresearch subjects therefore raises the question of how findings mightbe influenced by the gendered relations between researchers andsubjects, and whether gender-inclusive research teams are in a betterposition to detect this. Ethnography, which derives propositionalknowledge of others from personal knowledge of native informants inlong-term, often intimate relationships, raises these issues mostacutely (Bell et al 1993; Leacocke 1981). Similar issues arise insurvey research, clinical research, and human experimentation (Sherif1987).Gendered skills. Some skills are labelled masculine orfeminine because men and women need them specifically to perform theirrespective gender roles, and they are not generically useful for almostany role (as walking, talking, and seeing are). It takes a particularknowledge of small children to know how to comfort them, a particularknowledge of soldiers to know how to whip up their morale. Although menand women alike may acquire and exercise these skills, they areconsidered the peculiar responsibility of one or the other gender. Menand women may therefore have differential access to such skill-basedknowledge. To the extent that the skill is perceived by the agent asthe proper province of the “other” gender, he or she mayhave a difficult time seeing himself or herself perform it confidentlyand fluidly, and this inability to self-identify with the task canimpair performance. The feedback effects of the phenomenology ofgendered embodiment and de se knowledge of one's ownsubjective gender identity can therefore influence the exercise ofgendered skills. To the extent that a skill is perceived by others asthe proper province of one gender, others may grant or withholdacknowledgment of an agent's expertise. If the successful exercise ofthe skill requires that others be willing to accept it as a competentperformance — as in the cases of comforting children or raisingsoldiers' morale — others' gender-based readiness or refusal togrant expertise to an agent in exercising that skill can be aself-fulfilling prophecy. These phenomena raise various questions forepistemology. Does the “masculine” symbolism of certainscientific skills, such as of assuming an “objective”stance toward nature, interfere with the integration of women intoscience? Do actually or symbolically “feminine” skills aidthe acquisition of scientific knowledge (Keller 1983, 1985a; Rose 1987;Smith 1974)?Gendered cognitive styles. Some theorists believe that menand women have different cognitive styles (Belenky et al 1986; Gilligan1982). Whether or not this is true, cognitive styles are gendersymbolized (Rooney 1991). Deductive, analytic, atomistic, acontextual,and quantitative cognitive styles are labelled “masculine,”while intuitive, synthetic, holistic, contextual and qualitativecognitive styles are labelled “feminine.” Such associationsare not wholly arbitrary, the way blue is gendered male and pink,female. For example, it is seen as masculine to make one's point bymeans of argument, feminine to make one's point by means of narrative.Argument is commonly cast as an adversarial mode of discourse, in whichone side claims vindication by vanquishing the opposition. Such pursuitof dominance follows the competitive pattern of male gender roles incombat, athletics, and business. Narrative is a seductive mode ofdiscourse, persuading by an enticing invitation to take up theperspective of the narrator, which excites one's imagination andfeeling. Its operations are more like love than war, and therebyfollows a mode of persuasion thought more suitable for women. Thesephenomena raise numerous epistemological questions: does the quest for“masculine” prestige by using “masculine”methods distort practices of knowledge acquisition (Addelson 1983;Moulton, 1983)? Are some kinds of sound research unfairly ignoredbecause of their association with “feminine” cognitivestyles (Keller 1983, 1985b)? Do “feminine” cognitive stylesyield knowledge that is inaccessible or harder to achieve by“masculine” means (Duran 1991, Rose 1987, Smith 1974)?Gendered background beliefs and worldviews. We have seenabove how men and women have access to different phenomenologicalknowledge, de se knowledge, know-how, and personal knowledgeof others, in virtue of their gender. They also tend to represent theworld in different terms, in virtue of their gendered interests,attitudes, emotions and values, and perhaps also (although this is amatter of controversy among feminist theorists) in virtue of differentcognitive styles. These differences create different background webs ofbelief against which information to which men and women have inprinciple equal access may be processed. Representational schemes thatare functional for different gender roles and gendered attitudes makedifferent kinds of information salient. In traditional domesticsettings, women tend to notice dirt that men don't. This is not becausewomen have a specially sensitive sensory apparatus. It is because theyhave a role which designates the females of the household as the oneswho have to clean up. Male surgeons have no difficulty maintaining muchhigher degrees of vigilance about contamination in an operating roomthan would ever be warranted in housecleaning. Besides making differentkinds of information salient to men and women, their differentbackground knowledge may lead them to interpret commonly accessedinformation differently. A man might read a woman's demure smile as acoy come-on, where another woman may interpret it as her polite anddefensive reaction to unwanted attention from him. Such differences canspring from differential access to phenomenological knowledge. The maleand female observers imaginatively project themselves into hersituation, inferring her feelings from the feelings they think underlieher body language. Because men's and women's phenomenologies ofembodiment are different — most men are not in the habit ofsmiling as a defense against unwanted attention from women — theman may narcissistically imagine the smile as relaxed and spontaneous,whereas the woman may suspect it is forced. Here are a fewepistemological questions raised by these phenomena. Are thereepistemic obstacles to men's ability to know when they are raping orsexually harassing women, or to legal institutions recognizing this,insofar as they confine their thinking within a “masculine”perspective (MacKinnon 1989)? More generally, do the unexamined sexistor androcentric background beliefs of scientists cause them to generatesexist theories about women, despite their adherence to ostensiblyobjective scientific methods (Harding 1986; Harding & O'Barr, 1987;Hubbard 1990)? More generally still, how might the social practices ofscience be organized so that variations in background beliefs ofinquirers function as a resource rather than an obstacle to scientificsuccess (Longino 1990; Solomon 1994)?Relations to other inquirers. Gender differences inknowledge and background beliefs can be reduced if men and womenparticipate in inquiry together. Each gender can take on testimony whatthe other can acquire through direct experience. Each may also learnhow to exercise imaginative projection more effectively, and to take upthe perspective of the other gender. However, gender norms influencethe terms on which men and women communicate (Kalbfleisch 1995). Inmany contexts, women are not allowed to speak or even show up, or theirquestions, comments, and challenges are ignored, interrupted, andsystematically distorted, or they aren't accepted as experts. Genderednorms of conversational interaction and epistemic authority thusinfluence the ability of knowledge practices to incorporate theknowledge and experience of men and women into their processes ofdiscovery and justification. Feminist epistemologists are thereforeinterested in exploring how gender norms distort the dissemination oftestimony and relations of cognitive authority among inquirers(Addelson 1983; Code 1991) and how the social relations of inquirerscould be reformed, especially with regard to the allocation ofepistemic authority, so as to enable more successful practices ofinquiry (Longino 1990; Nelson 1990, 1993).Problems of and Approaches to Gendered SituatedKnowledge. Mainstream epistemology takes as paradigms ofknowledge simple propositional knowledge about matters in principleequally accessible to anyone with basic cognitive and sensoryapparatus: “2 + 2=4”; “grass is green”;“water quenches thirst.” Feminist epistemology does notclaim that such knowledge is gendered. But examination of such examplesis not particularly helpful for answering the epistemological problemsthat arise specifically in feminist theory and practice. What is it toknow that I am a woman? What is it like to be sexually objectified? Whyis it that men and women so often have dramatically divergentunderstandings of what happened in their sexual encounters? How can wearrange scientific practices so that science and technology servewomen's interests? These kinds of questions make other kinds ofknowledge salient for feminist epistemology: phenomenologicalknowledge, de se knowledge, knowledge of persons, know-how,moral knowledge, knowledge informed by emotions, attitudes, andinterests. These kinds of knowledge are often gendered, and they caninfluence the propositional claims people are disposed to form andaccept. This has critical implications for mainstream epistemologicalconceptions of knowledge, insofar as the latter are based on falsegeneralizations drawing only from examples of ungendered knowledge.Feminist epistemologists stress the situatedness orperspective-relativity of much knowledge. They do not thereby embraceepistemological relativism. To regard some knowledge claim or form ofunderstanding as situated in a perspective is not to claim that theperspective yields true beliefs or satisfactory understandings (noteven “for” those taking up the perspective). It is not toclaim that perspectives can only be judged in their own terms, nor thatno perspectives are better than others, nor that one cannot take a moreobjective view of the phenomena than that taken up in one or anotherperspective. It is not to claim that all knowledge necessarily reflectssome peculiar non-universalizable relation of a subset of knowers tothe object of knowledge. What attention to situated knowledge does dois enable questions to be raised and addressed that are difficult evento frame in epistemologies that simply assume that gender, and thesocial situation of the knower more generally, is irrelevant toknowledge. How are the knowledge claims generated by genderedperspectives related to one another? Can men take up a gynocentricperspective, and women, an androcentric perspective? Or are thereepistemological barriers to such perspective crossing? Are certainperspectives epistemically privileged? Is there any way to construct amore objective perspective out of differently gendered perspectives?What is the relation of an objective perspective, if one is possible,to gendered perspectives? What would be the point of achieving such aperspective? Would the achievement of such an objective perspectivemake possible or desirable the elimination of gendered perspectives?Feminist epistemology does not rule out in advance the possibility ordesirability of objective knowledge. It does raise new questions aboutobjectivity.Feminist epistemologists have developed their approaches to thesituatedness of knowledge within three broad