Lecture notes

Monday 5 OctoberFeminist epistemology and standpoint theory

Feminism

• The account of feminism offered focuses on addressing oppression that results from the unequal distribution of power due to gender, and also notes that gender intersects with other social categories that affect participation in knowledge production in a variety of ways.
• 1970s and 1980s: more women entered the scientific field and challenged certain ideas. Example: primatology.

Philosophers

• Philosophers assumed the social features of scientists were not relevant to what we know or to the evidence produced.
• The belief: humans have essentially the same perceptual apparatus and therefore the same ability to reason. What is observed should not depend on contingent features of an observer.
• Scientific methods are believed to be objective, so the process of collection should not matter.
• Counter-example. Female primatologists: why did they observe different behaviours, or have different theories? Why were their conclusions different?

The textbook's project

• Who knows? What do we have knowledge of? How do we know? What don't we know? Why does it matter what we know? How can we know better?

Feminism, defined

Feminism is an emancipatory political movement with the aim of ending oppressive structures based on gender ideologies and norms that divide the world into two classes of people with distinct social roles, men and women, that tend to systematically empower men and disempower women.Crasnow and Intemann, quoted on her slide

• The feminist argument for this textbook: power is distributed unequally and gender is one of the reasons; how societal structures and institutions are shaped depends on differing distributions of power; feminism is a political movement aimed at egalitarianism; and ending the oppression of women is central to ending all forms of oppression.
• This is true in part because women are among the members of all races, ethnicities, religions, sexualities and abilities, so their liberation as women is never wholly separable from the effects of being subject to these other intersecting identities.

Epistemology and philosophy of science

• Epistemology: the study of knowledge, and the study of relationships between beliefs and knowledge.

A history

• Feminism acknowledged a shift in how knowledge was understood. Women had been actively kept out of many roles. Why does knowledge change when women enter fields?
• When women were able to enter fields not previously open to them, they often found it difficult to study the subjects they were interested in, and in the ways they thought best, because both the subjects and the approaches were unlike or even antithetical to those established in their professions. This was likely not because of any biological difference, but because they had been socialised under social, political and economic structures that produced different experiences, interests and skill sets.
• Example: Kuhn, acknowledging that knowledge was a product of society.

Knowledge is power

• Knowledge enables well-grounded decisions and actions. Scientific knowledge is important for determining how to address challenges, and goes hand in hand with technologies that shape our lives and communities. How we understand the world gives us opportunities to protect and to change it, and to decide how we want to live.
• Science needs to be aware of the social stereotypes that shape research questions. Her examples: stereotypes of gender, race, ethnicity.

Who knows?

• Feminists question traditional assumptions about knowers. Traditional epistemology assumes reason is necessary, and traditional philosophy has denied women and children reason. Example: Aristotle, Kant. Both believed women are not fully capable humans, like young children.

philosophers commonly treat the knower as a featureless abstraction. The traditional formula for epistemological analysis has been S knows that p if and only if certain conditions hold, and the focus has been on identifying what conditions are necessary and sufficient. Epistemologists tended not to ask: who is S? That question was not taken to be relevant, as evidenced by the practice of reducing a knower to a mere variable, stripped of any social features. What is also apparent in this formula is that the knower is conceived of as an individual. Knowers are isolated individuals who simply know in virtue of their own cognitive capacities. Actual humans are embodied, existing at a particular place and time, and related to other individuals in a variety of ways, while an abstract knower is not.Lorraine Code 1991, and the book's commentary on her, quoted on the slide

• Philosophy as a discipline intentionally ignored social location.

What do we have knowledge of?

• In S knows that p, p is traditionally a proposition that must be justified and true to count as knowledge. The long-dominant view: what we have knowledge of are propositions describing states of affairs independent of human minds, so knowing is the subjective mind grasping something true about a mind-independent reality. It assumes a one-to-one correspondence between what we believe and some state of the world, and a single conception of what it is to get it right.
• Feminism: knowledge focuses on a particular subject matter, and inquiries focus on particular subjects or objects.

The heart disease example

• Research has focused mostly on men. Reasons: women's and men's health have different economic effects; heart disease in women is often misdiagnosed because it appears with different symptoms.
• So the object of inquiry is not heart disease generally. It is heart disease in men, and not in humans.
• 2017 survey: both the public and doctors were still unaware that heart disease is also the leading cause of death for women.

Knowers

• Knowers influence the process of knowing and what is known.
• Knowledge is knowledge of the world that matters to us (Donna Haraway 1988).
• Thomas Nagel 1986, the view from nowhere.
• Feminist argument: the world is known from social locations. Her note: quote page 10.
• Feminism needs to acknowledge that the subjects and topics that interest knowers affect how we acquire knowledge.

How do we know?

• Feminist argument: what we know depends on gender norms and relations.
• To understand why who knows and what is studied make a difference to how we know, it helps to recognise that talk of the scientific method is misleading. It suggests there is one right way to produce knowledge when knowledge production involves many different kinds of activity.

What don't we know?

• Agnotology: what we are ignorant of. The study of ignorance, examining the ways in which ignorance is produced and maintained. Asked what we don't know it is tempting to answer everything we do not yet have knowledge about. Feminists and others working in agnotology, also called epistemologies of ignorance, have argued that ignorance is not merely a lack of knowledge. Rather it is often the result of complex social and institutional factors that intentionally or unintentionally obscure knowledge or prevent us from achieving certain kinds of knowledge.
• Knowledge is power, and what we don't know can be a way of maintaining power or preventing social, political or policy changes. Scholars have examined how institutional or social forces of sexism, racism, classism, colonialism and ableism intersect to produce or maintain ignorance of knowledge vital to understanding and addressing systems of oppression.

Why does it matter?

• Feminist goals: acknowledge that epistemic aims are deeply intertwined with social and political aims, and that knowledge production should aim to achieve liberation and equality.