## 1. Situated Knowers



Feminist epistemology conceives of knowers as situated in particular
relations to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and
how it is known, reflects the situation and perspective of the knower.
Here we are concerned with *claims* to know, temporarily
bracketing the question of which claims are true or warranted. 



**Situated knowledge in general.** People may understand
the same object in different ways that reflect the distinct relations
in which they stand to it. (1) *Embodiment*. People experience
the world by using their bodies, which have different constitutions
and are differently located in space and time. (2) *First-person
vs. third-person knowledge*. Individuals have first-personal
access to some of their own bodily and mental states, and knowledge about themselves, which differs from third-person
knowledge about them. (3) *Emotions, attitudes, interests, and
values*. People often represent objects in relation to their
emotions, attitudes and interests, which differ from how others
represent these objects. A thief represents a lock as a frustrating obstacle while its owner represents the lock as a comforting source of security. (4) *Personal knowledge of others*.
Because people behave differently toward others, and others interpret
their behavior differently, depending on their personal relationships,
what others know of them depends on these relationships. (5)
*Know-how*. People have different skills, which may also be a
source of different propositional knowledge. (6) *Cognitive
Styles*. People have different styles of investigation and
representation (e.g. preferring lumping or splitting). (7)
*Background beliefs and worldviews*. People form different
beliefs about an object, in virtue of different background beliefs. Such differences may lead a patient to interpret his symptoms as signs of a heart attack, while his doctor diagnoses heartburn. Differences in global metaphysical or political worldviews may also generate different beliefs about particulars on a broader scale. (8) *Relations to other
inquirers*. People may stand in different epistemic relations to
other inquirers--for example, as informants, assistants,
students--which affects their access to information and their
ability to convey their beliefs to others. 



Situatedness influences knowers' access to
information and the terms in which they represent what they know. They
bear on the form of their knowledge (articulate/implicit,
formal/informal, and so forth). They affect their attitudes toward
their beliefs (certainty/doubt, dogmatic/open to revision), their
standards of justification, and the authority with which they lay
claim to their beliefs and offer them to others. They affect
knowers' assessment of which claims are significant or
important.



**Social situation.** Feminist epistemology focuses on
how the *social location* of the knower affects what and how
she knows. It is thus a branch of social epistemology.
Individuals' social locations consist of their ascribed social
identities (gender, race, sexual orientation, caste, class, kinship
status, trans/cis etc.) and social relations, roles, and role-given interests,
which are affected by these identities. Individuals are subject to
different norms that prescribe different virtues, habits, emotions,
and skills thought to be appropriate for their roles. They also have
different subjective identities--identities incorporated into their self-understandings--, and attitudes toward their ascribed identities, such as affirmation, rejection, pride, and shame. 



**Gender as a mode of social situation.** In feminist
theory, "gender" refers to systems of meanings, social
identities, roles, norms, and associated behaviors, traits and
virtues, ascribed or prescribed to individuals on the basis of their
real or imagined sexual characteristics (Haslanger 2000). It also
includes individuals' subjective identifications with and
orientations to such meanings. Psychological traits are considered
"masculine" and "feminine" if they dispose
their bearers to comply with the gender norms assigned to men and
women, respectively. From a performative perspective, masculinity and
femininity are not fixed traits but contrasting styles of behavior
that may be manifested by individuals of any ascribed or subjective
gender identity in almost any role (West & Zimmerman 1987; Butler
1990). Finally, "gender symbolism" comprises metaphorical
ascriptions of gendered ideas to animals and inanimate objects.



**Gendered knowledge.** By joining the account of
situated knowledge with the account of gender as a social situation,
we can generate a catalog of ways in which what people know, or think
they know, can be influenced by their own gender (roles, norms,
traits, performance, identities), other people's genders, or by
ideas about gender (symbolism).



*The phenomenology of gendered bodies*. People's bodies are both differently sexed and differently gendered. Early child
socialization trains boys' and girls' bodies to different
norms of bodily comportment. Once internalized, such norms profoundly
affect the phenomenology of embodiment. They inform men's and
women's distinct first-personal knowledge of what it is like to
inhabit a body, to express capacities unique to one sex or another
(e.g., breast feeding), and to have experiences that are manifested
through different body parts in differently sexed bodies (e.g.,
orgasm). They also cause men's and women's experiences of
gendered behaviors that both can perform to differ--in fluidity,
self-consciousness, confidence, awkwardness, shame, and so forth. Some
feminist epistemologists argue that dominant models of the world,
especially of the relation between minds and bodies, have seemed
compelling to mostly male philosophers because they conform to a male
or masculine phenomenology (Bordo 1987; Young 1990).



*Gendered first-personal knowledge*. It is one thing to
know what sexual harassment is in third-personal terms. It is another
to recognize "*I* have been sexually harassed."
Many women know that women in general are disadvantaged have
difficulty recognizing themselves as sharing women's predicament
(Clayton & Crosby 1992). The problems of self-knowledge
are pressing for feminist theory, because it is committed to
theorizing in ways that women can use to improve their lives. This
entails that women be able to recognize their lives in feminist
accounts of women's predicament. Feminist epistemology is
therefore concerned with investigating the conditions of feminist
self-understanding and the social settings in which it may arise
(MacKinnon 1989).



*Gendered attitudes, interests, and values*. A representation
is *androcentric* if it depicts the world in relation to male
or masculine interests, attitudes or values. A "male"
interest is an interest a man has, in virtue of the goals given to him
by social roles designated as appropriate for men to occupy, or in
virtue of his subjective gender identity. A "masculine"
interest is an interest a man has in virtue of attitudes thought
appropriate to men. Such attitudes and interests structure the
cognition of those who have them. For instance, they may influence how
heterosexual men classify women as, e.g., differently eligible for
sexual intercourse with them. A representation is *gynocentric*
if it depicts the world in relation to female or feminine interests,
attitudes, or values. An interest, attitude, or value might also be
symbolically gendered. For example, the ethics of care represents moral problems in
terms of symbolically feminine values--values culturally
associated with women's gender roles (Gilligan 1982). It is a
symbolically gynocentric perspective, even if men also adopt it.
Feminist epistemology raises numerous questions about these phenomena.
Can situated emotional responses to things be a valid source of
knowledge about them (Jaggar 1989, Keller 1983, Pitts-Taylor 2013)? Do
dominant practices and conceptions of science reflect an androcentric
perspective, or a perspective that reflects other dominant positions,
as of race and colonial rule (Merchant 1980; Harding 1986, 1991, 1993,
1998, 2006, 2008; Schiebinger 2007)? Do mainstream philosophical
conceptions of objectivity, knowledge, and reason reflect an
androcentric perspective (Bordo 1987; Code 1991; Flax 1983; Rooney
1991)? How would the conceptual frameworks of particular sciences
change if they reflected the interests of women (Anderson 1995b, Rolin
2009)?



*Knowledge of others in gendered relationships*. Gender norms
structure the social spaces to which people with different gender
identities are admitted, as well as the presentation of self to
others. Inquirers with different gender identities therefore have
access to different information about others. Male and female
ethnographers may be admitted to different social spaces, and have
different effects on their informants. Research that elicits
information about others through personal contact therefore raises the
question of how findings might be influenced by gendered relations
between researchers and subjects, and whether gender-inclusive
research teams are in a better position to detect this (Bell et al
1993; Leacock 1981; Sherif 1987).



*Gendered skills*. Some skills are labeled masculine or
feminine because men and women need them to perform their respective
gender roles. To the extent that the skill is perceived by the agent
or others as proper to someone with a different gender, performance of
it, or social recognition of success in performance, may be impaired.
These phenomena raise various epistemic questions. Does the
"masculine" symbolism of certain scientific skills, such
as of assuming an "objective" stance toward nature,
interfere with the integration of women into science? Do actually or
symbolically "feminine" skills aid the acquisition of
scientific knowledge (Keller 1983, 1985a; Rose 1987; Ruetsche
2004)?



*Gendered cognitive styles*. Some theorists believe that men
and women have different cognitive styles (Belenky et al 1986;
Gilligan 1982). Whether or not this is true, cognitive styles are
gender symbolized (Rooney 1991). Deductive, analytic, atomistic,
acontextual, and quantitative cognitive styles are labeled
"masculine," while intuitive, synthetic, holistic,
contextual and qualitative cognitive styles are labeled
"feminine." It is seen as masculine to make one's
point by argument, feminine to make one's point by narrative.
Argument is commonly cast as an adversarial mode of discourse, like
war, while narrative is viewed as a seductive mode of discourse, like
love. These phenomena raise epistemic questions: does the quest for
"masculine" prestige by using "masculine"
methods distort practices of knowledge acquisition (Addelson 1983;
Moulton, 1983)? Are some kinds of research unfairly ignored because of
their association with "feminine" cognitive styles (Keller
1983, 1985b)?



*Gendered background beliefs and worldviews*. Representational
schemes that are functional for different gendered roles and attitudes
make different information salient. The resulting differential
background knowledge may lead differently gendered individuals to
interpret commonly accessed information differently. A man might read
a woman's demure smile as a coy come-on, where another woman may
interpret it as her polite and defensive reaction to unwanted
attention. Such differences can spring from differential access to
empathetic and phenomenological knowledge. These phenomena raise
epistemological questions. Are there epistemic obstacles to legal
institutions recognizing rape and sexual harassment, insofar as they
confine their thinking within a "masculine" perspective
(MacKinnon 1989)? Do sexist or androcentric background beliefs cause
scientists to generate sexist theories about women, despite adhering
to ostensibly objective scientific methods (Harding 1986; Harding
& O'Barr, 1987)? How might the social practices of science
be organized so that variations in background beliefs of inquirers
function as epistemic resources (Longino 1990; Solomon 2001)?