epistemologicaltraditions: standpoint theory, postmodernism, and empiricism.Standpoint theory identifies one particular social situation asepistemically privileged. Postmodernism rejects claims of epistemicprivilege, emphasizing instead the contingency and instability of thesocial identity of knowers, and consequently of their representations.Empiricism seeks standards, within a naturalized framework, fordifferentiating the circumstances in which situatedness generates errorand in which it constitutes a resource that can be harnessed to advanceknowledge. It advances a conception of objectivity constituted bycritical and cooperative relations among a plurality of differentlysituated inquirers.2. Feminist Standpoint TheoryStandpoint Epistemology in General. Standpointtheories claim to represent the world from a particular sociallysituated perspective that can lay a claim to epistemic privilege orauthority. A complete standpoint theory must specify (i) the sociallocation of the privileged perspective, (ii) the scope ofits privilege: what questions or subject matters it can claim aprivilege over, (iii) the aspect of the social location thatgenerates superior knowledge: for example, social role, or subjectiveidentity; (iv) the ground of its privilege: what it is aboutthat aspect that justifies a claim to privilege; (v) the typeof epistemic superiority it claims: for example, greater accuracy, orgreater ability to represent fundamental truths; (vi) the otherperspectives relative to which it claims epistemic superiority and(vii) modes of access to that perspective: is occupying the sociallocation necessary or sufficient for getting access to the perspective?Many claims to epistemic privilege on behalf of particular perspectiveswith respect to certain questions are commonplace and uncontroversial.Auto mechanics are generally in a better position than auto consumersto know what is wrong with their cars. Practical experience infulfilling the social role of the mechanic grounds the mechanic'sepistemic privilege, which lays a claim to greater reliability than thejudgments of auto consumers. Standpoint theories become controversial when they claim epistemicprivilege over socially and politically contested topics on behalf ofthe perspectives of systematically disadvantaged social groups,relative to the perspectives of the groups that dominate them. Thescope of the claimed privilege includes the character, causes, andconsequences of the social inequalities that define the groups inquestion. This type of standpoint theory classically claimsthree types of epistemic privilege over the standpoint of dominantgroups: First, it claims to offer deep over surface knowledge ofsociety: the standpoint of the disadvantaged reveals the fundamentalregularities that drive the phenomena in question, whereas thestandpoint of the privileged captures only surface regularities.Second, in virtue of this, it claims to offer superior knowledge of themodality of surface regularities, and thus superior knowledge of humanpotentialities. Where the standpoint of the privileged tends torepresent existing social inequalities as natural and necessary, thestandpoint of the disadvantaged correctly represents them as sociallycontingent, and shows how they could be overcome. Third, it claims tooffer a representation of the social world in relation to universalhuman interests. By contrast, the standpoint of the privilegedrepresents social phenomena only in relation to the interests of theprivileged class, but ideologically misrepresents these interests ascoinciding with universal human interests.Marxist Standpoint Theory. Marxism offers theclassic model of a standpoint theory, claiming an epistemic privilegeover fundamental questions of economics, sociology, and history onbehalf of the standpoint of the proletariat (Marx 1964, Lukács1971). Workers do not have this standpoint to begin with. They attainit by gaining collective consciousness of their role in the capitalistsystem and in history. Several aspects of workers' social situationenable them to attain an epistemically privileged perspective onsociety. Workers are oppressed, central to the capitalist mode ofproduction, endowed with a cognitive style based on their practicalproductive material interaction with nature, and collectivelyself-conscious agents of a potentially universal class. Oppressiongives them an objective interest in the truth about whose interestsreally get served by the capitalist system. Centrality gives themexperiential access to the fundamental relations of capitalistproduction. Because, under capitalism, the standing of all otherclasses is defined in relation to them, in coming to know themselvesand their class position, workers come to know their society as atotality (Lukács 1971). Practical productive interaction withthe world is the fundamental mode by which people come to know it, in amaterialist epistemology. It leads workers to represent their world interms of use values, whereas capitalists represent it in terms ofexchange values. The workers' representation is more fundamental,because the basic laws of economics and history are expressed in termsof the struggle over the appropriation of surplus (use-) value, not interms of superficial money (exchange) values. The necessary andtranshistorical character of this practical, instrumental mode ofknowing also gives it an objective validity for all societies, whichmust come to grips with accounting for surplus value in terms ofultimate use-values. Universality — the workers' standing as theagents for the future universal class they will become under communism(where everyone has the same class status, standing in a commonrelation to the means of production as both workers and collectiverulers over the surplus) — entails that workers represent thesocial world in relation to universal human interests, rather than inrelation to class-specific interests (as is true of capitalistperspectives). This gives their representations of society greaterobjectivity than capitalist representations. Finally, the collectiveself-consciousness of the workers has, as all successful intentionalaction does, the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Workers'collective insight into their common predicament and the need toovercome it through collective revolutionary action generates aself-understanding which, when acted upon, gets realized. Workersbecome the universal class, the primary agent of history, by acting onthat self-understanding. The epistemic privilege of the standpoint ofthe proletariat, therefore, is also grounded in the epistemic privilegethat autonomous agents have over what they are doing.Grounds of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Feministstandpoint theory claims an epistemic privilege over the character ofgender relations, and of social and psychological phenomena in whichgender is implicated, on behalf of the standpoint of women. Theprivilege is relative to theories that justify patriarchy or reflectsexist assumptions. Various feminist standpoint theories ground theclaim to epistemic privilege in different features of women's socialsituation. Each can be seen as drawing an analogy with one or morestrands of Marxist epistemology.Centrality. According to marxist feminists, such asHartsock (1987) and Rose (1987) women are central to the system ofreproduction — of socializing children and caring for bodies— as workers are central to the system of commodity production.Because women are in charge of tending to the needs of everyone else inthe household, they are in a better position than men to see howpatriarchy fails to meet people's needs. Men, in virtue of theirdominant position, have the privilege of ignoring how their actionsundermine the interests of subordinates. The epistemic privilege ofwomen therefore rests on the fact that women as a class have superioraccess to information about whose needs get better served underpatriarchy.Collective self-consciousness. According to MacKinnon(1999) male dominance is based on sexual objectification, a processinvolving epistemic mystification. In objectification, dominant groupsproject their desires onto subordinate groups and, in virtue of theirpower, make subordinate groups conform to the way dominants want themto be. It represents as given, natural, and necessary the groupdifferences that are caused by dominant group desires. Gender is themode of objectification constituted by erotic desire, the eroticizationof domination. Men constitute women as women by representing theirnatures as essentially sexually subordinate to men and treating themaccordingly. Women can unmask these ideological misrepresentations byachieving and acting on a shared understanding of themselves as women— that is, as a social group unjustly constituted by sexualobjectification. Women act collectively on this shared understanding inresisting the sexist representations made of them, through campaignsagainst sexual harassment, pornography, restrictions on reproductivefreedom, and so forth. Through these feminist actions, in which womenrefuse to act as sexual objects, women show that representations ofwomen as sexual objects are not natural or necessary. Their privilegedknowledge is agent self-knowledge, made true by being put intoaction.Cognitive style. Many versions of standpoint theory(including Flax 1983, Hartsock 1987, Rose 1987, and Smith 1974) acceptfeminist object relations theory, which explains the development ofstereotypical feminine and masculine traits in terms of the differentproblems of identity-formation faced by male and female children whoare raised by female caregivers (Chodorow 1978). Object relationstheory postulates that male children form their distinctive masculineidentities by separating themselves from their mothers, a task thatpsychologically involves an anxious rejection of the feminine and acontinuous need to maintain distance and boundaries by controlling anddenigrating the feminine. Female children gain a sense of their genderidentity through identification with their mothers, and so are morecomfortable with a blurring of boundaries between self and other. Thedevelopment of gender identities leads males and females to acquiredistinctively masculine and feminine cognitive styles. The masculinecognitive style is abstract, theoretical, disembodied, emotionallydetached, analytical, deductive, quantitative, atomistic, and orientedtoward values of control or domination. The feminine cognitive style isconcrete, practical, embodied, emotionally engaged, synthetic,intuitive, qualitative, relational, and oriented toward values of care.These cognitive styles are reinforced through the distinctive types oflabor assigned to men and women — men having a near monopoly onthe theoretical sciences, warmaking, and on positions of political andeconomic power calling for detachment and control; and women beingassigned to hands-on emotional care for others. The feminine cognitivestyle is said to be epistemically superior because it overcomes thedichotomy between the subject and object of knowing and because anethics of care is superior to an ethics of domination. Ways of knowinginformed by the motive of caring for everyone's needs will produce morevaluable representations than ways of knowing informed by the interestsof the dominant (Hartsock 1987). They will produce representations ofthe world in relation to universal human interests, rather than interms of the interests of dominant