about gender and traditional epistemological concerns. Feminist
epistemology is a loosely organized approach to epistemology, rather
than a particular school or theory. Its diversity mirrors the
diversity of epistemology generally, as well as the diversity of
theoretical positions that constitute the fields of gender studies,
women's studies, and feminist theory. What is common to feminist
epistemologies is an emphasis on the epistemic salience of gender and
the use of gender as an analytic category in discussions, criticisms,
and reconstructions of epistemic practices, norms, and ideals. While
feminist epistemology is not easily and simply characterized, feminist
approaches to epistemology tend to share an emphasis on the ways in
which knowers are particular and concrete, rather than abstract and
universalizable. Feminist epistemologies take seriously the ways in
which knowers are enmeshed in social relations that are generally
hierarchical while also being historically and culturally specific. In
addition, feminist epistemologies assume that the ways in which
knowers are constituted as particular subjects are significant to
epistemological problems such as warrant, evidence, justification, and
theory-construction, as well as to our understanding of terms like
"objectivity," "rationality," and "knowledge."
1. Introduction
The themes which characterize feminist engagements with epistemology
are not necessarily unique to feminist epistemologies, since these
themes also crop up in science studies more generally, as well as in
social epistemology. Feminist epistemologies are distinctive, however,
in the use of gender as a category of epistemic analysis and
re-construction. Feminist approaches to epistemology generally have
their sources in one or more of the following traditions: feminist
science studies, naturalistic epistemologies, cultural studies of
science, Marxist feminism and related work in and about the social
sciences, object relations theory and developmental psychology,
epistemic virtue theory, postmodernism, hermeneutics, phenomenology,
and pragmatism. Many feminist epistemological projects incorporate
more than one of these traditions. For the sake of this entry,
however, particular theorists have been segregated into these fairly
arbitrary categories. The caveat here is that each particular theorist
might just as well have been included under a number of different
categories.
2. Critiques of Rationality and Dualisms
Work by Susan Bordo (1990) and Genevieve Lloyd (1984) analyzes the
ways in which metaphors of masculinity operate in constructions of
ideals of rationality and objectivity. Drawing on feminist discussions
of object relations theory (Bordo) and of the role of the symbolic
imaginary and metaphor in modern epistemological projects, both Lloyd
and Bordo argue that the operations of the symbolic imaginary are
implicated in the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity and in
the characterization of epistemic problems that follow from that
metaphysics. The result of the work done by these feminist historians
is that ideals of reason, objectivity, autonomy, and disinterestedness
operating in assumptions about inquiry, as well as the idea that the
"perennial" problems of epistemology are gender neutral are now
revealed to be connected to and constitutive of gender relations.
Bordo's and Lloyd's analyses provide resources for feminists working
in science studies, as well as those working in Anglo-American
analytic traditions. Much of the work in feminist epistemology is
influenced by these critiques, and the emphasis that Lloyd especially
places on the cognitive role of metaphor, is a starting point for much
feminist work on the role of "affective" and "literary" aspects of
cognition and philosophy more generally.
Susan Hekman's (1990) work argues that dualisms of nature/culture,
rational/irrational, subject/object, and masculine/feminine underwrite
modernist epistemological projects and that feminist epistemology
should aim to destabilize and deconstruct those dualisms. Hekman
argues that such destablization can only take place if feminists
refuse the dichotomous presuppositions of the modernist project,
including the dichotomy of masculine/feminine and its role in identity
ascriptions. The aim, then, of feminist epistemology is both the
eradication of epistemology as a going concern with issues of truth,
rationality, and knowledge and the undermining of gender categories.
Critics of feminist epistemology have charged that feminist critiques
of rationality amount to a valorization of irrationality, a charge
that misses the point of these critiques. If our ideals of rationality
are to be interrogated and reconstructed, then, presumably, our ideals
of irrationality will be so reconstructed as well, since the operative
premise of Bordo's, Lloyd's and Hekman's analyses are that the
dichotomy of rationality and irrationality help to constitute the
dualism of masculine/feminine and vice-versa. Thus, what critics take
to be a valorization of irrationality can only appear so if those
dichotomies remain in place.
3. Feminist Science Studies
Much of the initial work in feminist epistemology grew out of feminist
critiques of, and engagement with, science. This work generally
emphasizes the ways in which science has been marked by gender bias,
not only in the fact that women are seriously underrepresented in the
sciences, but also in the ways in which assumptions about gendered
behavior serve an evidential role in dominant and widely accepted
theories in such fields as anthropology, biology, and psychology
(Bleier, (1984), Haraway (1988, 1989), Keller (1983, 1984)).
