Feminist epistemology (Philosophy)

There is a large and growing literature on communal interpretive resources, the concepts, theories, narratives, etc. a community draws on in interpreting its members and their world. (They're also called "hermeneutical resources" in some places and "epistemic resources" in others.) Several recent contributions to this literature have concerned dominant and resistant interpretive resources and how they affect concrete lived interactions. In this paper,

Chair's Response to "AI and Epistemic Injustice: Whose Knowledge and Authority?", the first session of the one-day workshop 'Origin Myths of Artificial Intelligence: Histories of Technology and Power' which took place on 30 November 2018 at Hughes Hall College, University of Cambridge (http://lcfi.ac.uk/events/origin-myths-artificial-intelligence-histories-tec/)

El presente texto parte de la necesidad de rastrear en la teoría feminista algo más que una categoría para estudiar las diferencias entre hombres y mujeres. Así, indaga -al interior de la epistemología feminista- el desarrollo del concepto conocimientos situados. Por tanto, en una primera parte plantea tanto las críticas feministas a la ciencia como las vertientes que se reconocen en la epistemología feminista. En la segunda parte, aborda la evolución del término conocimientos situados, para lo cual empieza con la idea de política de la localización de Adrienne Rich, sigue con la propuesta de Sandra Harding como el primer momento en los conocimientos situados y finaliza con la propuesta de Donna Haraway como el segundo momento, la reelaboración de los conocimientos situados. La última parte la constituyen unas conclusiones de cara a la creación de una ciencia feminista.

"In this paper I suggest that gender archaeology has followed the three main feminist epistemologies as described by SandraHarding (1986): feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. I explore the main principles of these orientations and discuss their use in gender archaeology, offering examples from Norwegian, Spanish and North American contexts. My
purpose is to trace a genealogy of gender archaeology from the point of view
of epistemology that will reveal its feminist character. Even though it has been developed within the processual and post-processual contexts of archaeology, a review of its epistemological principles will show that gender archaeology must be situated within a wider feminist framework."

This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discern a black feminist poetics that anticipates recent feminist materialism’s attentiveness to the mutually-constitutive effects of discursivity and materiality. Said poetics approaches a shared worry over the problem of referentiality, not in representationalist terms, as recent materialists would suggest, but rather through a poetics attentive to the racially sexuating bases of an (anti)black sublime that conditions, exceeds, and potentially ruptures the scales of the empirical.  Privileging performativity, gesture, resonance, and metaphor over the authority and purported veridicality of Western empirical science, the poetics of black feminism investigated here is instructive for a general theory of representation.

This essay reflects on some of the problems with characterizing collective epistemic resistance to oppression as “unthinking” or antithetical to reason by highlighting the epistemic labor involved in contending with and resisting epistemic oppression. To do so, I develop a structural notion of epistemic gaslighting in order to highlight structural features of contexts within which collective epistemic resistance to oppression occurs. I consider two different forms of epistemic echoing as modes of contending with and resisting epistemic oppression that are sometimes mischaracterized as “unthinking” or “group think.” The first sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in withdrawing from conditions of structural epistemic gaslighting that is sometimes mischaracterized as a pernicious self-sequestering that is antithetical to reason. The second sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in actively confronting epistemic structures that gaslight what is sometimes mischaracterized...

This dissertation studies the different ways of conceptualizing the „situatedeness“ of knowledge. This shall be undertaken out of a feminist epistemological point of view. Firstly, current ways of thinking about the knowledge as a situated action in the field of science policy, will be displayed. Secondly the topic of feminist epistemologies will be introduced, this outlines the development and current state of this discipline in both international and national context. In the analysis three major research topics emerge: 1/ introduction and comparative analysis of Sandra Harding’s “Standpoint theory” and Donna Haraway’s conception of “Situated knowled- ges”, 2/ historical excursion containing ways of conceptualizing the knowledge as a socially si- tuated practice on the work of Ludwick Fleck (1935); and later on the work of feminist critique of current science studies (Haraway 1996), 3/ the third part concludes with a recurrence to the initially mentioned science policy and offers a critical gender analysis in dependence of empirical research results in the field of science praxis and its institutional organization in both internatio- nal and national context (Szapuová ed. 2009, Felt et. al 2009). The methodology used is Donna Haraway’s „Cats Cradle“, combined with Sandra Harding’s “Standpoint theory” gender analysis, functioning on three levels. These are: individual, institutional and symbolical. The results can be grouped around two main research questions. First: what persists in the ways we talk and think about science? Second: what kind of model of knowledge subject can serve the best facing the current state of complexity of knowledge production? And as a secondary question appears: what are the consequences of articulating the current “messiness” of science studies? In seking answers for these three questions presented, this work aims of other possibilities in conceptualizing the topic of „situated knowledges“ presented in discussion.
Paper is in Slovak language.