classes, ideologicallymisrepresented as universal interests. To institutionalize the feminineway of knowing, however, would require overcoming the division ofmental, manual, and caring labor that characterizes capitalistpatriarchy (Rose 1987).Oppression. Women are oppressed, and therefore have aninterest in representing social phenomena in ways that reveal ratherthan mask this truth. They also have direct experience of theiroppression, unlike men, whose privilege enables them to ignore howtheir actions affect women as a class. The logic of an epistemologythat grounds epistemic privilege in oppression is to identify themultiply oppressed as multiply epistemically privileged. Withinfeminist theory, this logic has led to the development of blackfeminist epistemology. Collins (1990) grounds black feministepistemology in black women's personal experiences of racism andsexism, and in cognitive styles associated with black women. She usesthis epistemology to supply black women with self-representations thatenable them to resist the demeaning racist and sexist images of blackwomen in the wider world, and to take pride in their identities. Theepistemic privilege of the oppressed is sometimes cast, followingW.E.B. DuBois, in terms of “bifurcated consciousness”: theability to see things both from the perspective of the dominant andfrom the perspective of the oppressed, and therefore to comparativelyevaluate both perspectives (Harding 1991, Smith 1974, Collins 1990).Black women are “outsiders within,” having enough personalexperience as insiders to know their social order, but enough criticaldistance to empower critique.Access to the Feminist Standpoint. Every standpointtheory must offer an account of how one gains access to its situatedknowledge. This depends on whether membership in the group whoseperspective is privileged is defined objectively, in terms of one'sposition in a social structure, or subjectively, in terms of one'ssubjective identification as a member of the group. When groupmembership is defined objectively, it is neither necessary norsufficient for gaining access to the privileged perspective. It is notsufficient, because one might be unaware of the fact or objectivesignificance of being a member of the group. Members become aware oftheir objective group identity only by achieving a shared understandingof their predicament with other group members. This is the function ofconsciousness-raising groups in feminist practice (MacKinnon 1999). Itis not necessary, because when a group is defined objectively, thefacts that constitute the group as such and its interests are publiclyaccessible, so anyone can theorize phenomena in relation to theinterests of that group. Thus, Marx theorized from the standpoint ofthe proletariat, even though he was not a worker. However, to theextent that the ground of epistemic privilege lies in theself-knowledge of autonomous agents, only those who participate in thatagency can have first-personal agent knowledge. At this point, the siteof epistemic privilege shifts from the group as defined objectively tothe group defining itself as a collective political agent. Theprivileged standpoint is not that of women, but of feminists. Men canparticipate in the feminist movement, too. But they cannot assume adominant role in defining (hence knowing) the aims of the feministmovement without defeating that movement, given that a constitutive aimof feminism is overcoming male dominance. When group membership isdefined subjectively, then membership in the group is both necessaryand sufficient to gain access to the perspective of the group. Ifsubjectively identifying as a woman is necessary and sufficient to havea feminine cognitive style, as object-relations theory postulates, thenall and only self-identified woman have access to the epistemicallyprivileged standpoint. Similarly, Collins' (1990) version of blackfeminist epistemology rests on identity politics.Goals of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Feministstandpoint theory is a type of critical theory, as this termwas understood by the Frankfurt school of critical social theorists,from Adorno to Habermas. Critical theories aim to empower the oppressedto improve their situation. They therefore incorporate pragmaticconstraints on theories of the social world. To serve their criticalaim, social theories must (a) represent the social world in relation tothe interests of the oppressed — i.e., those who are the subjectsof study; (b) supply an account of that world which is accessible tothe subjects of study, which enables them to understand their problems;and (c) supply an account of the world which is usable by the subjectsto study to improve their condition. Critical theory is theory of, by,and for the subjects of study. These pragmatic features of criticaltheory raise the possibility that claims of superiority for particulartheories might be based more on pragmatic than epistemological virtues(Harding 1991, Hartsock 1996). Even if a particular feminist theorycannot make good on the claim that it has privileged access toreality, it may offer true representations that are moreuseful to women than other truthful representations.Criticisms of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Longino(1993b) argues that standpoint theory cannot provide a noncircularbasis for deciding which standpoints have epistemic privilege. Stevens(2000) argues that in Marxist theory, the transhistorical necessity ofrelations of production, and the universalizability of these relations,grounds the epistemic privilege of workers as the future universalclass. But gender relations cannot be universalized, and race relationsalso lack transhistorical necessity, so neither the standpoint of womennor of black women can claim epistemic privilege. Bar On (1993) arguesagainst grounding women's epistemic privilege in their oppression, viafeminine cognitive styles. If the feminine ethics of care provides theepistemically privileged perspective on morality, then our access tomoral knowledge is predicated on the continuation of existing genderrelations, which produce this ethic. Grounding epistemic privilege infeminine cognitive styles therefore forces a choice between havingethical knowledge and living in a nonsexist society. Bar On also claimsthat the center-periphery model that underwrites the epistemicprivilege of workers does not apply to women. Marx held that classconflict is the central phenomenon that drives all other forms of groupconflict, including sexism, racism, imperialism, and national andreligious conflict. So understanding class could yield an understandingof other dimensions of inequality. It is no longer plausible to holdthat any group inequality is central to all the others; theyintersect in complex ways (Crenshaw 1999). This entails that womencannot even have privileged access to understanding their ownoppression, since this takes different forms for different women,depending on their race, sexual orientation, and so forth. Thiscritique has been forcefully developed by feminist postmodernists, whoquestion the very possibility of a unified standpoint of women, andsee, behind the assertion of a universal woman's viewpoint, only theperspective of relatively privileged white women (Lugones & Spelman1983).3. Feminist PostmodernismGeneral Postmodernist Themes. Postmodernism as a NorthAmerican intellectual movement draws inspiration from a variety ofFrench poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists, includingFoucault, Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, and Irigaray. It embodies askeptical sensibility that questions attempts to transcend oursituatedness by appeal to such ideas as universality, necessity,objectivity, rationality, essence, unity, totality, foundations, andultimate Truth and Reality. It stresses the locality, partiality,contingency, instability, uncertainty, ambiguity and essentialcontestability of any particular account of the world, the self, andthe good. Politically, the postmodernist emphasis on revealing thesituatedness and contestability of any particular claim or system ofthought is supposed to serve both critical and liberatory functions. Itdelegitimizes ideas that dominate and exclude by undermining theirclaims to transcendent justification. And it opens up space forimagining alternative possibilities that were obscured by those claims.Although postmodernist themes are often expressed in an obscurejargon, they can be cast in terms more familiar to analyticphilosophers. Postmodernists begin with ideas about language andsystems of thought. They claim that (what we think of as) reality is“discursively constructed.” This is the linguistic versionof the now inescapable (!) Kantian thought that our minds grasp thingsnot as they are “in themselves” but only through concepts,signified by words. “The linguistic sign acts reflexively, notreferentially” in a “discursive field.” This is aversion of radical meaning holism: signs get their meaning not fromtheir reference to external things but from their relations to all ofthe other signs in a system of discourse. Meaning holism entails thatthe introduction of new signs (or elimination of old ones) will changethe meanings of the signs that were already in use. Signs therefore donot have a fixed meaning over time. This is a Heraclitean version ofhistoricism: we cannot step into the same stream of thought twice.Together, these ideas support the “rejection of totalizingmetanarratives.” There can be no complete, unified theory of theworld that captures the whole truth about it. Any such theory willcontain a definite set of terms. This entails that it cannot expressall conceptual possibilities. For a discourse that contained differentterms would contain meanings not available in the discursive field ofthe theory that claims completeness. Thus, the selection of anyparticular theory or narrative is an exercise of “power”— to exclude certain possibilities from thought and to authorizeothers.Postmodernism extends these ideas about language to social practicesmore generally. The key idea underwriting this extension is thatactions and practices are linguistic signs. Like words, they signifythings beyond themselves by means of linguistic devices such asmetaphor and metonymy. For example, the elevation of the judge's benchmetaphorically signifies his superior authority over everyone else inthe courtroom. This permits an analysis of social practices andbehaviors as exhibiting the same structure and dynamics as languageitself. Just as words get their meaning from their relations to otherwords rather than from their relation to some external reality, so doactions get their meaning from their relations to other actions, ratherthan from their relation to some pre-linguistic realm of human natureor natural law. Thus, the superior authority of the judge consists inthe conventions of deference others manifest in their actions towardhim. It is not underwritten by a supposed natural tendency of humans toobey authority, or by an underlying normatively objective authority.The latter thoughts express essentialist and objectivist power plays,attempts to foreclose contests over practices by fixing them in asupposedly extra-linguistic reality. Such attempts are not onlyobjectionable but futile, because the meanings of actions areconstantly being subverted by other actions that, in changing thecontext of the former actions, changes their meanings. This is whypostmodernists