Harding and Hintikka's (1983) collection represents early work
primarily in science studies and epistemology but also includes early
work that represents one of the primary and unique contributions of
feminist epistemology: the incorporation of moral and political theory
in discussions of epistemology and science.
The recognition that the process of scientific theory construction and
inquiry essentially involved appeals to extra-scientific values was
further developed by subsequent theorists augmenting the early
critiques of gender bias in science. Rather than claiming that values
and politics always compromised scientific inquiry, feminist theorists
such as Nelson (1990), Longino (1990) and Harding (1986, 1991, 1998)
argue that such values are always operating in evaluations of
evidence, justification, and theory-construction and that trying to
develop an epistemology for science that would make it less prone to
gender bias requires the recognition of the ways in which values enter
the process of scientific reasoning. Feminist theorists, thus, turned
their attention to developing epistemologies that would allow for
critical evaluation of the values that are shared, and, thus, often
invisible, to inquirers in the sciences. Nelson's work, drawing on
Quine, develops a holistic approach to questions about evidence and
justification, emphasizing the ways in which knowledge is held by
communities, rather than by individual knowers who are abstractable
members of such communities. Helen Longino argues for the value of
pluralism in the construction of scientific models as a way of making
the values and assumptions of scientific communities accessible for
critical evaluation. Harding uses Marxist analysis to develop a
feminist version of standpoint theory.
What these approaches to feminist science studies emphasize is that
good science is not value-free science, since values are ineradicable
from the process of scientific inquiry and theory-construction.
Instead, they argue that good science is science that can critically
evaluate the values and assumptions that operate epistemically in
scientific theory construction and in the ways in which scientific
problems are formulated. Good science is a science that can develop
mechanisms for critically evaluating, not only the results of inquiry,
but also the ways in which those results depend upon a raft of
value-laden and theory-laden assumptions and facts.
Part of the problem with these approaches (with the exception of
standpoint epistemologies, which are discussed in more detail below),
however, is that they have few theoretical resources for dealing with
questions about how such diversity can be brought into scientific
theorizing, and how one could, in principle, exclude groups with
commitments or values that are, on the face of it, anti-scientific
(e.g. magic) or unpalatable in other ways (e.g. Nazi science). If the
value of pluralism is that it would allow for the critical reflection
necessary for ensuring that the values and commitments that enter
scientific inquiry are visible, then on what grounds could one
exclude, for example, creationism? Feminist epistemology that draws on
work in science studies has revealed the ways in which it is
individuals in communities who know and how such communities operate
with a variety of value commitments that make knowledge possible.
However, the issue about methodological pluralism remains a difficult
one.
a. Feminist Naturalized Epistemologies
Feminist naturalized epistemologies have developed as a way of taking
account of the fact that knowers are located in "epistemic spaces" and
the ways in which knowledge is more properly understood on a community
rather than an individual model. Naturalism is defined here as an
approach to epistemology that focuses on causal accounts of knowledge,
and in the case of feminist naturalism, these causal accounts also
include social, political, and historical factors. Primarily, feminist
naturalism seeks to emphasize the ways in which cultural and
historical factors can enable, rather than distort, knowledge.
Feminist naturalism is itself a rather loosely organized category,
with some approaches privileging scientific naturalism and others
placing science within the broader scope of human epistemic endeavors.
Feminist naturalist approaches by Lynn Hankinson Nelson (1990) and
Louise Antony (Antony and Witt 1993) try to develop Quinean naturalism
in ways that are consistent with feminist insights about the epistemic
relevance of gender and social relations; other feminist
epistemologists, such as Elizabeth Potter (1995, 2001), draw on
sociological and historical work (in Potter's case, specifically work
on Robert Boyle) to develop naturalistic accounts of theory
construction and choice. Work by Alison Wylie (1999) develops feminist
naturalistic analyses of the scientific practices of archaeology. The
work of Lorraine Code (1987, 1991, 1995, 1996) can also be
characterized as a form of feminist naturalized epistemology; this
work is discussed in greater detail in the section on Epistemic Virtue
Theories below. Nancy Tuana (2003) has developed Charles Mills's
concept of "epistemologies of ignorance" by looking at the ways in
which ignorance, rather than knowledge, is constructed by studies of
sexuality and public school sex education programs.