*Relations to other inquirers*. Gender differences in knowledge
can be reduced if differently gendered people participate in inquiry together. Each
gender can take on testimony what the other can acquire through direct
experience. Each may also learn how to exercise imaginative projection more effectively, and to take up the perspective of another gender. However, gender norms influence the terms on which men and
women communicate (Kalbfleisch 1995). In some contexts, women are not
allowed to speak, or their questions, comments, and challenges are
ignored, interrupted, and systematically distorted, or they
aren't accepted as experts. Gendered norms of conversation and
epistemic authority thus influence the ability of knowledge practices
to incorporate the knowledge of men and women into their processes of
inquiry. Feminist epistemologists explore how gender norms distort the
dissemination of testimony and relations of cognitive authority among
inquirers (Addelson 1983; Code 1991; Fricker 2007) and how the social
relations of inquirers could be reformed, especially with regard to
the allocation of epistemic authority, so as to enable more successful
practices of inquiry (Jones 2002; Longino 1990; Nelson 1990,
1993).



**Problems of and Approaches to Gendered Situated
Knowledge.** Mainstream epistemology takes as paradigms of
knowledge simple propositional knowledge about matters in principle
equally accessible to anyone with basic cognitive and sensory
apparatus: "2+2=4"; "grass is green";
"water quenches thirst." Feminist epistemology does not
claim that such knowledge is gendered. Paying attention to
gender-situated knowledge enables questions to be addressed that are
difficult to frame in epistemologies that assume that gender and other
social situations of the knower are irrelevant to knowledge. Are
certain perspectives epistemically privileged? Can a more objective
perspective be constructed from differently gendered perspectives?




Feminist epistemologists have considered situated knowledge within
three traditions: standpoint theory, postmodernism, and empiricism.
The next three sections explain how these three traditions were
originally articulated, while
 section 5
 discussion their interactions and convergence.


## 2. Feminist Standpoint Theory



**Standpoint Epistemology in General.** Standpoint
theories claim to represent the world from an epistemically advantaged
socially situated perspective. A complete standpoint theory must
specify (i) the *social location* of the advantaged
perspective, (ii) its *scope*: the subject matters over which
it claims advantage, (iii) the *aspect* of the social location
that generates epistemic advantage: for example, social role, or
subjective identity; (iv) the *ground* of its advantage: what
justifies its claim to superiority; (v) the *type* of epistemic
superiority it claims: for example, greater accuracy, or greater
ability to represent fundamental truths; (vi) the *other
perspectives* relative to which it claims advantage, and (vii)
modes of access to that perspective: is occupying the social location
necessary or sufficient for getting access to the perspective? Many
limited claims to epistemic advantage on behalf of particular
perspectives are uncontroversial. Auto mechanics are in a better
position than auto consumers to know what is wrong with their cars.
Practical experience in fulfilling the mechanic's role grounds
mechanics' epistemic advantage, which claims superior
reliability. 



Standpoint theories usually claim that the perspectives of
subordinated social groups have an epistemic advantage regarding
politically contested topics related to their subordination, relative
to the perspectives of the groups that dominate them.
*Classically*, standpoint theory claims that the standpoint of
the subordinated is advantaged (1) in revealing *fundamental*
social regularities; (2) in exposing social arrangements as
*contingent* and susceptible to change through concerted
action; and (3) in representing the social world in relation to
universal human interests. By contrast, dominant group standpoints
represent only surface social regularities in relation to dominant
group interests, and *misrepresent* them as necessary, natural,
or universally advantageous. 



**Marxist Standpoint Theory.** Marxism offers the classic
model of standpoint theory, claiming an epistemic advantage over
fundamental questions of social science and history, on behalf of the
standpoint of the proletariat (Marx 1964, Lukacs 1971). Workers
attain this standpoint by gaining collective consciousness of their
role in the capitalist system. In virtue of their oppression, they
have an interest in the truth about whose interests capitalism serves.
In virtue of their centrality, they have experiential access to the
fundamental relations of capitalist production. In virtue of their
practical productive activity, they represent it in terms of use
values (labor values), which are the terms in which the fundamental
laws of economics and history are expressed. In virtue of their
standing as the agents for the universal class they will become under
communism, they represent the social world in relation to universal
human interests. (Capitalists, by contrast, represent the world
ideologically in superficial (exchange value) and parochial (class
interested) terms.) Finally, the collective self-consciousness of the
workers involves, like all successful intentional action, a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Workers' collective insight into their
common predicament and the need to overcome it through revolutionary
action generates a self-understanding which, when acted upon, gets
realized. The epistemic advantage of the standpoint of the proletariat
is thus also grounded in the epistemic privilege that autonomous
agents have over what they are consciously doing.



**Grounds of Feminist Standpoint Theory.** Feminist
standpoint theory claims that the standpoint of women has an epistemic
advantage over phenomena in which gender is implicated, relative to
theories that make sexist or androcentric assumptions. Variants of
feminist standpoint theory ground this epistemic advantage in
different features of women's social situation, by analogy with
different strands of Marxist epistemology.



*Centrality*. Marxist feminists, such as Hartsock (1987) and
Rose (1987) focus on women's centrality to the system of
reproduction--of childrearing and caring for bodies. Because
women tend to the needs of everyone in the household, they are in a
better position than men to see how patriarchy fails to meet
people's needs. Men, in virtue of their dominant position, can
ignore how patriarchy undermines subordinates' interests.



*Collective self-consciousness*. MacKinnon (1989) argues that
men constitute women as women by sexually objectifying them, i.e., by
representing their natures as essentially sexually subordinate to men
and treating them accordingly. Women unmask these ideological
misrepresentations by achieving and acting on a shared understanding
of themselves as women--as a group unjustly constituted by sexual
objectification. Through collective feminist actions in which women
refuse to act as sexual objects--as in campaigns against sexual
harassment and rape-- women show that representations of women as
sexual objects are not natural or necessary. Their privileged
knowledge is collective agent self-knowledge, made true by being put
into action in feminist campaigns.



*Cognitive style*. Some early versions of standpoint theory
(Flax 1983, Hartsock 1987, Rose 1987) accept feminist object relations
theory, which explains the development of gender identity in male and
female children raised by female caregivers. Males acquire a masculine
identity by distinguishing themselves from their mothers, through
controlling and denigrating the feminine. Females acquire their gender
identity through identification with their mothers, blurring
boundaries between self and other. Males and females thereby acquire
distinct cognitive styles. The masculine cognitive style is abstract,
theoretical, emotionally detached, atomistic, and oriented toward
control or domination. The feminine cognitive style is concrete,
practical, emotionally engaged, relational, and oriented toward care.
These cognitive styles are reinforced by the gendered division of
labor--men having a near monopoly on positions of political,
economic, and military power calling for detachment and control; and
women being assigned to emotional care for others. The feminine
cognitive style claims epistemic advantage because ways of knowing
based on caring for everyone's needs produce more valuable
representations than ways of knowing based on domination (Hartsock
1987). Institutionalizing feminine ways of knowing requires overcoming
the division of mental, manual, and caring labor that characterizes
capitalist patriarchy (Rose 1987).



*Oppression*. Women have an interest in representing social
phenomena in ways that reveal their oppression. They also have
personal experience of sexist oppression, unlike men, whose power
enables them to ignore how their actions affect women. If epistemic
advantage is grounded in oppression, the multiply oppressed have
additional epistemic authority. Thus, Collins (1990) grounds black
feminist epistemology in black women's personal experiences of
racism and sexism. She uses this epistemology to supply black women
with self-representations that enable them to resist demeaning racist
and sexist images of black women, and to take pride in their
identities. The epistemic advantage of the oppressed is sometimes
founded on"bifurcated consciousness": the ability to see
both from the perspective of the dominant and from the perspective of
the oppressed (Harding 1991, Collins 1990).



**Access to the Feminist Standpoint.** Every standpoint
theory must explain how one gains access to it. Most standpoint
theories represent the epistemically advantaged standpoint not as
given, but as achieved through critical reflection on the power
structures constituting group identities. If the group and its
interests are defined objectively, the facts that constitute the group
and its interests are publicly accessible. So anyone can theorize
phenomena in relation to the interests of that group. However, if
epistemic advantage lies in collective agent-knowledge, its site lies
in the group defining itself as a collective agent. The privileged
standpoint is not that of women, but of feminists (MacKinnon 1989).
Men can participate in the feminist movement. But they cannot assume a
dominant role in defining (hence knowing) its aims, given the feminist
interest in overcoming male dominance.



**Goals of Feminist Standpoint Theory.** Feminist
standpoint theory is a type of
 critical theory.
 Critical theories aim to empower the oppressed. To serve this aim,
social theories must (a) represent the world in relation to the
interests of the oppressed; (b) enable the oppressed to understand
their problems; and (c) be usable by the oppressed to improve their
condition. Claims of superiority for critical theories are thus
fundamentally based on pragmatic virtues (Harding 1991, Hartsock
1996).



**Criticisms of Feminist Standpoint Theory.** Longino
(1993b) argues that standpoint theory cannot provide a noncircular
basis for deciding which standpoints have epistemic privilege. Crenshaw (1999) argues
that it is implausible to hold that *any* group inequality is
central to all the others; they intersect in complex ways. Hence,
women cannot have privileged access to understanding their oppression,
since this takes different forms for different women, depending on
their race, sexual orientation, and other identities. This critique
has been developed by feminist postmodernists, who question the
possibility of a unified standpoint of women, and see, behind the
assertion of a universal woman's viewpoint, the perspective of
relatively privileged white women (Lugones & Spelman 1983).