celebrate ironic, parodic, and campy renditions ofconventional behaviors as politically liberating (Butler 1993). If Marxlamented that history repeats itself twice — first as tragedy,second as farce — postmodernists revel in the same process.Postmodernists view the self as likewise constituted by signs thathave meaning only in relation to other signs. There is no unified selfthat underlies the play of a stream of signifiers. This is a linguisticversion of Hume's fragmented stream-of-consciousness account of theself, but with a social twist. Signs, unlike Hume's simple ideas, formlanguage, which is socially constructed. Thus, although subjectivity isconstituted through the production of signs, the self is not free tomake of these whatever it wants, but finds itself entangled in a web ofmeanings not of its own creation. Our identities are socially imposed,not autonomously created. However, this does not foreclose thepossibility of agency, because we occupy multiple social identities(e.g., a woman might be a worker, a mother, lesbian, Mexican, and soforth). The tensions among these conflicting identities open up spacesfor disrupting the discursive systems that construct us.Because, in its philosophy of language, words refer to conceptsrather than things in the world, postmodernism reproduces in linguisticterms some of the same epistemological conundrums posed in the historyof modern philosophy by the veil of ideas. This generates a tendencytoward idealism in both traditions. However, given the constant flux ofmeanings generated by holism, these tendencies cannot secure thecertainty or stability that empiricists thought they could attain byresorting to idealism. The more careful practitioners of postmodernismresist wholesale idealism. Claims that bodies, matter, or the objectsinvestigated by the natural sciences are “discursivelyconstructed” or “socially constructed” do not assertthat the external world would disappear if people stopped talking aboutit. Rather, they assert a kind of nominalism: that the world does notdictate the categories we use to describe it, that innumerableincompatible ways of classifying the world are available to us, andtherefore that the selection of any one theory is a choice that cannotbe justified by appeal to “objective” truth or reality.Even the ways we draw our distinctions between mind and body, ideas andobjects, discourse and reality, are contestable.Feminist Postmodernism. Within feminism,postmodernist ideas have been deployed against theories that purport tojustify sexist practices — notably, ideologies that claim thatobserved differences between men and women are natural and necessary,or that women have an essence that explains and justifies theirsubordination. The oft-cited claim that gender is socially ordiscursively constructed — that it is an effect of socialpractices and systems of meaning that can be disrupted — findsone of its homes in postmodernism (Butler 1990). However, postmodernismhas figured more prominently in internal critiques of feministtheories. One of the most important trends in feminist thinking in thepast twenty years has been exposing and responding to exclusionarytendencies within feminism itself. Women of color and lesbian womenhave argued that mainstream feminist theories have ignored theirdistinct problems and perspectives (Collins 1990; Hull, Scott andSmith, 1982; Lorde 1984). Feminist postmodernism represents both avehicle for and response to these critiques. It underwrites a critiqueof the concept “woman” — the central analyticalcategory of feminist theory. And it proposes perspective-shifting as astrategy for negotiating the proliferation of theories produced bydifferently situated women.The critique of the concept “woman.” Feministpostmodernists have criticized many of the leading feminist theories ofgender and patriarchy as essentialist (Butler 1990, Flax 1990, Spelman1988). Essentialism here refers to any theory that claims to identify auniversal, transhistorical, necessary cause or constitution of genderidentity or patriarchy. The objection to essentialism is fundamentallypolitical: in claiming that gender identity is one thing or has onecause, such theories convert discursively constructed facts into norms,difference into deviance. They either exclude women who don't conformto the theory from the class of true “women,” or elserepresent them as inferior. The critiques of feminist theories bylesbian women and women of color have reinforced skepticism about theunity presumed in the category “woman” by highlighting theintersectionality of identities of gender, race, class, and sexualorientation. The chief faultlines for the fragmentation of the category“woman” have thus been the other identity formations alongwhich social inequalities are constructed.This critique of “woman” as a unified object oftheorizing entails that “woman” also cannot constitute aunified subject of knowing (Lugones & Spelman 1983). Thetheories of universal gender identity under attack are ones in whichthe authors, all white middle class heterosexual women, could seethemselves. Critics claim that the authors fail to acknowledge theirown situatedness and hence the ways they are implicated in andreproduce power relations — in this case, the presumptuousauthority of white middle class heterosexual women to define “thestandpoint of women” — to speak for all other women anddefine who they are. Feminist standpoint theorists, who claim anepistemic privilege on behalf of their standpoint, are thereby unmaskedas asserting a race and class privilege over other women.Feminist postmodernists draw two lessons from this critique. First,universal claims about women, gender, and patriarchy should be avoided.Second, feminist standpoint theory's project of identifying a singleepistemically privileged perspective is fundamentally flawed, anunjustified assertion of power in the name of an unattainableobjectivity. This lesson applies to subaltern feminist standpoints aswell. The assertion of a black feminist standpoint, for example,objectionably essentializes black women. Once the postmodernistcritique of essentialism is granted, there is no logical stopping pointin the proliferation of perspectives.Perspective shifting. Feminist postmodernism thus envisionsour epistemic situation as characterized by a permanent plurality ofperspectives, none of which can claim objectivity — that is,transcendence of situatedness to a “view from nowhere.”This position has sometimes been characterized as relativist. Haraway(1991) replies that it rejects both objectivism and relativism for theways they let knowers escape responsibility for the representationsthey construct. To claim objectivity for a representation is to claimthat “the world made me represent things this way.” Toclaim relativism is to claim that “my identity (my situation)made me represent things this way (and my identity/situation is notinferior to yours).” Both positions disclaim the activeparticipation of the knower in constructing her representations. Even aphotograph, the paradigm of an “objective” representation,reflects the photographer's choice of film, lenses, frames, exposure,and so forth. But the resort to a relativism of identity is no better.In asserting the equality of all perspectives, it claims immunity fromthe critiques of differently positioned others, and complacency inone's own position. Although it acknowledges the dependence of aknower's representations on the particulars of her situation, it claimsthat she had no choice about that. Postmodernists, however, reject thefixity and unity of personal identity on which relativism rests. Peopleare not epistemically trapped inside their cultures, their gender,their race, or any other identity. They can choose to think from otherperspectives. Thus, although we will always have a plurality ofperspectives, their constitution is constantly shifting rather thanstatic, and there is no stable correspondence between individuals andperspectives.Negotiating the bewildering array of situated knowledges thereforeinvolves two types of epistemic practice. One is acceptance ofresponsibility, which involves acknowledging the choices of situationthat entered into the construction of one's representations (Haraway1991), and considering how one's situation affects th “Rethinking StandpointEpistemology: ‘What is Strong Objectivity?’”, InAlcoff and Potter.–––, (ed.), 1993, The “Racial”Economy of Science, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.–––, 1996, “Comment on Hekman's‘Truth and Method’: Whose standpoint needs the regimes ofTruth and Reality?”, Signs, 22: 382-391.–––, 1998, Is Science Multicultural?:Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies, Bloomington,Ind.: Indiana University Press.–––, and Merrill Hintikka, (eds.), 1983,Discovering Reality, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel; Boston:Kluwer.–––, and Jean O'Barr, (eds.), 1987, Sex andScientific Inquiry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Hare-Mustin, Rachel and Jeanne Maracek, 1994, “Gender and theMeaning of Difference: Postmodernism and Psychology”, InTheorizing Feminism, Anne Herrmann and Abigail Stewart,(eds.), Boulder, Col.: Westview.Hartsock, Nancy, 1987, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developingthe Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism”,In Harding 1987a.–––, 1996, “Comment on Hekman's‘Truth and Method’: Truth or Justice”,Signs, 22: 367-73.Haslanger, Sally, 1993, “On Being Objective and BeingObjectified”, In Antony and Witt.–––, 1995, “Ontology and SocialConstruction”, Philosophical Topics, 23: 95-125.–––,ence in play at once) and ofpolitically effective coalition building among women with differentidentities. Carried to its logical conclusion, feminist postmodernismdissolves all groups, thereby reproducing the individualism of theEnlightenment epistemology it claims to repudiate. And the idea ofmobile positioning may simply reproduce the objectivism and ideas ofautonomy that postmodernists claim to reject, only now in the guise of“the view from everywhere” rather than “the view fromnowhere” (Bordo 1990). Critics argue that feminists would dobetter if they forthrightly appropriated ideals of human rights andautonomy, rather than embracing “the death of the subject”in the fragmentation of the self (Benhabib 1995). Despite thesedifficulties, postmodernism remains a powerful current in feministepistemology, due to the acknowledgment by all feminists that aplurality of situated knowledges appears to be an inescapableconsequence of social differentiation and embodiment.4. Feminist EmpiricismRelations of Feminist Empiricism to Empiricism ingeneral. Empiricism is the view that experience provides thesole, or at least the primary, justification for all knowledge. Fromthe classical empiricists to some early twentieth-century theorists,empiricists held that the content of experience could be described infixed, basic, theory-neutral terms — for example, in terms ofsense-data. Most also regarded philosophy as a discipline that couldprovide a transcendent or external justification for empirical orscientific methods. Quine revolutionized empiricism by rejecting bothof these ideas. For Quine, observation is thoroughly theory-laden. Itis cast in terms of complex concepts that cannot be immediately givenin experience, all of which are potentially subject to revision inlight of further experience (Quine 1963). And epistemology, far fromproviding an