Georg Lukács’ theory of reification, with its original combination of Weberian and Simmelian themes within a Hegelian-Marxist framework, has had an incredibly fertile influence on 20th century social philosophy, – including numerous renowned philosophers, literature scholars, and social theorists, as well as collective theoretical enterprises such as the Praxis and Budapest Schools, the Situationist International, and Critical Theory. Yet, Fredric Jameson provocatively suggests that the most authentic descendency of Lukács’ thinking is to be found, not among the Marxists, but within feminist standpoint theory. The affinity of this ongoing project to Lukács’ Marxism is remarkable: the idea that the proletariat might achieve a distinctive, and potentially privileged, standpoint that allows (and even compels) it to grasp capitalist society in its totality has a parallel in the affirmation made by feminist standpoint theorists that women might also attain a privileged perspective on the dynamics of patriarchal societies. The current relevance of feminist standpoint theories is attested by the role played by its central concern – i.e., the material conditioning of knowledge and the cognitive potentiality of socially subjugated standpoints – in contemporary scholarly discussions on epistemic injustice and ignorance as well as in the articulation of collective action against oppression. Although the Lukácsian and Marxian lineage of feminist standpoint theory is usually alluded to, this relationship is often taken for granted and not further problematized. In this chapter, I address two prominent early versions of feminist standpoint theory, namely, those of Nancy Hartsock and Dorothy Smith, with the aim of exploring both the connections and the contrasts to Lukács’ theory regarding their accounts of the experiences of “the revolutionary subject” – the proletariat, women. What could Lukács’ contribution to such debates be? It is noteworthy that feminist standpoint theory (especially in the academic setting) has gradually been focusing less on women’s subjugation and struggles and more on the discussion about the validity of truth claims, which is often connected to embracing a postmodern view to the detriment of the dialectical tradition that has its origins in Hegel, Marx, and Lukács. By discussing the works of Hartsock and Smith and their connection to Lukács’ theory of reification, this paper aims at countering the tendency to reduce standpoint theory to a purely epistemological debate centered on discourse. Finally, a further reason to discuss these founding texts of feminist standpoint theory is an effort to shift the discussion back to the (politically and epistemologically) enabling features of subjugated standpoints, in contrast to contemporary studies in epistemic injustice that see only the disabling consequences of oppression. I begin (1) by presenting Nancy Hartsock’s conception of standpoint theory and discussing some problematic features of her proposal, especially the idealization of women’s standpoint as free from dichotomies. Next (2), I argue that looking back at Lukács’ theory of reification and his phenomenology of the dilacerated subject might contribute to addressing such difficulties. I turn then (3) to Dorothy Smith and argue that her seminal essay on women’s experience of disjunction and bifurcated consciousness as the starting point of a critical sociology shares with Lukács the key feature that enables her to avoid the complications identified in Hartsock’s work: the connection between dilaceration and emancipatory interest.

While many forms of violence shape the global world order, the disciplines devoted to international politics are often content with reductionist concepts of violence; knowledge and knowledge production are more often than not seen as altogether antithetical to direct and physical harm. At the same time, global entanglements of knowledge with violence have increasingly come into view in the course of the ongoing (de-)colonial turn. After more than 30 years, Gayatri C. Spivak's feminist postcolonial understanding of epistemic violence is still the preeminent theoretical touchstone for addressing this issue. By providing an interdisciplinary understanding of lesser known conceptions of epistemic violence, I open up additional routes for deploying the term in the analysis, theorization, and critique of international politics. Based on this assemblage, I frame epistemic violence along the decolonial concept of a coloniality of power, knowledge, and Being and finally consider how we can possibly undo epistemic violence while un/doing IR.