## 3. Feminist Postmodernism



**General Postmodernist Themes.**
Postmodernism
 draws inspiration from poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists,
including Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Lacan, Lyotard, and Saussure.
It questions attempts to transcend situatedness by appeal to such
ideas as universality, necessity, objectivity, essence, and
foundations. It stresses the locality, partiality, contingency,
instability, uncertainty, ambiguity and essential contestability of
any particular view of the world and the good. The postmodernist
emphasis on revealing the situatedness and contestability of any claim
or system serves both critical and liberatory functions. It
delegitimizes ideas that dominate and exclude by undermining their
claims to ultimate justification. And it opens up space for imagining
alternative possibilities that were obscured by those claims.



Postmodernists claim that what we think of as reality is
"discursively constructed." According to Saussure,
"the linguistic sign acts reflexively, not referentially"
in a "discursive field." This amounts to radical holism about meaning: signs get their meaning not from their reference to external
things but from their relations to all the other signs in the
discourse. Introducing new signs (or discarding old ones) thus changes
the meanings of the signs already in use. Signs therefore lack a fixed
meaning over time. These ideas support the rejection of what Lyotard
calls "totalizing metanarratives." There can be no
complete, unified theory of the world that captures the whole truth. A
discourse with different terms would contain meanings not available in
the discursive field of the theory that claims completeness. The
assertion of any particular theory is an exercise of
"power"--to exclude certain possibilities from
thought and authorize others. Postmodernist claims that objects are
"discursively constructed" or "socially
constructed" assert a kind of nominalism: that the world does
not dictate the categories we use to describe it, that innumerable
incompatible ways of classifying the world are available to us. The
selection of any one theory is a choice that cannot be justified by
appeal to "objective" truth or reality.



Social practices also function as linguistic signs. For example, the
elevation of the judge's bench metaphorically signifies the
judge's superior authority over others in the courtroom. As
words get their meaning from their relations to other words, so do
actions get their meaning from their relations to other actions,
rather than from their relation to some pre-linguistic realm of human
nature or natural law. Thus, the superior authority of judges consists
in the conventions of deference others manifest toward them. It is not
underwritten by an underlying normatively objective authority. The
latter thought expresses an essentialist and objectivist power play,
attempting to foreclose contests over practices by fixing them in a
supposedly extra-discursive reality. The meanings of actions can be
subverted by other actions that, in changing the context, changes
their meanings. This is why postmodernists celebrate ironic, parodic,
and campy renditions of conventional behaviors as politically
liberating (Butler 1993).



The self is likewise constituted by signs. There is no unified self
that underlies the play of a stream of signifiers. Although
subjectivity is constituted through the production of signs, the self
is entangled in a web of meanings not of its own creation: our
identities are socially imposed. However, this does not foreclose
agency, because we occupy multiple social identities (a woman might be
a worker, a mother, lesbian, Mexican, etc.). Tensions among these
identities open up spaces for disrupting the discursive systems that
construct us.



**Feminist Postmodernism.**
 Feminist postmodernist ideas are deployed against theories that
purport to justify sexist practices--notably, ideologies that
claim that observed differences between men and women are natural and
necessary, or that women have an essence that explains and justifies
their subordination. The claim that gender is socially or discursively
constructed--that it is an effect of social practices and systems
of meaning that can be disrupted--finds a home in postmodernism
(Butler 1990). However, postmodernism has figured more prominently in
internal critiques of feminist theories. One of the most important
trends in feminist thinking has been exposing and responding to
exclusionary tendencies within feminism itself. Women of color and
lesbian women have argued that mainstream feminist theories have
ignored their problems and perspectives (Collins 1990; Hull, Scott,
and Smith, 1982; Lorde 1984).



*The critique of the concept "woman."*
 Feminist postmodernists have criticized many of the leading feminist
theories of gender and patriarchy as essentialist (Butler 1990, Flax
1990, Spelman 1988). Essentialism here refers to any theory that
postulates a universal, transhistorical, necessary cause or
constitution of gender or patriarchy. Feminist postmodernists object
that, in claiming that gender identity is one thing or has one cause,
such theories convert discursively constructed facts into norms,
difference into deviance. They either exclude women who don't
conform to the theory from the class of "women," or
represent them as inferior. Critiques of feminist theories by lesbian
women and women of color reinforce skepticism about the unity of the
category "woman" by highlighting intersectioning
identities of gender, race, class, trans/cis, and sexual orientation. The
faultlines for fragmentating the category "woman" are thus
other identities along which social inequalities are constructed.



This critique of "woman" as a unified *object* of
theorizing entails that "woman" also cannot constitute a
unified *subject* of knowing (Lugones & Spelman 1983). The
theories of universal gender identity under attack are ones in which
the authors, white middle class heterosexual women, could see
themselves. Critics claim that the authors fail to acknowledge their
own situatedness and hence the ways they are implicated in and
reproduce power relations--in this case, the presumption of white
middle class heterosexual women to define "the standpoint of
women"--to speak for all other women. Feminist standpoint
theorists, who claim an epistemic privilege on behalf of their
standpoint, thereby unjustifiably assert a race and class privilege
over other women. This lesson applies to subaltern feminist
standpoints as well. The assertion of a black feminist standpoint, for
example, objectionably essentializes black women. Once the
postmodernist critique of essentialism is granted, there is no logical
stopping point in the proliferation of perspectives.



*Perspective shifting*. Feminist postmodernism envisions our
epistemic situation as characterized by a shifting plurality of
perspectives, none of which can claim objectivity--that is,
transcendence of situatedness. This position rejects both objectivism
and relativism for the ways they let knowers escape responsibility for
the representations they construct (Haraway 1991). People are not
epistemically trapped inside their cultures, their gender, or any
other identity. They can think from other perspectives. Thus, although
we will always have plural perspectives, their constitution is always
shifting, without a stable correspondence between individuals and
perspectives. Negotiating the array of situated knowledges involves
two types of epistemic practice. One is acceptance of responsibility:
acknowledging the choices of situation involved in constructing
one's representations (Haraway 1991), and considering how they
affect the content of one's representations (Harding 1993). The
second is "world traveling" (Lugones 1987) or
"mobile positioning"--trying to see things from many
other perspectives. Mobile positioning can never be transparent or innocent. Imagining oneself in another's situation is
risky, requiring sensitive engagement with and sympathy for occupants
of those positions. Both transform situated knowing into a critical
and responsible practice.



**Criticisms of Feminist Postmodernism.** Both features
of feminist postmodernism--the rejection of "woman"
as a category of analysis, and the fragmentation of
perspectives--are controversial. Wholesale opposition to broad
generalizations about women may preclude critical analysis of
large-scale social forces that affect women (Benhabib 1995). That
women in different social positions experience sexism differently does
not entail that they have nothing in common--they still suffer
from sexism (MacKinnon 2000). Intersectionality may be accommodated
through a structural analysis of gender that allows for racialized and
other particularized modes of sexist oppression (Haslanger 2000).
Postmodernist fragmentation threatens both the possibility of
analytical focus and of politically effective coalition building among
diverse women. Yet, virtually all feminists acknowledge that a
plurality of situated knowledges appears to be an inescapable
consequence of social differentiation and embodiment.


## 4. Feminist Empiricism



**Relations of Feminist Empiricism to Empiricism in
General.** Empiricism is the view that experience provides the
sole or primary justification for knowledge. Classical empiricists
held that the content of experience could be described in fixed,
basic, theory-neutral terms--such as in terms of sense-data. Most
also supposed that philosophy could provide an external justification
for scientific method. Quine revolutionized empiricism by rejecting
these ideas. For Quine, observation is theory-laden. It is cast in
terms of complex concepts not immediately given in experience, which
are potentially subject to revision in light of further experience
(Quine 1963). Moreover, epistemology is just another project within
science, in which we empirically investigate our practices of inquiry
(Quine 1969). Many feminist empiricists accept these views while
rejecting Quine's sharp division of facts from values, which
they regard as inconsistent with naturalized empiricism. Feminist
empiricists consider how feminist values can legitimately inform
empirical inquiry, and how scientific methods can be improved in light
of demonstrations of sex bias in science (Campbell 1998, Clough 2003,
Nelson 1990). Quine also presupposes an individualist account of
inquiry, while most feminist empiricists advocate a socialized
epistemology, in which inquiry is treated as a social practice, and
the subjects of knowledge may even be communities. 



**The Paradoxes of Bias and Social Construction.** Two
apparent paradoxes encapsulate the central problematics of feminist
empiricism. First, much feminist science criticism consists in
exposing androcentric and sexist biases in scientific research. This
criticism seems to rest on the view that bias is epistemically bad.
Yet, advocates of feminist science argue that science would improve if
it allowed feminist values to inform scientific inquiry. This amounts
to a recommendation that science adopt certain biases. This is the
paradox of bias. Second, much feminist science criticism exposes the
influence of social and political factors on science. Scientists
advance androcentric and sexist theories because they are influenced
by sexist values in the wider society. This might suggest adopting an
individualist epistemology to eliminate these social biases. Yet most
feminists urge that scientific practices should be open to
*different* social influences. Call this the paradox of social
construction.