extrascientific vindication of natural science, is simplyanother project within science, in which we empirically investigate ourown practices of inquiry (Quine 1969). In these two respects, feministempiricists are the daughters of Quine. However, Quine accepted a sharpdivision between facts and values that feminist empiricists arguecannot be sustained within a thoroughly naturalized empiricism.Feminist empiricists are deeply engaged in considering how feministvalues can legitimately inform empirical inquiry, and how scientificmethods can be improved in light of feminist demonstrations of sex biasin currently accepted methods. Their version of naturalizedepistemology therefore does not follow Quine in reducing epistemologyto nonnormative psychological investigations, but rather upholds theroles of value judgments in rigorous empirical inquiry (Campbell 1998,Nelson 1990). Quine also presupposes an individualist account ofinquiry; his preferred reduction basis for naturalized epistemology isbehavioral and neuro- psychology. Feminist empiricists are concernedwith the impact on inquiry of social practices relating to gender,race, class and other bases of inequality. They therefore takesociology, history, and science studies seriously. Most also advocate asocialized epistemology, in which inquiry is treated as a fundamentallysocial process and the basic subjects of knowledge may even becommunities or networks of individuals. The Paradoxes of Bias and Social Construction. Thecentral problematics of feminist empiricism can be captured in twoapparent paradoxes. First, much feminist science criticism consists inexposing the androcentric and sexist biases in scientific research,especially in theories about women, sexuality, and gender differences.The force of this criticism seems to rest on a prior empiricistcommitment to the view that bias is epistemically bad — that itleads to false theories. Yet, advocates of feminist science urge thatfeminist values inform scientific inquiry. This amounts to arecommendation that science incorporate certain biases into itsoperations. Feminist empiricists need to reconcile these conflictingclaims. This is known as the paradox of bias. Second, and relatedly,much feminist science criticism is devoted to exposing the influence ofsocial and political factors on scientific inquiry. Scientists advocateandrocentric and sexist theories because they are influenced by thesexist values of the wider society. This would seem to imply that, toeliminate these social biases, feminists adopt an individualistepistemology. Instead, feminist epistemologists stress the socialconstruction of knowledge. They urge, not that inquirers insulatethemselves from social influences, but that they restructurescientific practices to be open to different socialinfluences. This can be called the paradox of social construction.Feminist empiricists argue that the key to dissolving both paradoxesis to undermine the assumptions that underlie them: that biases,political values, and social factors can influence inquiry only bydisplacing the influence of evidence, logic, and whateverother purely cognitive factors tend to lead to true theories. Not allbias is epistemically bad (Antony 1993). There are three generalstrategies for showing this, which may be called pragmatic, procedural,and moral realist. The pragmatic approach stresses the plurality ofaims that inquiry serves. Inquiry seeks truths, or at least empiricallyadequate representations, but which truths any particularinquiry seeks depends on the uses to which those representations willbe put, many of which are practical and derived from social interests.The paradoxes are dissolved by showing how responsible inquiry respectsa division of labor between the functions of evidence and social values— the evidence helping inquirers track the truth, the socialvalues helping inquirers construct representations out of those truthsthat serve the pragmatic aims of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). This viewmay be joined with a view of nature as rich, complex, and messy. Nosingle theory captures the whole structure of reality, since differentways of classifying phenomena will reveal different patterns useful todifferent practical interests (Longino 2001). The procedural approachargues that epistemically bad biases can be kept in check through anappropriate social organization of inquiry. A social organization thatholds people with different biases accountable to one another will beable to weed out bad biases, even if no individual on her own can befree of bias (Longino 1990). This view may be joined with the idea thatthe subject of knowledge (Nelson 1993), epistemic rationality (Solomon1994) or objectivity (Longino 1990, 2001) is the epistemic community,not the individual. The moral realist approach argues that moral,social and political value judgments have truth-values, and thatfeminist values are true. Inquiry informed by feminist values thereforedoes not displace attention to the evidence, because the evidencevindicates these values (Campbell 1998).Feminist empiricists appeal to the pragmatist tradition to underminethe sharp dichotomy between fact and value (Antony 1993; Nelson 1993).They argue (compatibly with other pragmatists, such as Hilary Putnam),that Quine's arguments about the underdetermination of theory byevidence lead to a view of facts as partially constituted by values,and values by facts. In the absence of a sharp distinction betweenfacts and values, it cannot be argued that inquiry explicitly motivatedby feminist values is in principle opposed to the truth.Whether any particular feminist, or sexist, theory is true or falsewill depend on empirical investigation informed by epistemic norms— norms which may themselves be reformed in light of the meritsof the theories they generate. This is the project of naturalizedepistemology, whereby the vindication of norms of inquiry is sought notoutside, but within, ordinary empirical investigation. Feministempiricist investigations of the interaction of facts and values arefurther discussed below. Feminist empiricistexplorations of how norms of inquiry should be constituted to enhanceobjectivity are also discussed below.Criticisms of Feminist Empiricism. Within feministtheory, the intellectual traditions and training of standpoint andpostmodernist epistemologists have not kept track of the radicalchanges in the empiricist tradition inspired by Quine and furtherdeveloped by feminist empiricists. Consequently, some criticisms ofwhat is called “feminist empiricism” by other feministtheorists do not fit what feminists who call themselves “feministempiricists” believe. For example, feminist postmodernistscriticize feminist empiricists for presuming the existence of anindividual, transhistorical subject of knowledge outside of socialdetermination (Harding 1990), even though the naturalized epistemologythat feminist empiricists adopt has long since abandoned thatconception of knowers in favor of viewing knowers as socially situated.Feminist empiricists are also criticized for accepting an uncriticalconcept of experience (Scott 1991), even though feminist empiricistsaccept the theory- and value-laden character of evidence and hence thecritical revisability of descriptions of experience in light of newevidence, theoretical, and normative reflections. Feminist empiricistshave also been criticized for naively holding that that science willcorrect the errors and biases in its theories about women and othersubordinated groups all by itself, without the aid of feminist valuesor insights (Harding 1986, 1991). This contrasts with the actualposition of those who call themselves feminist empiricists, who arguethat science cannot claim to attain objective knowledge of genderedbeings or our gendered social world without actively including feministinquirers as equals in the collective project of inquiry (Longino1993a, 1993b). More pointedly, the standpoint theorist Hundleby (1997)criticizes feminist empiricism for overlooking the vital role offeminist political activity, in particular, the development ofoppositional consciousness, as a superior source of hypotheses andevidence for challenging sexist and androcentric theories.5. Feminist Science Criticism and Feminist ScienceThe history of feminist interventions into most disciplines follows acommon pattern. Feminist inquiry begins as a critique of accepteddisciplinary methods, assumptions, and canons. As it matures, itdevelops constructive projects of its own. The history of feminism andscience follows this pattern. In the empirical sciences, the patternhelps us see how feminist epistemology negotiates the tension betweenthe two poles in the paradox of bias that lies at the core of thefeminist empiricist project. Feminist science critics focus onidentifying androcentric and sexist biases in the actual practice ofscience. This practice began by representing bias as a source of error.But as philosophers and historians of science joined the practice offeminist science criticism, they developed a more sophisticated way ofunderstanding some biases as epistemic resources. Advocates of feministscience develop this theme in seeking to practice science in light ofand in the service of feminist aims and values. They thereby representfeminist biases as epistemic resources. Feminist Science Criticism: Bias as Error. Feministscience criticism originated in the critiques that working biologists,psychologists, and other scientists made of the androcentric and sexistbiases and practices in their own disciplines — especially oftheories about women and gender differences that legitimate sexistpractices. Exemplary works in this tradition include Bleier (1984),Fausto-Sterling (1985), Hrdy (1981), Leacock (1981), Sherif (1987), andTavris (1992). The criticism takes many forms. (1) Studies of how theexclusion or marginalization of women scientists impair scientificprogress. For example, the failure to provide Barbara McClintock withprofessional standing, resources, and access to graduate studentsdelayed incorporation of her pioneering discoveries of genetictransposition into mainstream biology (Keller 1983). (2) Studies of howthe applications of science and technology disadvantage women and othervulnerable groups, treat their interests as less important, or expresscontempt for them. Examples include eugenics (Hubbard 1990), andeconomic development policies that reinforce gender hierarchy byoffering training and resources to men, but not women, in developingcountries (Waring 1990). Such practical ill-effects of scienceapplications can be traced in part to epistemic defects in theunderlying science — to bogus concepts of race in the case ofeugenics, and to failures to recognize women's work as contributing tothe “economy” in the case of sexist development policies.