The concept of epistemic injustice has recently arisen as a major topic in the field of epistemology, connected to testimony and credibility around discussions of social power dynamics (Grasswick 2018). In Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), Miranda Fricker presented the notion of testimonial injustice (henceforth, T.I.). Roughly, T.I. is an epistemic wrong that occurs when a hearer is not afforded enough credibility by a speaker as a result of an identity prejudice, where the hearer suffers what Fricker dubs a credibility deficit. However, Federico Luzzi (2016) suggested that there could be cases of T.I. where the hearer is given the right level of credibility and that, as a result, the original definition of T.I. may prove too narrow. In this paper, I advance Luzzi’s proposal by contending that there are cases where T.I. obtains in virtue of due credibility.

Some birth scholars (Melissa Cheyney, Robbie Davis-Floyd, and Elizabeth Davis) have argued that there are two models of birth that value different kinds of knowledge. They assert that the "technocratic" model has been adopted by "mainstream" culture, which values reason and scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, the "countercultural" birth subculture, which has adopted a "holistic" model, values intuition and "body knowledge" instead. However, my research does not support this argument. Rather, the 119 birth stories I analyzed suggest that, even if the birth subculture rhetoric supports those scholars' dichotomies, their birth experiences do not. Neither group appears to uniformly hold their respective values, thus weakening the original dichotomy between the "mainstream" group and the "countercultural" group. Moreover, I demonstrate how the dichotomy between reason and scientific knowledge on the one hand, and intuition and "body knowledge" on the other, is also inaccurate. Feminist epistemology also warns that this dichotomization undercuts a diversity of thinking styles by limiting them to just two.

The article is in English but here comes a Danish summary:

Denne artikel rejser en række epistemologiske og metodologiske spørgsmål vedrørende læsningen af trans som identitetskategori. Disse spørgsmål er stærkt underbelyste i en skandinavisk akademisk kontekst, om end der ellers i stigende grad produceres analyser af trans identitetsnarrativer. Artiklen sætter fokus på, hvordan trans indrammes og betydningstilskrives indenfor visse former for queer teoretisk informerede læsninger. Gennem næranalyser af tre nyere tekster af henholdsvis Katherine Johnson, Dag Heede og Jodi Kaufmann påpeges farerne ved en alt for dissekerende læsning, da denne har tendens til at reducere trans til et spørgsmål om normativ (re)produktion eller subversiv dekonstruktion. Sluttelig argumenteres der for at (gen)besøge og ihukomme spørgsmålet om lokaliseringens politik som forsker og i den analytiske praksis; hvem taler og tildeles stemme – og på hvilke præmisser? 

Keywords: methodology, epistemology, transgender studies, trans life-story narratives

Published 1996: Ethics and the Environment 1 (2): 91-102.

While articulating a philosophy of ecology that reconciles deep ecology with ecofeminism may be a laudable project, it remains at best unclear whether this attempt can be successful. I argue that one attempt, Carol Bigwood's feminized deep ecology fails in that it reproduces important elements of the deep ecologist's essentializing discourse that ecofeminists rightly argue is responsible for the identification with and oppression of women and nonhuman nature. I then propose an alternative model for conceiving and describing human and nonhuman nature modeled on Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks concerning anthropomorphizing.

The article is in English but here comes a Danish summary: Denne artikel rejser en række epistemologiske og metodologiske spørgsmål vedrørende læsningen af trans som identitetskategori. Disse spørgsmål er stærkt underbelyste i en skandinavisk akademisk kontekst, om end der ellers i stigende grad produceres analyser af trans identitetsnarrativer. Artiklen sætter fokus på, hvordan trans indrammes og betydningstilskrives indenfor visse former for queer teoretisk informerede læsninger. Gennem næranalyser af tre nyere tekster af henholdsvis Katherine Johnson, Dag Heede og Jodi Kaufmann påpeges farerne ved en alt for dissekerende læsning, da denne har tendens til at reducere trans til et spørgsmål om normativ (re)produktion eller subversiv dekonstruktion. Sluttelig argumenteres der for at (gen)besøge og ihukomme spørgsmålet om lokaliseringens politik som forsker og i den analytiske praksis; hvem taler og tildeles stemme – og på hvilke præmisser? Keywords: methodology, epistemology, transgender studies, trans life-story narratives