Feminist empiricists dissolve these paradoxes by rejecting their
underlying assumptions: that biases, political values, and social
factors influence inquiry only by *displacing* the influence of
evidence, logic, and other factors that lead to true or empirically
adequate theories. Not all bias is epistemically bad (Antony 1993).
There are three strategies for showing this: pragmatic, procedural,
and moral realist. The pragmatic strategy stresses the uses to which
knowledge will be put. Responsible inquiry respects a division of
labor between the functions of evidence and social
values--evidence helping inquirers track truths, social values
helping inquirers construct representations from those truths that
serve the practical aims of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). This view may be
joined with a view of nature as complex. Different ways of classifying
phenomena will reveal different patterns useful to different practical
interests (Longino 2001). The procedural strategy argues that
epistemically bad biases can be kept in check through an appropriate
social organization of inquiry. A social organization that holds
people with different biases accountable to one another will be able
to weed out bad biases, even if no individual is free of bias (Longino
1990). This view may be joined with the idea that the subject of
knowledge (Nelson 1993), epistemic rationality (Solomon 2001) or
objectivity (Longino 1990, 2001) is the epistemic community. The moral
realist strategy argues that moral, social and political value
judgments have truth-values, and that feminist values are true.
Inquiry informed by feminist values therefore does not displace
attention to the evidence, because the evidence vindicates these
values (Campbell 1998).



Feminist empiricists appeal to the pragmatist tradition to undermine
the sharp dichotomy between fact and value (Antony 1993, Nelson 1993).
They argue that the underdetermination of theory by evidence leads to
a view of facts and values as mutually constituting. Whether any
particular feminist, or sexist, theory is true will depend on
empirical investigation informed by epistemic norms--norms which
may be reformed in light of the merits of the theories they generate.
This is the project of naturalized epistemology, whereby the
vindication of norms of inquiry is sought within empirical
investigation.



**Criticisms of Feminist Empiricism.** Feminist
empiricists are criticized for naively holding that science will
correct the errors and biases in its theories about women and other
subordinated groups by itself, without the aid of feminist values or
insights (Harding 1986, 1991). These criticisms apply to what Harding
called "spontaneous feminist empiricism"--the view
that elimination of sexist bias, without further modification of
scientific methods as traditionally understood, is sufficient for
feminist critique. However, the naturalized epistemology of most
feminist empiricists views knowers as socially situated, empirical
evidence as theory-laden and critically revisable in light of
theoretical and normative reflection, and objective knowledge of human
phenomena as requiring inclusion of feminist inquirers as equals in
the social project of inquiry (Longino 1993a, 1993b). Hundleby (1997),
a standpoint theorist, criticizes feminist empiricism for overlooking
the role of feminist political *activity,*especially the
development of oppositional consciousness, as a superior source of
hypotheses and evidence for challenging sexist and androcentric
theories.


## 5. Interactions of Feminist Standpoint Theory, Postmodernism, and Empiricism



Harding's (1986) tripartite classification of feminist
epistemologies cast them as three contrasting frameworks. In the last
thirty years, feminist epistemologists have blurred the distinctions
among these views, as Harding both predicted and promoted (1990, 1991,
1998). Early theorizing in feminist epistemology tended to explore
global questions about gender and knowledge: are dominant conceptions
or practices of science, objectivity, and knowledge masculine or
androcentric? The field has evolved toward local investigations of the
ways gender affects inquiry in specific investigations by particular
communities using distinct methods. This turn to the local has
facilitated the convergence of the three types of feminist
epistemology.



*Feminist standpoint theory*.
 The postmodernist critique of standpoint theory, in conjunction with
the proliferation of subaltern women's standpoints (black,
Latina, lesbian, postcolonial, etc.) has led most standpoint theorists
to abandon the search for a single feminist standpoint. They
acknowledge plural standpoints of intersecting marginalized groups
(Harding 1991, 1998; Collins 1990). Inquiry that draws on their
insights and starts from their predicaments is more fruitful than
inquiry that draws only on the insights and starts from the
predicaments of relatively privileged groups (Harding 1993, 1998). It
also offers pragmatic advantages in enabling us to envision and
realize more just social relations (Hartsock 1996). Standpoint
theorists (Collins 1996; Harding 1996; Hartsock 1996) have shifted
from claims of general epistemic privilege to claims of practical
advantage in response to postmodernist critics such as Hekman (1996).
Wylie (2003) argues that consensus has emerged among feminist
epistemologists on two points: (1) rejection of essentialism (the idea
that the social groups defining any standpoint have a necessary and
fixed nature, or that their members do or ought to think alike) and
(2) rejection of attempts to grant automatic epistemic privilege to
any particular standpoint. Instead, the social situation of
"insider-outsiders" (members of subordinated groups who
need accurate knowledge of the worlds of the privileged to navigate
them) sometimes affords a *contingent* epistemic advantage in
solving particular problems. Standpoint theorists' pluralism
reflects a productive interaction with feminist postmodernism; their
shift toward pragmatism and contingent epistemic advantages of the
oppressed reflects convergence with feminist empiricism.



Theorists have devoted effort to specifying the contingent cognitive
advantages claimed by a feminist standpoint with sufficient precision
that these claims are empirically testable. Solomon (2009) suggests
that the achievement of a feminist standpoint involves characteristics
empirically associated with creative thinking. Ruetsche (2004)
suggests that it could involve Aristotelian second-nature capacities
to recognize certain kinds of evidence--for example, social
interactions among primates--relevant for understanding primate
social organization. Other standpoint theorists stress the cognitive
advantages of a feminist standpoint for revealing and uncovering
phenomena in domains of interest to feminists. Rolin (2009) points to
the superior capacity of a feminist standpoint to reveal how power
relations obscure their operations and effects, and enable inquirers
to overcome these obstacles to understanding by empowering those
subordinated by power relations. Scientists who have investigated the
causes of women's underrepresentation in the sciences from a
feminist standpoint have produced more empirically adequate theories,
using more normatively adequate conceptions of bias and
discrimination, than nonfeminist researchers (Rolin 2006, Wylie
2009).



*Feminist postmodernism*. Haraway (1989) stands out among
feminist postmodernists for the tributes she pays to the achievements
of feminist scientists working within empiricist standards of
evaluation. Fraser and Nicholson (1990) urge a reformulation of the
lessons of postmodernism toward pragmatism, fallibilism, and
contextualization of knowledge claims--all features compatible
with naturalized feminist empiricism.



*Feminist empiricism*. While early feminist science criticism
by working scientists may have presupposed a naive version of
empiricism, feminist empiricists today stress the pervasiveness of
situated knowledge, the interplay of facts and values, the absence of
transcendent standpoints, and the plurality of theories. These themes
converge with postmodernism. After thirty years of development, it is
also getting harder to identify points of disagreement between
feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. Intemann (2010,
2016) proposes *feminist standpoint empiricism* as a synthesis
of the two theories, arguing that feminist empiricists should accept
standpoint theory's claim that better (i.e., feminist) values
produce better theories. Feminist empiricists have already done so, as
long as these claims are kept contingent and local (Anderson 2004,
Wylie and Nelson 2007). Some feminist standpoint theorists, however,
also claim that exclusion of sexist standpoints, or bad values, can be
epistemically justified (Intemann 2010, Hicks 2011).


## 6. Feminist Science Criticism and Feminist Science



The history of feminist interventions into most disciplines follows a
common pattern. Feminist science critics begin by criticizing accepted
disciplinary methods, assumptions, and theories, exposing their
androcentric and sexist biases. As feminist inquiries mature, they
develop constructive projects, and deploy feminist perspectives as
epistemic resources. This history helps us see how feminist
epistemology negotiates the tension between the two poles in the
paradox of bias in feminist empiricism--viewing bias as error,
and as resource. 



**Feminist Science Criticism: Bias as Error.** Feminist
science criticism originated in the critiques that working biologists,
psychologists, and other scientists made of the androcentric and
sexist biases and practices in their own disciplines--especially
of theories about women and gender differences that legitimate sexist
practices. Exemplary works in this tradition include Bleier (1984),
Hrdy (1981), Leacock (1981), Sherif (1987), and Tavris (1992).
Feminist science criticism includes several types of research. (1)
Studies of how the marginalization of women scientists impairs
scientific progress (e.g., Keller 1983). (2) Studies of how
applications of science in technology disadvantage women and other
vulnerable groups and devalue their interests (e.g., Perez 2019). (3)
Studies of how science has ignored women and gender, and how tending
to these issues may require revisions of accepted theories (e.g.,
Hays-Gilpin and Whitley (1998). (4) Studies of how biases toward
working with "masculine" cognitive styles--for
example, toward centralized, hierarchical control models of causation
as opposed to "feminine" (contextual, interactive,
diffused) models--have impaired scientific understanding(e.g.,
Keller 1985b, Spanier 1995). (5) Studies of how research into sex
differences that reinforces sex stereotypes and sexist practices fails
to follow standards of good science (Fine 2010, Lloyd 2006, Tavris
1992). Theories may also manifest gender bias in their conceptual
framework--for example, in representing subjective gender
identification as a dichotomous variable, thereby eliminating other
modes of gender identity from consideration (Bem 1993). In these
cases, gender bias is represented as a cause of error. As philosophers
and historians of science joined feminist science criticism,
additional models of gender bias were developed (Bluhm 2013; Haraway
1989; Harding 1986, 1991, 1993, 1998; Lloyd 2006; Meynell 2012;
Schiebinger 1989; Wylie 1996). Some of this work argues that interests
in technological control that underlie modern science limit its scope
and what it takes to be significant knowledge (Lacey 1999, Merchant
1980, Tiles 1987). Feminist science criticism in the bias-as-error
tradition generates methodological principles for engaging in
nonsexist science (Eichler 1988).