(3) Studies of how science has ignored women and gender, and howturning attention to these issues may require revisions of acceptedtheories. Hays-Gilpin and Whitley (1998) document particularly dramaticexamples of this in the field of archaeology. (4) Studies of how biasestoward working with “masculine” cognitive styles —for example, toward centralized, hierarchical control models ofcausation as opposed to “feminine” (contextual,interactive, diffused) models — have impaired scientificunderstanding, for example, in studies of slime-mold (Keller 1985b) andmolecular biology (Spanier 1995). (5) Studies of how research into sexdifferences and women's and men's “natures” that reinforcessex stereotypes and sexist practices fail to live up to standards ofgood science — for example, in drawing inferences on the basis ofminiscule sample sizes or correlations not tested against anappropriately designed control group, or in ignoring disconfirming data( Fausto-Sterling 1985, Tavris 1992). Gender bias may also be revealedin the conceptual framework of the theory in question — forexample, in representing subjective gender identification as adichotomous variable, thereby eliminating other possibilities, such asandrogyny, from consideration (Bem 1993).In all of these cases, gender bias is represented as a cause oferror, or at least delay in recognizing the truth. But, as philosophersand historians of science joined the practice of feminist sciencecriticism, alternative models of gender bias were developed, sometimesin cooperation with working scientists. Exemplary works of feministscience criticism by philosophers and historians of science includeHaraway (1989), Harding (1986, 1991, 1993, 1998), Lloyd (1993), Longino& Doell (1983), Schiebinger (1989), and Wylie (1996). Although someof this work is devoted to exposing errors caused by sexist andandrocentric bias, some of it is devoted rather to showing how theinterests in technological control that underlie the modern practice ofscience limit its scope and what it takes to be significant knowledge(Lacey 1999, Merchant 1980, Tiles 1987). Another core project offeminist science criticism is demonstrating that the evidence assembledon behalf of the theories under study does not compel assent to thetheories. The theories go well beyond the data that support them, withthe gap being filled by sexist and androcentric assumptions. Thus,Haraway (1989) uses the tools of literary theory to demonstrate howhypotheses in primatology and evolutionary theory depend on narrativeconventions (for example, casting the transition from ape to hominid asa heroic drama) and tropes (for example, casting primates as mirrors ofhuman nature). While these narrative conventions and tropes haveconsiderable persuasive power, their appeal is rhetorical, and theevidence does not compel their selection. Beyond this negativecritique, feminist science critics are interested in uncovering anddefending the viability of alternative nonsexist and feminist theoriesof the phenomena in question. When they operate in this mode, thecritics are not claiming that sexist and androcentric theories arefalse, but rather that they are not proven or established, because atthis stage in the development of the evidence, legitimate and at leastequally viable rivals exist.To sort out these different accounts of the cognitive role of genderbias, it is helpful to distinguish four dimensions in the evaluation ofresearch programs: (1) conceptual criticism; (2) methodologicalcriticism; (3) evaluating the relation of the available evidence to theprogram's hypotheses (does the evidence tend to confirm or disconfirmthem?); (4) comparing the program's theory to rival theoriesin terms of their empirical adequacy and other epistemic values. Biasin a research program is revealed as error to the extent thatit is shown to generate or rest on (1) confused or nonreferringconcepts that purport to refer (for example, the concept of“race” as biological subspecies of human beings); (2)violation of valid methodological principles; (3) belief in a theory inthe face of a lack of evidential support for it, or strong evidenceagainst it; or (4) continued commitment to a theory with someevidential support, even when some rival theories dominate it withrespect to all epistemic values, including empirical adequacy.Biases shown to generate error in this way should be stopped, throughbetter training of scientists or the adoption and enforcement ofmethodological principles designed to check their influence. Feministscience criticism in the bias-as-error mode parallels theheuristics-and-biases tradition of psychology (Kahneman, Slovic andTversky 1982), a tradition which has already been taken up innaturalized epistemology and philosophy of science (e.g., Solomon1994). On a normative level, it generates methodological principles forengaging in nonsexist science. Exemplary normative (methodological)works generated by feminist science criticism include Altmann (1974)and Eichler (1988).Bias in a research program is shown to be limiting orpartial, but not necessarily erroneous, to the extent thatavoids clear error and generates (1) a limited range of concepts and/or(2) uses a limited range of methods, (3) has some empirical successes,while (4) rival theories, depending on different concepts and/ormethods, can also claim to avoid clear error and to possess someempirical successes or other epistemic virtues not possessed by theresearch program in question. Such biases are legitimate: itis rationally acceptable to conduct scientific inquiry under theinfluence of such biases. Indeed, empirical investigations into theworkings of the human mind strongly suggest that we have no choice butto think in accordance with some biases (Chomsky has shown, forexample, that we have innate ideas of deep grammatical structures).Moreover, the underdetermination of theory by data implies that withoutsome biases, we would be unable to make sense of our world at all(Antony 1993). When biases are partial but not clearly erroneous, theyserve a positive generative function: they produce newconcepts, methods, and hypotheses that open up new aspects of the worldfor understanding. They are resources for enhancing our graspof the world. From a normative point of view, feminist philosophers ofscience argue that we have an epistemic interest in ensuring thatcertain limiting biases do not dominate research to the exclusionof other generative biases that would generate rival theoriespossessing a different range of important empirical successes. Thepoint in exposing the androcentric and sexist biases lying behindcertain research theories is not to show that they are false (theymight in the end be empirically vindicated), but to make salient theroom for alternative programs not based on such biases.Feminist Science: Bias as Resource. Most advocatesof feminist science argue, in this vein, that scientificinquiries informed by feminist values are based on legitimate,generative limiting biases. They argue not that feminist sciencesshould exclude other ways of doing science, but that feminist sciencesshould be included as among the legitimate choices available toinvestigators. This picture of science is pluralistic, compatible withthe postmodern rejection of “totalizing narratives,” butmore inclined than postmodernists to explain the persistence ofpluralism in the social and applied sciences in scientific realistterms: science is disunified because the world is rich with a multitudeof cross-cutting structures, which no single theoretical vocabulary cancapture. Different communities have interests in different aspects ofreality, so leaving them free to follow their interests will revealdifferent patterns and structures in the world (Harding 1998; Longino2001).Against this pluralistic view, some advocates of feminist sciencedefine it in terms of adherence to specific ontologies andmethodologies expressing a “feminine” cognitive style(Duran 1991, Keller 1983, 1985a). On this conception, for example, thecontent of any feminist theory should have a relational rather than anatomistic ontology, favor the concrete over the abstract, avoidgeneralizations about women in favor of exposing the richness andparticularity of different women's lives and perspectives, and soforth. Its methods should encompass intuition, emotional engagement, andother cognitive styles associated with a feminine sensibility. Thisview has had perhaps its greatest impact in feminist works attackingquantitative methods in the social sciences. For example, Stanley &Wise (1983) argue that only qualitative methods that accept women'sreports of their experiences in their own terms, refusing togeneralize, can uphold feminist values of respecting differences amongwomen and avoiding the replication of power differences betweenresearchers and research subjects.Pluralist feminist scientists and philosophers of science havevigorously contested these attempts to define feminist science in termspreferred content and “feminine” method. They argue thatmany questions of interest to feminists are best answered withquantitative methods (Jayaratne & Stewart, 1991), and indeed thatfeminists may properly make use of a wide range of methods (Harding1987, Nielsen 1990, Reinharz 1992). Feminist science is not defined byits content, but rather by the pragmatic interests that generate thequestions it asks. (Sometimes this distinction is cast as one between“feminist science” and “doing science as afeminist.”) Feminists are interested in uncovering the causes ofwomen's oppression, revealing the dynamics of gender in society, andproducing knowledge that women can use to overcome the disadvantages towhich they are subject. Forms of knowledge that simply valorize the“feminine” may not be helpful to women who would be betteroff not having norms of femininity imposed on them. In any event,feminist pluralists argue that advocates of “feminine”science have not shown that feminine cognitive styles and ontologiesare, as a general matter, better able to track the truth (Longino1989).If feminist science amounts to “doing science as afeminist” — that is, using science to answer questionsgenerated by feminist interests — one may ask whether it differsin any substantive respect from the science that is already practicedby nonfeminists. Feminist pluralists reply that scientific practice isalready highly disunified; philosophies of the special sciences revealgreat variations in methods, background assumptions, sources ofevidence, cognitive values, and interpretive strategies (Longino 2001).So the dichotomy between feminist and mainstream science presupposed bythe question is false. Doing biology, primatology, anthropology,archaeology, psychology, economics, history or any other specialscience as a feminist — that is, with the aim of answeringfeminist questions — has resulted in many and variouslocal methodological innovations, discoveries of new sourcesof evidence, and developments of alternative theories (see, forexample, Bell, Caplan and Karim 1993; Haraway 1989; Hays-Gilpin andWhitley 1998; Nielsen 1990). These are then made available to inquirersasking other, nonfeminist questions. Thus, there is no presumption thatcertain methods, evidence, etc. are uniquely available to servefeminist cognitive interests.Nevertheless, there are some common threads in “doing scienceas a feminist” that tend to favor certain types ofrepresentation over others (Longino 1994). Feminists are interested inepistemic practices that reveal the operations of gender in the world,and opportunities for women to resist and transform these operations.One way gender bias operates to reinforce sexism is through theperpetuation of categorical, dichotomous thinking which representsmasculinity and femininity as “opposites,” femininity asinferiority, and nonconformity to gender norms as deviant. This givesfeminists an interest in the value of “ontologicalheterogeneity” — using categories that permit theobservation of within-group variation and that resist therepresentation of difference from the group mean as a form of deviance.Gender