Feminist naturalized approaches, like non-feminist naturalized
approaches, often come to grief over the status of normativity in the
construction of theory, since, traditionally, the naturalistic impulse
is to provide a descriptive account of knowledge. However, without an
appeal to the ways in which sexism, racism, or homophobia might deform
knowledge practices, feminist epistemology would appear to have few
resources for arguing that present cultural and historical conditions
should be changed, since there is no way to show that these are
inherently unreliable or objectionable. Feminist naturalized
epistemologies differ in how seriously they take this problem. Some
theorists take the challenge presented by this problem very seriously,
while others argue that it is only a problem if we assume a strong
descriptive/prescriptive or fact/value distinction. Those who take the
issue seriously generally offer solutions that either emphasize the
value of pluralism in epistemic pursuits or argue that the distinction
between the normative and the descriptive is less clear cut than
naturalism's opponents think, thus allowing the feminist naturalist
the normative resources that allow for internal critique. Furthermore,
feminist naturalists often point out that scientific theories that
have been motivated by feminist insights have often turned out to be
more empirically reliable than those which claim to be normatively
neutral.
b. Cultural Studies of Science
Cultural studies of science begin with the assumption that science is
a practice and that practices include both normative and descriptive
components that cannot be easily separated from each other. Feminist
cultural studies of science emphasize the importance of
non-relativistic epistemological commitments and the importance of
using revised versions of normative concepts such as "objectivity" and
"evidence." However, they recognize that, insofar as science is a
practice, these concepts and their normative import are worked out in
practical interactions with the material world, a position that
requires that these concepts be revised in ways that are not committed
to representational theories of mind and truth. Karen Barad (1999)
uses an analysis of the practice of using the scanning tunneling
microscope to emphasize the ways in which the boundaries between
subject and object are relatively permeable and to show the ways in
which observation itself is a form of practice. Her "agential realism"
seeks to bridge the gap between descriptive epistemologies and
normative epistemologies on the one hand, and between naïve realism
and social constructivist approaches to scientific objects on the
other.
Donna Haraway's (1988) work on situated knowledges emphasizes the ways
in which science is a rule-governed form of "story-telling" that aims
at getting at the truth, but the idea of truth she uses here is not
that of reality an sich but a reality that is produced by human
material practices. Thus, she argues "facts" are in fact "artifacts"
of scientific inquiry. This does not make them false, but it does
render them bound up with processes of human production and human
needs. Nonetheless, they maintain an ontological independence to a
certain extent; this is the central insight of the analogy to other
kinds of artifacts.
c. Standpoint Theory
Feminist standpoint epistemology initially developed in the social
sciences, primarily in work by Nancy Hartsock (1998) in political
science and by Dorothy Smith in sociology. As a methodology for the
social sciences, it emphasizes the ways in which socially and
politically marginalized groups are in a position of epistemic
privilege vis-à-vis social structures. Drawing on Hegel and Marx,
feminist standpoint theorists in the social sciences argue that those
on the "outside" of dominant social and political groups must learn
not only how to get along in their own world, but also how to get
along in the dominant society. Thus, they have an "outsider" status
with respect to dominant groups that allows them to see things about
social structures and how they function that members of the dominant
group cannot see.
In philosophy, this theoretical position was developed most thoroughly
by Sandra Harding (1986, 1991, 1998). Harding argues that "starting
thought out" from the lives of the marginalized will lead to the
development of new sets of research questions and priorities, since
the marginalized enjoy a certain epistemic privilege that allows them
to see problems differently, or to see problems where members of a
dominant group do not. However, Harding emphasizes that one need not
be a member of a marginalized group in order to be capable of starting
one's thought from that standpoint. She argues that Hegel was not a
slave and Marx was not a member of the proletariat, yet they both were
able to identify with the standpoint of the slave and with that of the
proletariat. Thereby, they were able to start their thought out from
lives very different from their own.