Bias in a research program is shown to be *limiting* or
*partial*, but not erroneous, if it avoids clear error and has
some empirical successes, while rival theories in the same domain also
avoid clear error and have *different* empirical successes or
other epistemic virtues. Such biases are legitimate: it is rationally
acceptable to conduct scientific inquiry under their influence. When
biases are partial but not erroneous, they serve a generative
function, producing new concepts, methods, and hypotheses that open up
new aspects of the world for understanding. They are epistemic
*resources*. Feminist philosophers of science argue that we
have an epistemic interest in ensuring that certain limiting biases do
not dominate research to the exclusion of other generative biases that
yield rival theories possessing a different range of important
empirical successes. Exposing androcentric and sexist biases lying
behind certain theories makes salient the room for alternative
programs not based on such biases.



**Feminist Science: Bias as Resource**. Most advocates of
*feminist science* argue, in this vein, that scientific
inquiries informed by feminist values are based on legitimate,
generative limiting biases. This picture of science is pluralistic:
science is disunified because the world is rich with a multitude of
cross-cutting structures, which no single theoretical vocabulary
captures. Different communities have interests in different aspects of
reality, so leaving them free to follow their interests will reveal
different patterns and structures in the world (Harding 1998; Longino
2001).



Against this pluralistic view, some advocates of feminist science
define it in terms of adherence to specific ontologies and
methodologies expressing a "feminine" cognitive style
(Duran 1991, Keller 1983, 1985a). On this view, for example, feminist
science should have a relational rather than an atomistic ontology,
favor the concrete over the abstract, and encompass intuition,
emotional engagement, and other "feminine" cognitive
styles. For example, Stanley and Wise (1983) argue that only
qualitative methods that accept women's reports of their
experiences in their own terms, refusing to generalize, uphold
feminist values of respecting differences among women and avoiding the
replication of power differences between researchers and research
subjects.



Pluralist feminist scientists and philosophers of science contest
these attempts to define feminist science in terms of preferred
content and "feminine" method. Many questions of interest
to feminists are best answered with quantitative methods (Jayaratne
& Stewart, 1991). Feminists properly make use of diverse methods
(Harding 1987, Nielsen 1990, Reinharz 1992). Feminist science is not
defined by its content, but rather by pragmatic interests in
uncovering the causes of women's oppression, revealing dynamics
of gender in society, and producing knowledge that women can use to
overcome the disadvantages to which they are subject. Forms of
knowledge that simply valorize the "feminine" may not be
helpful to women who would be better off not having norms of
femininity imposed on them, and might not be better at generating
empirical success (Longino 1989).



On the pluralist view, feminist science amounts to "doing
science as a feminist"--using science to answer questions
generated by feminist interests--. There is no presumption that
certain methods, evidence, etc. are uniquely available to serve
feminist cognitive interests. Nevertheless, some common threads in
doing science as a feminist tend to contingently favor certain types
of representation (Longino 1994). Gender bias may reinforce sexism
through the perpetuation of categorical, dichotomous thinking which
represents masculinity and femininity as "opposites,"
femininity as inferiority, and gender nonconformity as deviant. This
gives feminists an interest in the value of "ontological
heterogeneity"--using categories that permit the
observation of within-group variation, and that resist the
representation of difference from the group mean as deviance. Gender
bias also reinforces sexism through single-factor causal models that
attribute intrinsic powers to men by neglecting their wider context.
The value of "complexity of relationship" favors the
development of causal models that facilitate the representation of
features of the social context that support male power. Other feminist
cognitive values involve the *accessibility* of knowledge, that
*diffuses power* in being usable to people in subordinate
positions. Such feminist cognitive values do not displace or compete
with tending to evidence, because doing science as a feminist, like
doing science with any other interest in mind (for example, medical or
military interests) involves commitment to the cognitive value of
producing empirically adequate theories.


## 7. Feminist Defenses of Value-Laden Inquiry



**The Challenge of Value-Neutrality.** Against the
project of feminist science, many philosophers hold that good science
is neutral among social, moral, and political values. Lacey (1999)
distinguishes the following claims of value-neutrality: (1)
*Autonomy*: science progresses best when uninfluenced by
social/political movements and values. (2) *Neutrality*:
scientific theories do not imply or presuppose judgments about
noncognitive values, nor do scientific theories serve any particular
noncognitive values more fully than others. (3) *Impartiality*:
The only grounds for accepting a theory are its relations to the
evidence. These grounds are impartial among rival noncognitive values.




Of these claims, neutrality is the most dubious, because it depicts
the grounds for accepting social, political and moral values as
detached from evidence about human potentialities and about what
happens when people try to realize these values in practice. If this
were true, then the defenders of keeping mathematics a male preserve
would not have bothered arguing that women were not intellectually
capable of doing mathematics--and feminists would not have
bothered disputing this claim. Neutrality is less a claim about the
character of science than about the purportedly
"fact-free" justification of social and political values.
As a claim about the latter, it is false (Anderson 2004, Taylor 1985,
Tiles & Oberdiek 1995).



The core claim of value-neutrality is impartiality. Only facts can
supply the warrant for other facts. Autonomy, in turn, is defended as
a means to ensure impartiality. Social movements are thought to
threaten impartiality because their influence on science is thought to
consist in pressuring scientists to ignore the facts and validate
their worldviews. Defenders of value-neutral science object to the
idea of feminist science because they view it as threatening autonomy,
and thereby impartiality.



**The Basic Underdetermination Argument.** Feminist
empiricists reply to this challenge by extending Quine's
argument that theory is underdetermined by evidence (Longino 1990,
Nelson 1993). Any body of observations counts as evidence for
particular hypotheses only in conjunction with certain background
assumptions. Vary the background assumptions, and the same
observations will support different hypotheses. For example, the
failure to observe stellar parallax in the 16th century was taken as
evidence that the Earth stands still by geocentrists, and as evidence
that the stars are very far away by heliocentrists. No logical
principle stops scientists from choosing different background
assumptions. In practice, scientists face constraints in selecting
background assumptions, based on cognitive values such as simplicity
and conservatism (resistance to revising assumptions on which many
other beliefs depend). But with respect to open questions, such
cognitive values rarely limit the scope for choice down to one option,
and their interpretation and weights are contestable in any event
(geocentrism was overturned by overriding conservatism). Feminist
empiricists conclude that, given the scope for choice in background
assumptions, no methodological principle forbids scientists from
selecting their background assumptions on account of their fit with
social and political values. Hence, feminist scientists may select
their background assumptions on account of their fit with feminist
values.



Standing alone, the underdetermination argument does not help us
discriminate error-generating biases from biases that serve as
cognitive resources. Additional criteria are needed. Anderson (2004)
argues that the chief danger of value-laden inquiry is wishful
thinking or dogmatism (Anderson 2004). To avoid this danger, the
value-laden character of the background assumptions linking evidence
to theories should not foreclose the possibility of discovering that
one's values are mistaken, because (for example) they are based
on false beliefs about human potentialities or the consequences of
putting certain values into practice. If women really can't do
math, the values incorporated into feminist science should not close
off this possibility in advance. Although, in setting out to test this
sexist hypotheses, women scientists presuppose their own mathematical
competence, this does not preclude their discovering otherwise. To
avoid dogmatism and wishful thinking, they need only make their
calculations accountable to public criticism.



**The Basic Pragmatic Strategy**. The above reflections
provide a standard for determining when socially value-laden inquiry
has gone wrong. But how can social values function as an epistemic
*resource?* Some feminist epistemologists stress the pragmatic
functions of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). All inquiry begins with a
question. Questions may be motivated by practical interests in
understanding the nature and causes of situations judged to be
problematic, and in finding out how to improve those situations. Defenders of the value-neutrality of science acknowledge that pragmatic factors legitimately influence the *choice* of objects of study. Feminist epistemologists argue that practical interests properly shape the *product* of inquiry by introducing new dimensions
of evaluation to theories. We can ask not only whether theories are
backed by evidence, but whether they are cast in forms that are
cognitively accessible to the situated knowers who want to use these
theories, whether they help these knowers solve their problems, and
whether they answer the questions they were designed to answer. A set
of statements can be true, yet fail these pragmatic tests. The basic
pragmatic strategy for defending feminist science, and any inquiry
shaped by social and political values, is to show how the pragmatic
interests of that inquiry license or require a particular mode of
influence of values on the process, product, and uptake of the product
of inquiry, while leaving appropriate room for evidence to play its
role in testing hypotheses. Values do not compete with evidence in
determining conclusions, but play different, cooperative roles in
properly conducted inquiry (Anderson 1995b, 2004).



**Types of Legitimate Influence of Social Values in
Science.** Feminist philosophers of science stress the variety
of roles for social and political values in science, and the
contingency of their effects (Wylie and Nelson 2007). We must examine
how particular values operate in particular scientific investigations
and judge whether they are closing off the possibility of discovering
unwelcome facts, leading scientists to reason dogmatically, or
insulating their findings from critical scrutiny--or rather
whether the values are enabling new discoveries. Feminist
epistemologists and philosophers of science have defended the
following types of influence of social values on theory choice.