bias also reinforces sexism through single-factor causal modelsthat attribute seemingly intrinsic powers to men by neglecting theirwider context. The value of “complexity of relationship”favors the development of causal models that facilitate therepresentation of features of the social context that support malepower, including female participation and complicity. Other feministcognitive values involve the accessibility of knowledge:feminist favor knowledge that “diffuses power” in beingcast in a form usable to people in subordinate positions, who usuallylack technical expertise and access to expensive equipment. Thisinterest underlies the appropriate technology movement in developingcountries. For similar reasons, feminists are more interested inknowledge applicable to meeting human needs than in research programswith little prospect of advancing these interests. These values arefeminist in the sense of advancing feminist interests, but theirusefulness is not confined to feminism. None of these feministcognitive values displace or compete with the search for truth, becausedoing science as a feminist, like doing science with any other interestin mind (for example, medical or military interests) involvescommitment to the cognitive value of producing empirically adequatetheories.6. Feminist Defenses of Value-Laden InquiryThe Challenge of Value-Neutrality. The theory andpractice of feminist science raises the question of how any inquiryshaped by moral, social, and political interests can simultaneously befaithful to the fundamental epistemic interest in truth. Against theproject of feminist science, many philosophers hold that true scienceis neutral among social, moral, and political values. Lacey (1999)usefully distinguishes the following claims of value-neutrality: (1)Autonomy: science progresses best when uninfluenced bysocial/political movements and values. (2) Neutrality:scientific theories do not imply or presuppose any judgments aboutnoncognitive values, nor do scientific theories serve any particularnoncognitive values more fully than others. (3) Impartiality:The only grounds for accepting a theory are its relations to theevidence. These grounds are impartial among rival noncognitive values. Of these claims, neutrality is the most dubious, because it depictsthe grounds for accepting social, political and moral values as utterlydetached from evidence about human potentialities and about whathappens when people try to realize these values in practice. If thiswere true, then the defenders of keeping mathematics a male preservewould not have bothered arguing that women were not intellectuallycapable of doing mathematics and that their uteri would wander if theytried to do it — and feminists would not have bothered disputingthose claims. Neutrality is less a claim about the character of sciencethan about the justification of social and political values. As acategorical claim about the latter, it is false. Taylor (1985) andTiles & Oberdiek (1995) show, in detailed case studies, howscientific theories do serve some social and political values more thanothers.The core claim of value-neutrality, however, is impartiality. Thethought that underwrites impartiality is that scientific theories aimat the truth, at what is the case, whereas value judgmentsdeal with what ought to be the case. Even if neutrality isfalse, because facts constitute part of the warrant for valuejudgments, the converse is not true. Only facts can supply the warrantfor other facts. Autonomy, in turn, is defended as a means to ensurethat science satisfies the demands of impartiality. Social andpolitical movements are thought to threaten autonomy because theirprimary influence on science is thought to consist in pressuringscientists to ignore the facts and validate their worldviews. Defendersof impartiality object to the very idea of feminist science becausethey view it as threatening impartiality.The Basic Underdetermination Argument. Feministempiricists reply to the challenge of value-neutrality by extendingQuine's argument that theory is underdetermined by evidence (Longino1990, Nelson 1993). Any body of observations counts as evidence forparticular hypotheses only in conjunction with certain backgroundassumptions. Vary the background assumptions, and the same observationswill support quite different hypotheses. For example, the failure toobserve stellar parallax in the 17th century was taken as evidence thatthe Earth stands still by geocentrists, and as evidence that the starsare very far away by heliocentrists. No logical principle stopsscientists from choosing different background assumptions against whichto interpret their observations. In practice, scientists face someconstraints in the selection of background assumptions, based oncognitive values such as simplicity and conservatism (resistance torevising deeply entrenched assumptions on which many other beliefsdepend). But these cognitive values rarely reduce the scope for choicedown to one option, and their interpretation and weights arecontestable in any event (geocentrism was overturned only by overridingconservatism). Feminist empiricists conclude that, given the scope forchoice in background assumptions, nothing stops scientists fromselecting their background assumptions on account of their fit withsocial and political values, or indeed any other preference orinterest. It follows that feminist scientists may select theirbackground assumptions on account of their fit with feministvalues.Putnam (1981) has advanced a similar argument, carried to feministconclusions by Nelson (1993). Value judgments operate like factualjudgments in the web of belief, such that values judgments figure inthe background assumptions that support factual judgments, andvice-versa. If the web of belief integrates judgments of fact and ofvalue, then there is no clear distinction between these two judgmenttypes. So there is no good argument against permitting feminist valuesto shape scientific judgments.The underdetermination argument pries open a potentialspace for social values in science. But it is not sufficient todemonstrate the legitimacy of any particular ways ofintroducing feminist values into science. Feminist science critics andfeminist scientists agree that there are cognitively illegitimate aswell as cognitively legitimate ways for social values to influencescience. That is the basis for distinguishing error-generating biasesfrom biases that serve as cognitive resources, a distinction requiredto dissolve the paradox of bias. Standing alone, the underdeterminationargument does not help us discriminate one from the other. Additionalcriteria are needed.One lesson about what to look for can be drawn from earlier debatesover the theory-ladenness of observation. It is now generally agreedthat the theory-laden character of observations does not threaten theirstatus as evidence for a theory, provided that the theories presupposedin those observations do not immediately include the very theory beingtested by those observations. Circularity, at least of a narrow sort,should be avoided. Similarly, the chief danger of value-laden inquiryis a kind of circularity of wishful thinking. The value-laden characterof the background assumptions linking evidence to theories should notforeclose the possibility of discovering that one's values aremistaken, because based on erroneous beliefs about human potentialitiesand the consequences of putting certain values into practice. (Noticethat it makes sense to worry about the danger of wishful thinking onlyif the neutrality thesis is false.) If women really can't do math, ortheir uteri really do migrate when they try (causing hysteria, as thesexist theory held), the values incorporated into feminist scienceshould not close off this possibility in advance. Although, in settingout to test these sexist hypotheses, women scientists presuppose theirown mathematical competence, this does not preclude their discoveringotherwise. They need only open their calculations to public criticismto keep this possibility alive. If their evidence disconfirms thesexist hypotheses, and their calculations survive public scrutiny, thenthey have not run a vicious circle.The Basic Pragmatic Strategy. The above reflectionsprovide a standard for determining when socially value-laden inquiryhas gone wrong. But they do not explain what positive epistemicinfluence they could have. How could they function as an epistemicresource? Feminist epistemologists at this point stress thepragmatic functions of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). All inquiry beginswith a question. Questions may be motivated not only by the purelycognitive interest of curiosity, but by various practical interests inunderstanding the nature and causes of situations one judges to beproblematic, and in finding out how to improve those situations. Theresulting product of inquiry — a theory or set of systematicallyconnected beliefs — should therefore be shaped to thesepractical-cum-cognitive interests. The pragmatic aspects of inquiryintroduce new dimensions of evaluation to theories. We can ask not onlywhether the theories are backed by sufficient evidence to warrant theiracceptance, but whether they are cast in forms that are cognitivelyaccessible to the situated knowers who want to use these theories,whether they are useful to these knowers (help them solve theirproblems), and whether they answer the questions they were designed toanswer. A set of statements can be true, yet fail these pragmatictests.Even the staunchest defenders of the value-neutrality of scienceacknowledge that pragmatic factors legitimately influence the choice ofobjects of study. In this function, then, pragmatic interests,including social and political values, are epistemic resources:inquirers with different interests will study and make discoveriesabout different aspects of the world. But the defenders ofvalue-neutral science contend that once inquirers decide where to casttheir flashlight, what gets lit up is determined entirely by the natureof the world. Feminist epistemologists argue that the light ofpractical interests penetrates more deeply into what is discovered thanthis. Knowers (subjects) play a more active role in constituting theobject of knowledge than the flashlight metaphor suggests. (This is onething feminist epistemologists mean when they say they reject“the subject-object dichotomy”.) “Constitution”has two senses, representational and causal. In the representationalsense, knowers constitute the object of knowledge in choosing the termsin which they represent it, and in defining the context in which it isrepresented as operating. If knowing is like seeing, all seeing is aform of “seeing as” — and different interests willmake us see the “same” things differently (Longino 1990).This is a straightforward implication of the fact of situated knowing.In the causal sense, some representations have a causal impact on whatis represented. When what we are representing is ourselves,uptake of our self-representations will change who we are and what wedo. This follows from our agency, which is the determination to governourselves by our self-understandings. This is sometimes what is meantby the claim that subjects, or their identities, are “sociallyconstructed.”The basic pragmatic strategy for defending feminist science, or anyinquiry shaped by social and political values, is to show how thepragmatic interests of that inquiry license