Essentialism is a contentious word in contemporary Western feminist theory, and leads into deeply entrenched debates in feminist epistemology that particularly concern gender's biological and/or social constitution. Epistemological essentialism, or the view that entities (including men and women) have intrinsic properties that can be discerned by reason, takes us into various forms of determinism, most usually associated with biology. However, the biological (essentialism)/social (constructionism) debate is complicated, and variously manifest, with intersecting and overlapping temporal and conceptual dimensions: on the one hand, as internally homogeneous and stable feminist waves in linear formation over time, and on the other, as distinct (and even antagonistic) feminist ideologies at a given time, both of which are captured in the feminist waves metaphor. This is also one place where we can see that antagonism has become something of an established trope for Western feminism, even within feminism. One familiar thread of the feminist waves narrative is a "modern" second wave of feminism as overtaken by a "postmodern" third wave. A major conceptual underpinning of generational feminist waves is a tension between "essentialist" modern feminist epistemology and "anti-essentialist" (or constructionist) postmod-ern epistemology presented as irreconcilable, and linked to feminism's "anachro-nism" or "death." Many recent approaches convincingly undermine received knowledge that the modern-postmodern relationship is explained in a second-to third-wave antagonism, contending that such representations detract from femi-nism's actual complex diversity (over time, and at a time), the consequences of

This article examines the primary epistemic harm of testimonial injustice, or, as defined by Miranda Fricker, the injustice of perceiving another epistemic agent as less credible due to an identity prejudice. I first analyze Fricker’s account of the harm, which she posits in terms of a subject/object relation as “epistemic objectification.” My analysis, however, shows that (1) testimonial injustice does not render its victim to an object-like status and (2) testimonial injustice necessarily treats its victim as a subject, albeit a truncated subject. Drawing on the work of Ann Cahill and Simone de Beauvoir, I demonstrate that the primary harm of testimonial injustice is more aptly described in terms of a subject/other relation, or a relation that circumscribes the subjectivity of its victim within the confines of the perpetrator’s subjectivity. Using these conceptual resources to examine the primary epistemic harm of testimonial injustice not only avoids the problems I raise with the notion of epistemic objectification, but also greatly enhances our understanding of testimonial injustice, and consequently of what more epistemically just relations look like.

The article is in English but here comes a Danish summary: Denne artikel rejser en række epistemologiske og metodologiske spørgsmål vedrørende læsningen af trans som identitetskategori. Disse spørgsmål er stærkt underbelyste i en skandinavisk akademisk kontekst, om end der ellers i stigende grad produceres analyser af trans identitetsnarrativer. Artiklen sætter fokus på, hvordan trans indrammes og betydningstilskrives indenfor visse former for queer teoretisk informerede læsninger. Gennem næranalyser af tre nyere tekster af henholdsvis Katherine Johnson, Dag Heede og Jodi Kaufmann påpeges farerne ved en alt for dissekerende læsning, da denne har tendens til at reducere trans til et spørgsmål om normativ (re)produktion eller subversiv dekonstruktion. Sluttelig argumenteres der for at (gen)besøge og ihukomme spørgsmålet om lokaliseringens politik som forsker og i den analytiske praksis; hvem taler og tildeles stemme – og på hvilke præmisser? Keywords: methodology, epistemology, transg...

IAPh 2021 will be devoted to the most pressing issues of our future: In times of rapid technological progress, climate change, and economic turmoil, we invite women’s contributions on the philosophy of economics, philosophy of technology, and ecology/environmental ethics.

Given the initial aim of IAPh and the research focus of the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, we seek to discover and reassess the role of women in the history of philosophy. Join us.

Thirty years of gender studies have resulted in a new awareness of a social, biological and cultural dimension of our life that must be rethought and reconsidered. Yet, although the impact of these studies on social life and policy-making is obvious, there are many questions that are left to explore and that revolve around the assessment of their epistemological impact:

1) How are they impacting behavioral research, and, more precisely, our vision of what a human being is?
2) To what extent the development of new research paradigms takes into account this dimension and how? What we – researchers - want to measure when we measure difference?
3) How differences in epistemic cultures impact the way in which the gender difference is conceived by research and conceptualized in our folk psychology? 