*Selection and weighting of cognitive values*. Kuhn (1977)
argued that scientists need to appeal to cognitive values to take up
the slack between theory and evidence. His list of cognitive values
includes accuracy, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness, internal
consistency, and consistency with other beliefs (conservatism).
Longino (1994) argues that feminists have reason to prefer theories
that manifest other cognitive values, such as diffusion of power.
Diffusion of power, like simplicity, is not a truth-oriented cognitive
value. Both count as cognitive values because they make theories
cognitively accessible. Diffusion of power recognizes that cognitive
accessibility is relative to the situation of the knower. Both
simplification and diffusion of power stand in tension with truth, in
that theories that embody them not only ignore many complex truths,
but may even make false claims. Whether this is bad depends on whether
the truths ignored or the inaccuracies allowed are *important*.
This can be judged only relative to the interests that the
investigation ought to serve. All legitimate research programs must
seek empirical adequacy, which requires that theories account for
observations. How much accuracy this requires depends on how much the
expected usefulness of the knowledge will be compromised by larger
risks or margins of error. The situation and pragmatic interests of
the inquirer or of the users of a theory may therefore legitimately
affect the selection and weighting of cognitive values in theory
choice.



*Standards of Proof*. The argument from inductive risk holds
that theories should be accepted or rejected depending on the relative
costs of type I error (believing something false) and type II error
(failing to believe something true). In medicine, clinical trials are
routinely stopped and results accepted as genuine notwithstanding
higher P-values than the conventional <5%, if the results are
dramatic enough and the costs to patients of not acting on them are
high enough. Hare-Mustin and Maracek (1994) argue, by parallel
reasoning, that whether studies that find gender differences, or that
fail to find them, should be accepted depends on the relative costs of
Alpha Bias (exaggerating differences) and Beta Bias (neglecting
differences) in the context at hand.



*Classification*. The ways phenomena are classified may
legitimately depend on social values. In medicine, the distinction
between health and disease reflects both causal judgments and ethical
judgments about human welfare and appropriate ways of dealing with
problems. A condition judged bad for human beings is not classified as
a disease unless medical intervention is considered an appropriate and potentially
effective way to deal with it. Feminist inquiries, too, raise
questions about the causes of women's oppression that require
classifying phenomena as instances of rape, sexual objectification,
sex discrimination, and so forth--classifications tied to their
meeting both empirical and evaluative criteria (Anderson 1995a,
1995b). In general, when inquiry seeks to answer a question about
value-laden phenomena, such as the impact of certain practices on
human welfare, or whether certain institutions are fair or
discriminatory, the contours of the empirical phenomena to be studied
will be defined by evaluative judgments (Intemann 2001, 2005).



*Methods*. The methods selected for investigating phenomena
depend on the questions one asks and the kinds of knowledge one seeks,
both of which may reflect social interests. Experimental methods in
social science may be good for discovering factors that can be used to
control people's behavior in similar settings. But to grasp
their behavior as *action*--that is, as attempts by agents
to govern their behavior through their understandings of what they are
doing--requires different empirical methods, including
participant observation and qualitative interviews (which allow
subjects to delineate their own systems of meaning). Standpoint
theories, as critical theories, seek to empower the subjects of study
by helping them forge liberatory self-understandings. These may
require different methods of inquiry--for example,
consciousness-raising (MacKinnon 1989).



*Causal Explanations; Models; Explanations of Meaning;
Narratives*. The number of factors that affect the occurrence of
most human phenomena is too large to comprehend or test in a single
model. Investigators must therefore select a subset of causal factors
to include in their models. This selection may be based on fit with
the values and interests of the investigator (Longino 1990, 2001).
These interests often reflect background social and moral judgments of
blame, responsibility, and acceptability of change. Conservatives are
more likely to study divorce and out-of-wedlock birth as causes of
women's poverty, whereas feminists are more likely to focus on
other causes--for example, the exclusion of women from
better-paid jobs, failures of state support for dependent-care work
within the family, the weak bargaining power of women in marriage, and
norms of masculinity that lead fathers to avoid significant
participation in child-rearing. These causal explanations are not
incompatible. Normative interests may also determine whether one
models only main effects or also interaction effects on outcomes
relevant to human welfare. A variable--say, a certain lifestyle--that
has a positive main effect on a population may have a negative effect
on some subpopulations. Whether one models and tests for such effects
may depend on whether one believes that one lifestyle does or should
fit all, or whether one values pluralism and ontological heterogeneity
(Anderson 2004).



Often inquirers seek not merely a set of facts, but what the facts
mean. The meaning or significance of facts depends on their relations
to other facts. Even if two inquirers agree on the causal facts, they
may still disagree about their meaning because they relate the facts
in different ways, reflecting their background values. Feminists may
agree with conservatives that divorce is a cause of the feminization
of poverty, but deny that this means that women are better off
married. They argue that marriage itself, with its gendered division
of domestic and market labor, constitutes one of the major structural
disadvantages women face, setting them up for worse outcomes in the
event of divorce. Conservatives, viewing marriage as an indispensable
condition of the good life, are no more willing to view marriage in
this light than most people would be willing to blame oxygen for the
occurrence of house fires. It might be thought that scientists should
stick to the facts and avoid judgments of meaning. But most of the
questions we ask demand answers that fit facts into larger, meaningful
patterns. Scientists therefore cannot help but tell stories, which
require the selection of narrative frameworks that go beyond the facts
(Haraway 1989). This selection may depend both on their fit with the
facts and on their fit with the background values of the
storyteller.



*Framework Assumptions*. As we ascend to higher levels of
abstraction, general framework assumptions constitute the object of
study. Some of these are disciplinary. Economics studies humans as
self-interested, instrumentally rational choosers. Social psychology
studies humans as responding to socially meaningful situations.
Behavioral genetics studies human conduct as influenced by their
genes. The selection of framework assumptions may depend on their fit
with the interests of the inquirer (Longino 1990, Tiles 1987).
Feminists, being interested in promoting women's agency, tend to
prefer frameworks that permit the representation of women as agents.
This does not guarantee that empirical findings will confirm the
background assumption that women's agency is critical to the
phenomena under investigation. The value-laden selection of framework
assumptions thus need not lead to a vicious circle of reasoning,
because it is still left up to the evidence to determine how
successful the assumptions are in explaining the phenomena of
interest.



**Pluralism and naturalized moral epistemology as upshots of
value-laden inquiry.** Because inquirers select background
assumptions in part for their fit with their varied interests and
values, their background assumptions will also vary. Feminist
epistemologists urge us to embrace this fact (Haraway 1991, Harding
1998, Longino 2001). Pluralism of theories and research programs
should be accepted as a normal feature of science. As long as the
different research programs are producing empirical successes not
produced by the others, and avoiding clear error and viciously
circular or dogmatic reasoning, we should treat the value-biases
animating them as epistemic resources, helping us discover and
understand new aspects of the world and see them in new perspectives.
Feminist science takes its place as one set of legitimate research
programs among others. This does not imply relativism. Value-laden
research programs are still open to internal and external critique. A
naturalized epistemology that rejects neutrality allows that
observations may undermine any background assumptions, including value
judgments (Anderson 2004).



One way to support this last claim is to advance Quinean holism, and
insist that any evidence may bear on any belief or value (Nelson
1990). While accepting the bi-directional influence of facts and
values, Anderson (2004) rejects holism, arguing that some observations
bear closer relevance relations than others to specific values.
Further progress in understanding legitimate and fruitful interactions
of facts and values in scientific inquiry will likely involve
naturalizing moral epistemology, to get a clearer view of the bearing
of observations on values. Tobin and Jaggar (2013) offer one way to
naturalize feminist moral epistemology.


## 8. Feminist Critiques and Conceptions of Objectivity



**Feminist Critiques of Objectivity.** Feminists regard
the following conceptions of objectivity as problematic: (a)
Subject/object dichotomy: what is really ("objectively")
real exists independently of knowers. (b) Aperspectivity:
"objective" knowledge is ascertained through "the
view from nowhere," a view that transcends or abstracts from our
particular locations. (c) Detachment: knowers have an
"objective" stance toward what is known when they are
emotionally detached from it. (d) Value-neutrality: knowers have an
"objective" stance toward what is known when they adopt an
evaluatively neutral attitude toward it. (e) Control:
"objective" knowledge of an object (the way it
"really" is) is attained by controlling it, especially by
experimental manipulation, and observing the regularities it manifests
under control. (f) External guidance: "objective"
knowledge consists of representations whose content is dictated by the
way things really are, not by the knower. These ideas are often
combined into a package of claims about science: that its aim is to
know the way things are, independent of knowers, and that scientists
achieve this aim through detachment and control, which enable them to
achieve aperspectivity and external guidance. This package arose in
the 17th-18th centuries, as a philosophical account of why Newtonian
science was superior to its predecessor. According to this account,
the predecessor science, which represented objects as intrinsically
possessing secondary qualities and ends, confused the way things are
in themselves with the ways they are related to emotionally engaged
human knowers, who erroneously projected their own mental states and
value judgments onto things. Adoption of the objective methods listed
above enabled the successor scientists to avoid these errors and
achieve an "absolute" conception of the universe (Williams
1978). Feminists object to each element in this package as a normative
ideal and as a general description of how science works.



*Subject/object dichotomy*. If the object of science is to
grasp things as they are, independent of knowers, then one must
sharply distinguish the knower from the known. However, when the
objects of inquiry are knowers themselves, this dichotomy rules out
the possibility that knowers' self-understandings help
constitute the ways knowers are. It thus rules out the possibility
that some of our characteristics are socially constructed. This may
lead people to make the projective errors objectivity is supposed to
avoid: attributing to the natures of the objects of study what are
products of people's contingent beliefs and attitudes about
those objects (Haslanger 1995).