or require a particularmode of influence of values on the process, product, and uptake of theproduct of inquiry, while at the same time leaving appropriate room forevidence to play its warranting role. Values and evidence playdifferent, cooperative roles in properly conducted inquiry; values donot compete with evidence for the determination of belief(Anderson 1995b).A Catalogue of Types of Legitimate Influence of SocialValues in Science. One can examine the actual operation ofparticular values in particular scientific investigations and judge, ona case by case basis, whether the values are closing off thepossibility of discovering unwelcome facts, leading scientists toreason in a vicious circle, or insulating their findings from criticalscrutiny, or whether the values are enabling the discovery of new facts— whether they are, in short, obstructing or facilitating thesearch for knowledge. Such judgments are contextual and subject torevision in light of new evidence. What follows is a catalogue oftypes of influence of social values that feministepistemologists and philosophers of science have argued may inprinciple legitimately influence theory choice (although whethertheir influence is epistemically good or bad in a particular caserequires further investigation).Selection and weighting of cognitive values. Kuhn (1977)argued that scientists need to appeal to cognitive values to take upthe slack between theory and evidence. His list of cognitive valuesincluded accuracy (empirical adequacy or truth), scope, simplicity,fruitfulness, internal consistency and consistency with other beliefs(conservatism). As we have seen above, Longino (1994) argues thatfeminists have reason to prefer theories that manifest other cognitivevalues, such as diffusion of power. Diffusion of power, likesimplicity, is not a truth-oriented cognitive value. Both count ascognitive values because they make theories cognitively accessible,comprehensible to our finite minds. Diffusion of power recognizes thatcognitive accessibility is relative to the situation of the knower.(Longino's characterization of other values of feminist science, suchas ontological heterogeneity and complexity of relationship, as“cognitive” values is something of a misnomer — thesefit better under the rubrics of classification and models, below.) Bothsimplification and diffusion of power stand in tension with truth, inthat theories that embody them not only ignore many complex, messytruths, but may even make false claims. Whether this is bad depends onwhether the truths ignored or the inaccuracies embraced areimportant, and this can be judged only in relation to theinterests of the investigator. All legitimate research programs mustseek to incorporate the value of empirical adequacy, which requires atleast that theories try to approximate the truth. But how muchaccuracy this requires depends on how much the expected usefulness ofthe knowledge will be compromised by larger margins of error. Thesituation and pragmatic interests of the inquirer or of the potentialusers of a theory may therefore legitimately affect the selection andweighting of cognitive values in theory choice.Standards of Proof. By convention, social scientists rejectthe null hypothesis (that observed results in a statistical studyreflect mere chance variation in the sample) only for P-values < 5%,an arbitrary level of statistical significance. Bayesians and othersargue that the level of statistical significance should vary, dependingon the relative costs of type I error (believing something false) andtype II error (failing to believe something true). In medicine,clinical trials are routinely stopped and results accepted as genuinenotwithstanding much higher P-values, if the results are dramaticenough and the estimated costs to patients of not acting on them areconsidered high enough. (The cost of not providing a potentiallyeffective treatment may be death, while the cost of providing a uselesstreatment may be small.) This practice explicitly incorporates socialvalue judgments in the standard of proof required before results areaccepted. Hare-Mustin and Maracek (1994) argue, by parallel reasoning,that whether studies that find gender differences, or that fail to findthem, should be accepted depends on the relative costs of Alpha Bias(exaggerating differences) and Beta Bias (neglecting differences) inthe context at hand.Classification. The ways observed phenomena are classifiedmay legitimately depend on the values of the researcher. In medicine,the distinction between health and disease reflects moral judgmentsabout human welfare and appropriate ways of dealing with problems, aswell as judgments about causation. A condition regarded as bad forhuman beings is not classified as a disease unless some kind of medicaltherapy is considered both an appropriate and a potentially effectiveway to deal with it. Feminist inquiries, too, raise questions about thecauses of women's oppression that require classifying phenomena asinstances of rape, sexual objectification, sex discrimination, and soforth — classifications all tied to their meeting both empiricaland evaluative criteria (Anderson 1995a, 1995b).Methods. The methods selected for investigating phenomenadepend on the questions one asks and the kinds of knowledge one seeks,both of which may reflect the social interests of the investigator.Experimental methods in social science may be good for discoveringfactors that can be used to control people's behavior in similarsettings. But to grasp their behavior as action — thatis, as attempts by agents to govern their behavior through theirself-understandings — requires different empirical methods,including qualitative interviews (which allow subjects to delineatetheir own systems of meaning) and participant observation. Standpointtheories, as critical theories, aim as well at empowering the subjectsof study by helping them forge liberatory self-understandings, andthese, too, may require different methods of inquiry — forexample, consciousness-raising (MacKinnon 1999).Causal Explanations; Explanations of Meaning; Narratives.For most phenomena, the number of factors that have a causal impact ontheir occurrence is vast — too large to comprehend or test in asingle model. Investigators must therefore select a subset of causalfactors to include in the models they test. This selection may be basedon considerations of cost or availability — some types of dataare hard or expensive to get; cheap and accessible methods may bebetter suited to testing the causal influence of some variables thanothers. The selection of causal variables may also be based on fit withthe social or personal interests of the investigator (Longino 1990,2001). These interests often reflect background social and moraljudgments of blame, responsibility, and acceptability of change. Totake an innocuous case, in most contexts, what is singled out as acause of dangerous fires is a spark, flame, or flammable material, notthe presence of oxygen. The items judged possible to change, or worthchanging, are the focus of causal explanation. To take a morecontroversial case, conservatives are more likely to study divorce andout-of-wedlock birth as causes of women's poverty, whereas feministsare more likely to focus on other causes — for example, theexclusion of women from better-paid jobs, the weak bargaining power ofwomen in marriage, and norms of masculinity that induce fathers toavoid significant participation in child-rearing, thereby forcing womento forego earnings in taking up the slack. Notice that these causalexplanations are not incompatible. All the causal factors cited maycontribute to the feminization of poverty.Often what inquirers seek is not merely a set of facts, but what thefacts mean. Meaning holism implies that the meaning or significance offacts depends on their relations to other facts. Even if two inquirersagree on the causal facts, they may still disagree about their meaningbecause they relate the facts in different ways, reflecting theirbackground values. Feminists may agree with conservatives that divorceis a cause of the feminization of poverty, but deny that this meansthat women are better off married. They argue that marriage itself,with its gendered division of domestic and market labor, constitutesone of the major structural disadvantages women face, setting them upfor worse outcomes in the event of divorce (Okin 1989). Conservatives,viewing marriage as an indispensable condition of the good life, are nomore willing to view marriage in this light than most people would bewilling to blame oxygen for the occurrence of house fires. It might bethought that scientists should stick to the facts and avoid judgmentsof meaning. But most of the questions we ask demand answers that fitfacts into larger, meaningful patterns. Scientists therefore cannothelp but tell stories, which require the selection of narrativeframeworks that necessarily go beyond the facts (Haraway 1989). Thisselection may depend both on their fit with the facts and on their fitwith the background values of the storyteller.Framework Assumptions. As we ascend to higher levels ofabstraction, very general framework assumptions come into play inconstituting the object of study. Some of these are disciplinary.Economics studies humans as self-interested, instrumentally rationalchoosers. Social psychology studies humans as responding to sociallymeaningful situations. Behaviorism studies humans as controlled byobjectively defined environmental variables. Behavioral geneticsstudies humans as controlled by their genes. These are all forms of“seeing as.” Longino (1990) and Tiles (1987) argue that theselection of framework assumptions may depend on their fit with theinterests of the inquirer. Feminists are interested in promotingwomen's agency, so they tend to prefer frameworks that permit therepresentation of women as agents. This selection does not guaranteethat they will confirm the background assumption that women are agents.Causal models that include only agentic variables may not explain muchof the variation in women's behavior; models that include both agenticand nonagentic variables may find that the latter explain all of thevariation. The value-laden selection of framework assumptions need notlead to a vicious circle of reasoning, because it is still left up tothe evidence to determine how successful the assumptions are inexplaining the phenomena of interest.Pluralism as the upshot of value-laden inquiry.Because the interests and values of inquirers vary, and inquirersselect background assumptions in part for their fit with theirinterests and values, their background assumptions will also vary.Rather than lamenting this fact, feminist epistemologists urge us toembrace it (Haraway 1991, Harding 1998, Longino 2001). A pluralism oftheories and research programs should be accepted as a normal featureof science — as it is, certainly, in the human sciences. As longas the different research programs are producing empirical successesnot produced by the others, and avoiding clear error and viciouslycircular reasoning, there is good reason to treat the value-biasesanimating them as epistemic resources, helping us discover andunderstand new aspects of the world and see them in new perspectives,rather than as obstacles to the search for truth. Feminist sciencetakes its place as one set of legitimate research programs amongothers, rather than as something that replaces the others. T | |