By gathering the results of one year of a research grant at the Institut Nicod in Paris on the epistemology of gender, my paper will explore how the gender dimension has impacted the practices of research in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience by challenging the received views coming from the classical “gender studies” about the gender distinction, the male/female dichotomy and the relation between nature and nurture

Resumo: O presente artigo busca investigar como a temática de gênero pode ser inserida em um currículo em Filosofia, como parte de uma política pública de combate a violência contra mulheres. Seguindo os passos de Clarissa Castro (2016), analisou-se a mais recente edição de um livro didático popular, Filosofando: Introdução à Filosofia, escrito por Maria Lúcia Aranha e Maria Helena Martins e que constou no Plano Nacional do Livro Didático na última década. Seguindo o diagnóstico de Castro, percebe-se uma desproporção muito grande entre autores e autoras e as questões de gênero são tratadas como não filosóficas. O texto termina apontando a necessidade de produção de materiais didáticos complementares para auxiliar o(a) professor(a) a abordar o assunto em sala de aula. Palavras-chave: Ensino de filosofia. Gênero. Livro didático. Pedagogias feministas. Abstract: The present paper seeks to investigate how gender issues could be part of a curriculum in Philosophy as public policy to fight violence against women. Following the steps of Clarissa Castro (2016), this research analyzes a recent edition of Filosofando: Introdução à Filosofia, by Maria Lúcia Aranha e Maria Helena Martins-a textbook t widely used in schools and that has been part of PNLD (brazilian national textbook program) in the past decade. Following Castro's diagnosis, one perceives a great disproportion between male and female authors. Also in a qualitative analysis, one can note that gender issues are treated as a non-philosophical subject in the textbook. The text ends by pointing out the need to produce supplementary didactic materials to help teachers approach the subject in their lessons.

The article presents a brief reconstruction of naturalized epistemology, understood as a methodological approach. Three emblematic positions within naturalized epistemology are distinguished: rejection of apriorism in epistemology, favoring the use of the results of empirical science; attribution of an instrumental normativity to epistemology; and the thesis of the empirical assessability of the epistemic norms or principles. The text addresses the way in which, historically, these features are presented in the foundational works of Quine and Laudan. Furthermore, it studies how this project is applied by three authors: Howard Sankey, who links naturalism to the debate of epistemic relativism; and Louise Antony and Elizabeth Anderson, who make use of these ideas as a foundation for feminist epistemology. Through these “applications”, it is possible to appreciate that naturalized epistemology does not lead to the elimination of normative aspects, as was feared by early critics of Quine. It is also possible to appreciate that the approach of Sankey is naturalized because it is empirically informed, but it still depends on a priori arguments. On the contrary, appropriations by feminist epistemology carry out the naturalization project in a deeper sense, that is, they introduce a set of epistemological premises that are themselves empirical

View all references): feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. I explore the main principles of these orientations and discuss their use in gender archaeology, offering examples from Norwegian, Spanish and North American contexts. My purpose is to trace ...

This special issue of Wagadu, edited by Mechthild Nagel, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies, SUNY Cortland, takes to task the complexities of gendered lives in a global racialized world.
Read volume at: wagadu.org

I want to explore strategic expressions of ignorance against the background of Charles W. Mills's account of epistemologies of ignorance in The Racial Contract (1997). My project has two interrelated goals. I want to show how Mills's discussion is restricted by his decision to frame ignorance within the language and logic of social contract theory. And, I want to explain why Maria Lugones's work on purity is useful in reframing ignorance in ways that both expand our understandings of ignorance and reveal its strategic uses. I begin with Mills's account of the Racial Contract, and explain how it prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, which Mills characterizes as an inverted epistemology. I briefly outline his program for undoing white ignorance and indicate that retooling white ignorance is more complex than his characterization suggests. Making this argument requires an abrupt shift from the white-created frameworks of social contract theory to Lugones's system of thinking rooted in the lives of people of color. So, the next section outlines Lugones's distinction between the logic of purity and the logic of curdling and explains its usefulness in addressing ignorance. With both accounts firmly in place the third section demonstrates how the Racial Contract produces at least two expressions of ignorance and explains how the logic of purity underlying the Contract shapes each expression in ways that limit possibilities for resistance. I don't mean to suggest that the social contract theory's love of purity invalidates Mills's work, only that this framework limits prospects for long-term change by neglecting the relationship between white ignorance and non-white resistance. The final sections explain how people of color use ignorance strategically to their advantage , and argue that examining ignorance through a curdled lens not only makes strategic ignorance visible, but also points to alternatives for retooling white ignorance.