*Aperspectivity*. The ideal of aperspectivity supposes that if
one views things from no particular position, without any
presuppositions or biases, then the only thing that guides
belief-formation is the object itself (external guidance). Feminists
question the intelligibility of a "view from nowhere," and
a presuppositionless, bias-free science, for both postmodernist
(Haraway 1991) and pragmatist (Antony 1993) reasons. Knowers are
situated. The underdetermination of theories by evidence implies that
biases are needed to get theorizing off the ground. Rather than
undertake a futile attempt to inquire without biases, we should
empirically study which biases are fruitful and which mislead, and
reform scientific practice accordingly (Antony 1993). Some feminist
critics also argue that the practice of objectivity--assuming
that observed regularities reflect the intrinsic natures of things,
and treating those things accordingly--when adopted by those in
power, produces the very regularities taken to vindicate that
assumption. When male observers use their power to make women behave
in accordance with their desires (for instance, to elicit female
submission to their aggressive sexual advances), but assume their own
aperspectivity, they misattribute the behavior to women's
intrinsic natures (feminine passivity) rather than to their own socially positioned power. This process constitutes the
"objectification" of women. It harms women by legitimating
the sexist practices that reinforce the projection. It misrepresents
observed regularities as necessary, rather than socially contingent,
as well as their cause (as generated by the intrinsic nature of the
things observed, rather than by the observer's own stance toward
what is observed.) (MacKinnon 1999, Haslanger 1993).



*Detachment*. The ideal of detachment, according to which
scientists should adopt an emotionally distanced, controlling stance
toward their objects of study, is defended as necessary to avoid
projective error. Keller suggests that it is responsible for the
symbolically "masculine" standing of science that
marginalizes women scientists, who are stereotyped as emotional. It
reflects an androcentric perspective, serving men's neurotic
anxieties about avoiding the "feminine" (Keller 1985a,
Bordo 1987). Emotional distance may also have epistemic defects. A
"feeling for the [individual] organism" may sensitize a
scientist to critical data (Keller 1983, Ruetsche 2004).



*Value-neutrality*. The ideal of objectivity as
value-neutrality is justified as a psychological stance needed to
guard against temptations toward wishful thinking and dogmatic,
politically motivated or ideological reasoning. Feminists argue that
this ideal is self-deceptive and unrealistic (Potter 1993; Longino
1990, 2001; Harding 1991, 1998; Wylie 1996). When scientists represent
themselves as neutral, this blocks their recognition of the ways their
values have shaped their inquiry, and thereby evades critical scrutiny
of these values. Value-neutrality ignores the many positive roles
value judgments play in guiding the process and products of inquiry
noted above. Other procedures are available to block wishful thinking
and political dogmatism on science, without requiring scientists to
bracket their value judgments (Anderson 1995, 2004, Longino 2001).



*Control*. Experimental contexts, in which scientists elicit
regularities in the behavior of the objects of study by manipulating
them under controlled conditions, are often taken to generate
epistemically privileged evidence about the objects of study. Such
evidence is thought to ground knowledge of how the objects
"really are," in contrast with evidence about the objects
of study generated through "subjective" methods, such as
participant observation, dialogue, political engagement, and caring
for their needs. Feminists argue that control is a stance of social,
often male, power. The epistemic privilege it enjoys reflects both
androcentrism and the prestige attached to the "masculine"
(Merchant 1980). The control ideal underrates the epistemic value of
experiences gained from loving or cooperative engagement with the
objects of study. Theories produced by control generate only a partial
view of the potentialities of the objects of study, reflecting and
serving interests in control over the objects, but not interests in
engaging with the objects in other ways, or in enabling the objects of
study, if human, to govern themselves (Tiles 1987).



*External guidance*. External guidance assumes that to achieve
knowledge of the way things "objectively" are, one's
beliefs must be guided by the nature of the object, not by the biases
of the knower. Feminists argue that the underdetermination of theories
by evidence entails that theories cannot be purely externally guided.
Inquirers must make numerous choices concerning how to represent the
object of knowledge, how to interpret evidence, and how to represent
the conclusions drawn (Anderson 2004, Longino 1990, Nelson 1990). The
pretense that sound scientific theories are the products of purely
external guidance obscures the forces shaping these choices and
absolves scientists from responsibility for defending them. For
example, feminists have paid particular attention to the ways
metaphors and narrative genres constrain scientific explanations
(Haraway 1989, 1991, Martin 1996). The decision to narrate the
transition from ape to hominid as a heroic drama dictates a focus on
presumptively male activities, such as hunting, as the engine of
evolution, obscuring alternatives equally supported by the data, that
focus on presumptively female activity (balancing child care needs
with gathering) or on behaviors, such as language use, shared by both
males and females (Haraway 1989, Longino 1990).



These feminist criticisms of different conceptions of objectivity
share common themes. The problematic conceptions of objectivity
generate *partial* accounts of the world, which they
misrepresent as complete and universal. The forms of partiality they
underwrite are either androcentric, symbolized as
"masculine," or serve male or other dominant group
interests. They are justified by appealing to models of cognition that
represent error and bias in terms of qualities gender symbolized as
"feminine" and attributed to women. Such conceptions of
objectivity, in recommending avoidance of the "feminine,"
exclude women from participation in inquiry or deprive them of
epistemic authority. The problematic conceptions of objectivity ignore
the knowledge-enhancing, epistemically fruitful uses of purportedly
"feminine" approaches to theorizing. In attempting to
transcend their situatedness, inquirers following these ideals of
objectivity only mask it, commit the projective errors they seek to
avoid, and resist correction.



**Feminist Conceptions of Objectivity.** Feminist
conceptions of objectivity tend to be procedural. Products of inquiry
are more objective, the better they are supported by objective
procedures. Some influential feminist conceptions of objectivity
include the following:



*Feminist/nonsexist research methods*. Some feminists have
offered methodological guidelines for avoiding the sexist and
androcentric errors and biases that feminists have identified in
mainstream science (Eichler 1988). More ambitiously, feminists have
sought research methods that embody feminist values (Nielsen 1990,
Reinharz 1992).



*Emotional engagement*. Some feminist theorists defend the
epistemic fruitfulness of emotional engagement with the object of
study. Emotions serve epistemic functions in normative inquiry,
attuning observers to evaluatively relevant features of the world
(Jaggar 1989, Little 1995, Anderson 2004). In social scientific
inquiry, emotional engagement with the subjects of study may be
necessary both to elicit and interpret behaviors of scientific
interest. Ethnographers may need to win the trust of their subjects to
get them to open up, and to achieve rapport with them to gain
understanding. Keller (1985a) promotes an ideal of "dynamic
objectivity," by which loving attention toward the object
enhances perception of it. However, Longino (1993b) questions whether
this ideal is generally epistemically superior to other modes of
engagement.



*Reflexivity*. Harding (1993) argues that the objectivity is
advanced by reflexivity, which demands that inquirers place themselves
on the same causal plane as the object of knowledge. They must make
explicit their situatedness and how that shaped their inquiry.
Reflexivity affirms the partiality of representations without denying
their claim to truth. Inclusion of marginalized groups into inquiry
improves reflexivity, because the marginalized are more likely to
notice and contest features of accepted representations that reflect
the perspectives of the dominant. Harding's ideal of
"strong objectivity" includes both reflexivity and
democratic inclusion as key features of more objective processes of
inquiry.



*Democratic discussion*. Longino (1990, 2001) advances a
conception of objectivity based on democratic discussion. Knowledge
production is a social enterprise, secured through the critical and
cooperative interactions of inquirers. The products of this social
enterprise are more objective, the more responsive they are to
criticism from all points of view. Feminists build on a tradition
including Mill, Popper, and Feyerabend (Lloyd 1997a) by offering (i) a
more articulate conception of "all points of view,"
stressing the influence of the social positions of inquirers on their
theorizing; and (ii) a greater stress on the importance of equality
among inquirers. In Longino's account, a community of inquirers
is objective if it: (1) offers public venues for the criticism of
knowledge claims; (2) responds to criticisms by changing its theories
according to (3) publicly recognized standards of evaluation; and (4)
follows a norm of equality of intellectual authority among its
members. The norm of equality has been refined to distinguish
legitimate differences of expertise from illegitimate exercises of
social power (Longino 2001).



**Pluralist Themes in Feminist Conceptions of
Objectivity.** Most feminist conceptions of objectivity
accommodate both methodological and theoretical pluralism. Different
communities of inquiry take an interest in different aspects of the
world, and develop partial theories to satisfy varied epistemic and
pragmatic values. Most feminists resist the thought that these varied
theories must eventually be unified into a single grand theory. As
long as different communities of inquiry are producing empirical
successes in accordance with publicly recognized standards, while
holding themselves accountable to criticism from all sides, their
products may each count as objective, however irreducibly plural the
content of their theories may be (Longino 2001, Harding 1991, 1998).
However, Intemann (2010) questions the value of unlimited pluralism.
If sexist and racist values have been found to be unjustified after
sustained inquiry, then scientific theories informed by these values
need not be taken seriously.


## 9. Epistemic Authority, Epistemic Injustice, Epistemologies of Ignorance, and Virtue Epistemology



Naturalized epistemology considers the effects of our pervasive
epistemic interdependence (Nelson 1990). Because inquiry is
collaborative and reliant on testimony, what we believe is influenced
by who we believe. Who we believe depends on attributions of epistemic
authority, which rely on views about people's expertise,
epistemic responsibility, and trustworthiness. Feminist
epistemologists explore how gender and other hierarchical social
relations influence attributions of epistemic authority, considering
their impact on (1) general models of knowledge; (2) the epistemic
standing of knowers; (3) whose claims various epistemic communities do
and ought to accept; and (4) how this affects the distribution of
knowledge and ignorance in society. Some of these effects amount to
*epistemic injustice* against members of subordinated groups.
Some feminist epistemologists have advanced conceptions of *virtue
epistemology* to remedy epistemic injustice and ignorance.



*Epistemic Authority and General Models of Knowledge*. Gendered
ideas about epistemic authority can distort our general models of
knowledge. Code (1991) argues that contemporary analytic
epistemology's core model of propositional knowledge implicitly
presupposes a male knower. The instances of knowledge analytic
epistemology takes to be paradigmatic when it analyzes the formula
"S knows that P" are propositions about readily observable
mind-independent objects. To take these as the paradigmatic instances
of knowledge invites a model of the knower as masculine, in adopting
the symbolically masculine objectivity package described above. This
implicitly denies epistemic authority to women. Code argues that
knowledge of other persons rather than of propositions should be taken
as a primary model of knowledge. Such second-person knowledge calls
the implicit masculinity of knowers into question, since getting to
know others typically requires intimacy, dialogue, empathy and other
characteristics gender symbolized as "feminine."



Recent epistemology's focus on the indispensability of testimony
to inquiry has led feminist epistemologists to take Code's ideas
in a different direction, by investigating the dependence of
propositional knowledge on knowledge of persons. For example,
anthropologists must cultivate personal relationships of trust with
native informants to gain access to the natives' situated
knowledge of their cultures. This requires reflection on the ways
differences in power, interest, and social situation between
anthropologists and their informants influence testimony its
interpretation. Feminist epistemologists question models of testimony
as transparent and unidirectional, highlighting testimony's
dialogic, strategic, and empathetic features, as well as the
importance and difficulty of cultivating epistemically fruitful
relations of mutual trust across differences in power (Bergin 2002;
Lugones 1987).



*Epistemic Injustice*. Other feminist epistemologists focus on
the impact of gender and other hierarchical relations on attributions
of epistemic authority. Dominant groups tend to accord epistemic
authority to themselves and withhold it from subordinates by
constructing stigmatizing stereotypes of subordinates as incompetent
or dishonest. They promote, as markers of epistemic authority,
characteristics stereotypically thought to be distinctively theirs
(Addelson 1983; Shapin 1994). They hoard opportunities for gaining
access to these markers--for instance, by denying subordinate
groups access to higher education. Such practices commit epistemic
injustice against members of subordinate groups, undermining their
ability to participate in collaborative inquiry. Fricker (2007) calls
this "testimonial injustice." In the core case of
testimonial injustice, people discount the credibility of what others
say on account of prejudice against their social group. Dotson (2011)
distinguishes two kinds of testimonial injustice, silencing and
smothering. Silencing follows Fricker's model, whereas
smothering is a kind of self-censorship to protect oneself or
one's group from prejudicial misunderstanding. For example,
women of color victimized by domestic violence might not to testify to
whites about this, to avoid reinforcing white prejudice against black
men. Hookway (2010) identifies epistemic injustice in practices that
exclude people from participating in inquiry in non-testimonial ways,
such as asking questions, suggesting hypotheses, raising objections,
and drawing analogies. When others fail to take such contributions
seriously out of prejudicial stereotyping of the contributor, this
injustice injures the speaker not as a knower but as an inquirer.



*Hermeneutical injustice* occurs when the interpretive
resources available to a community render a person's experiences
unintelligible or misunderstood, due to the epistemic marginalization
of that person or members of her social group from participation in
practices of meaning-making (Fricker 2007). An example of
hermeneutical injustice is the dismissal of women as humorless or
hypersensitive for getting upset at what was seen as mere cloddish
courtship or joking, before the concept of sexual harassment was
available to make sense of their experiences. This was an injustice
because the victims of harassment were prejudicially denied effective
access to the practices of meaning-making whereby they could have made
their experiences intelligible to others. Mason (2011) argues that
marginalized communities may have hermeneutical resources in which
their oppression is understood as such, but still suffer hermeneutical
injustice if the dominant community fails to take up these resources
by according epistemic authority to the marginalized. Pohlhaus (2011)
argues that such ignorance can be willful, leading to *contributory
injustice*, an intentional maintenance of inadequate hermeneutical
resources that harmfully obstructs the uptake of resources the
oppressed have developed to make sense of their experience (Dotson
2012). 



*Epistemologies of Ignorance.* Ignorance, like knowledge, has
systematic patterns and social-structural causes (Pohlhaus 2011,
Proctor & Schiebinger 2008, Sullivan & Tuana 2007, Tuana &
Sullivan 2006). Injustice in according people status as knowers and
inquirers generates systematic ignorance that damages the interests of
subordinated groups. Society could have access to, but forget or
suppress, knowledge useful to subordinated groups--for example, about
plants that are effective abortifactants (Schiebinger 2007). Since
accurate information on such matters is or was available, explanation
is needed for why it is forgotten. Ignorance is sometimes due to to
segregation of situated knowers, preventing knowledge or
understandings held by subordinate groups from disseminating (Margonis
2007). Members of subordinated groups may have strategic interests in
hiding knowledge about themselves from dominant groups (Bailey 2007).
Most importantly, dominant groups have interests in avoiding the truth
about their own injustices (Mills 2007).



*Virtue epistemology*. Some feminist epistemologists advance
ideals of epistemic virtue to address epistemic injustice. Fricker
(2007) argues that to correct for testimonial injustice, hearers need
to cultivate the virtue of epistemic justice--a disposition,
rooted in one's testimonial sensibility or second-nature
perception of others' credibility, to neutralize the effects of
prejudicial stereotypes on credibility judgments. Jones (2002)
proposes rules for checking such biases when confronted with
surprising testimony. These include undertaking independent
assessments of the credibility of the witness and the plausibility of
what they say; and letting the presumption against accepting
astonishing testimony be rebutted when one has good reason to distrust
one's distrust of the witness. Alcoff (2010) suggests that
correcting for testimonial injustice requires adopting standpoint
epistemology: one must not merely neutralize prejudice, but accord
epistemic privilege to the marginalized. Kwong (2015) stresses the
virtue of open-mindedness, and Daukas (2011) of trustworthiness, while
Sholock (2012) explores the importance of the dominant being disposed
to acknowledge their own ignorance of the situated knowledge of the
oppressed, so that they seek the latter's testimony, and extend
epistemic authority to them. A key theme of feminist virtue
epistemology is its aspiration to cultivate dispositions that enable
inquirers to produce knowledge that can overcome oppression (Daukas
2018).



Some theorists have questioned suggestions to remedy epistemic
injustice with individual virtues. We must share responsibility for
devising epistemic practices of resistance to epistemic injustice
(Medina 2013). A structural conception of remedies does not preclude
the use of virtue epistemology to address structural epistemic
injustice, as long as epistemic institutions and systems can be
bearers of epistemic virtue (Anderson 2012).


## 10. External Criticisms of Feminist Epistemology



Outside critics of feminist epistemology have argued that the entire
research program is fundamentally flawed. Leading critiques of
feminist epistemology include a collection of essays in the
*Monist*, 77(4) (1994), Gross and Levitt (1994), Haack (1993),
and Pinnick, Koertge and Almeder (2003). The most important criticism,
found in all these works, is that feminist epistemology corrupts the
search for truth by conflating facts with values and imposing
political constraints on the conclusions it will accept. Truths
inconvenient to a feminist perspective will be censored, and false
views promoted because they support the feminist cause. Critics also
accuse feminist epistemologists of a corrosive cynicism about science,
claiming that they reject it as a raw imposition of patriarchal and
imperialist power. Feminists are charged with holding that, since
everyone else is engaged in a cynical power-play, they may as well
join the battle and try to impose their beliefs on everyone else.



Defenders of feminist epistemology reply that these criticisms depend
on gross misreadings of the feminist research program. Feminists do
not reject objectivity and science, but rather seek to improve it by
correcting sexist and androcentric biases in scientific inquiry, and
by promoting criticism of research from all points of view (Lloyd
1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 1997b, Nelson 1990). Nor do they deny that
science discovers truths. The complaint is rather that, as dominantly
practiced, it offers a *partial* view of the world primarily
oriented to discovering those truths that serve particular human
interests in material control and maintaining current social
hierarchies (Harding 1986, 1998, 1993; Tiles 1987). Feminist
epistemologists observe that the democratic and egalitarian norms for
cognitive authority they accept, along with their requirement that the
scientific community be open and responsive to criticism from all
quarters, are incompatible with censorship, and with ignoring or
suppressing evidence that undermines any theory, including theories
inspired by feminist values (Longino 1990, 1993a, 2001; Anderson
2004--see Other Internet Resources). Although facts and values
are intertwined, attention to values does not displace or compete with
regard for the evidence (Anderson 1995b).



A second charge outside critics make against feminist epistemology is
that it accepts and uncritically valorizes traditional, empirically
unfounded stereotypes about women's thinking (as intuitive,
holistic, emotional, etc.) (Haack 1993). Valorization of
"feminine" ways of thinking may trap women in traditional
gender roles and help justify patriarchy (Nanda 2003). Promotion of
feminist epistemology may carve out a limited "separate
sphere" for female inquirers, but one that will turn into an
intellectual ghetto (Baber 1994).



Defenders of feminist epistemology reply that the critics are
attacking an obsolete version of feminist epistemology that was only
briefly--and even at the time, controversially--entertained
when the field was launched in the 1980s (Wylie 2003, Anderson
2004--see Other Internet Resources).



Further development of external critiques of feminist epistemology
awaits the critics' engagement with the feminist
epistemology's defenders and with current developments in the
field.