The concept of the "standpoint" of the marginalized is both what sets
standpoint epistemology apart from a general pluralism as well as the
concept that has provided the most challenges to feminist standpoint
theorists. One does not occupy the "feminist standpoint," for
instance, simply in virtue of being a woman; the feminist standpoint
is an achievement rather than something one is born with. One comes to
occupy the feminist standpoint by engaging in critical thought about
one's experience and its relationship to larger social and political
structures. By the same token, one need not be a woman in order to
occupy the feminist standpoint, since, like Hegel and Marx, one can
come to identify with that standpoint. However, the claim that social
marginalization confers epistemic privilege seems to depend on a
concept of identity that needs to be grounded in the experience of
social marginalization, and this has led to charges that standpoint
epistemology cannot avoid assuming a great deal of commonality in the
experiences of marginalized groups. This has also led to charges that
standpoint epistemology must appeal to an "essential" women's
experience or to an "essential" marginalized experience. Such an
appeal, implying that there are necessary and sufficient conditions
for such experiences, is considered illegitimate by many feminist and
postmodernist theorists because they take it to imply that there is
something about experience that is "natural" or "given" and that it
can serve a foundational role in identity construction. These
theorists are suspicious of the claim that there are some experiences
that all and only women have that can serve as a basis for
identification with that group, arguing that the category of "woman"
is either too fractured or too regulative to do the work that feminist
standpoint theorists and identity theorists need it to do.
4. Developmental Psychology, Object Relations Theory and the Question
of 'Women's Ways of Knowing'
Similar charges of "essentialism" have been leveled at feminist
epistemologies that draw on developmental psychology and object
relations theory to develop epistemic norms. This strand has been more
influential in developing feminist moral epistemologies, but it has
had some influence on epistemologies developed in tandem with the
science studies strain in feminist epistemology as well. Carol
Gilligan's (1982) groundbreaking work in developmental moral
psychology in In a Different Voice gave rise to a variety of feminist
moral epistemologies that emphasized relatedness and affect to
counterbalance the traditional emphasis on moral reasoning as a
process of deductive reasoning that takes the reasoner from a moral
principle to a particular moral judgment. In a Different Voice raises
the issue of whether and how reasoning is tied to the practices of
child-rearing, through which children develop gender affiliations and
come to live out gendered ideals. Gilligan argues that the moral
reasoning processes that take into account relationships in
determining the right moral action in a given situation, processes
which child development theorists characterized as "immature" or less
developed than reasoning processes that operated deductively, are
simply complementary and not necessarily inferior. Gilligan's
criticism of Kohlberg's work, however, ties these reasoning styles to
sex: Kohlberg's studies of moral development and moral reasoning uses
boys almost exclusively. The responses that girls give, which often
invoke the importance of maintaining relationships when posed with a
moral conflict and which emphasize negotiations, are characterized by
Kohlberg and his research team as developmentally prior to the
deductive reasoning that characterizes the boys' responses. Gilligan
conjectures that girls have more permeable boundaries of the self and
are often more concerned with relationship maintenance as a result of
their upbringing and that this might account for the different
"reasoning styles" that seem to attend gender differences.
Support for this conjecture may be found in object-relations theory.
Object relations theory emphasizes the fact that the cognitive
distinctions that underlie physical object theory, the process of
learning to distinguish between self and other, and the processes of
learning language and moral norms all evolve contemporaneously and are
tied to each other in a variety of ways such that they re-enforce each
other. Coming to learn about objects is connected to coming to learn
about what makes one a self and not a thing, and is, thus, connected
to theories of mind and intentionality; coming to learn about the
persistence of physical objects in time and space depends on
developing a sense of an "I" which persists and remains unchanged,
even as perceptions change. Feminists emphasize the fact that while
all the aforementioned cognitive developments are taking place, the
development and re-enforcement of gender ideals and norms is also
taking place, overlapping and helping to constitute the cognitive
distinctions. Thus, cognitive ideals and virtues come to be saturated
with, and partly constitutive of, gender norms and moral norms.
Developmental psychology and object-relations theory, however, are
seen by some feminist epistemologists as troublesome, insofar as they
assume certain kinds of commonalities in child-rearing that transcend
class and race differences. In addition, the claim that women reason
differently than men, no matter what the source of that difference, is
thought to be both wrong and politically retrograde. However, the
virtue of these approaches is that they allow feminist epistemologists
to claim that the gender of the reasoner is epistemically significant,
which in turn can support the claim that the fact that women are
absent from particular studies. Alternatively from the practice of
philosophy or science, it means that different ways of thinking about
problems or issues may also be missing as a result of that exclusion.
Some of the ways in which the developmental psychology and
object-relations strain have contributed to feminist epistemologies in
both the sciences and in moral philosophy, however, have relied less
on the empirical claims that there are reasoning differences between
men and women. These approaches take seriously the ways in which
certain aspects of human cognition and reasoning have been tied to
women and often devalued as a result, and they take that symbolic
relationship as the starting point for epistemic investigation. Along
these lines, feminist epistemologists analyze the ways in which
testimony operates epistemically while also being embedded in
particular social relations that are often opaque to actors and
reasoners. Similarly, feminist epistemologies have sought to find a
place for affect, relationships, and care in both moral reasoning and
in epistemic practices more generally. This branch of feminist
epistemology is covered in the section on epistemic virtue theories
below.
5. Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Postmodernist Approaches
The ways in which Continental philosophical approaches have shaped
feminist epistemologies are both complicated and widespread, and even
feminist epistemologists who are writing primarily in the
Anglo-American tradition have often been influenced by the critical
trends in Continental thought. This is true not only of
Marxist-feminist epistemologies described above, but it is also true
of feminist science studies generally and of feminist epistemologies
which draw on developmental psychology and feminist epistemic virtue
theory. It is not unusual to find feminist philosophers who are
trained primarily in the Anglo-American "analytic" tradition who draw
on work in hermeneutics, phenomenology and postmodernism, while
feminists who locate their work in these traditions often cross this
boundary as well. Similarly, feminist pragmatism (discussed below)
often draws on both the Anglo-American analytic tradition and the
Continental tradition. It is safe to say that these categories, never
stable in non-feminist philosophy, are even more loosely defined in
feminist philosophy.
Feminist epistemologies that develop out of the Continental tradition
often take as their starting point the need to re-envision and
reconstruct the epistemological project more generally. Drawing on
Foucault, Gadamer, and Habermas, among others, Linda Martín Alcoff
(1993, 1996) argues for a re-orientation of epistemological projects
that can take into account the political nature of truth-claims and
knowledge production and can provide resources for reconstructing
normative epistemic concepts such as rationality, justification, and
knowledge.
Continental feminist epistemologies emphasize the ways in which
epistemic practices, norms, and products (e.g. knowledge) are not
neutral but are, in fact, both produced by, and partly-constitutive
of, power relations. However, the claim that knowledge practices and
products are not neutral does not amount to the claim that they are
false or distorted, since all knowledge practices and products are
enmeshed in power relations. The ideal of neutrality, assumed to be
essential to good knowledge practices, is, in fact, itself a political
construction. Thus, a re-construction of epistemic value terms must be
a re-construction that recognizes the political nature of epistemology
and epistemic practices. Feminist theorists add to this theoretical
approach an emphasis on the ways in which gender is another, and
different, layer of power relations.
The other aspect of Continental philosophical traditions that has been
used by feminists to introduce and develop an analysis of the
epistemic salience of gender has been the phenomenological tradition
and its emphasis on the "lived body." Work by Gail Weiss and Elizabeth
Grosz (1994), among others, draws on phenomenology to re-frame
epistemological inquiry as well as develops its theory of the body to
undermine the oppositional dualisms that Genevieve Lloyd (1984), Susan
Bordo (1990), and Susan Hekman (1990) identify as implicated in gender
norms and ideals.
Feminist work in the Continental tradition has also led to a critical
evaluation of the centrality of epistemology to philosophy and to a
concomitant critique of feminists who insist on locating their work in
the field of epistemology. A related argument will be addressed below
in the section on pragmatist feminist epistemology. The theoretical
impetus that comes from the Continental tradition, unlike the one that
arises in pragmatism, is connected to the analysis of truth as an
instrument of domination, as part of the constitution and maintenance
of hegemonic practices, or as a strategic move to eliminate conflict
and resistance. This is not a position on which there is agreement
among feminist theorists working in the Continental tradition, but the
critique of epistemology has been one of the most important
developments to come out of feminist engagements with this tradition,
and that critique has taken a unique form. Thus, one aspect of
feminist Continental epistemology is the attack on epistemology
itself, feminist epistemology included.
6. Feminist Epistemic Virtue Theory
Epistemic virtue theories generally focus on the ways in which
epistemology and value theory overlap, but feminist versions of these
theories focus on the ways in which gender and power relations come
into play in both value theory and epistemology and, specifically, on
the ways in which subjects are constructed in the interplay of
knowledge claims, power relations, and value theory.
Work on the history of philosophy by feminists has led to critiques of
philosophical assumptions about what constitutes epistemic virtue,
particularly those virtues assumed to be definitive of reason and
objectivity. Bordo's (1990) and Lloyd's (1984) work examines the ways
in which "maleness" and "femaleness" operate symbolically in
philosophical discussions of conceptual relationships assumed to be
dichotomous, for instance: reason/unreason, reason/emotion,
objectivity/subjectivity, and universality/particularity.
These critical engagements with the history of philosophy have laid
the groundwork for feminist attempts to reconfigure epistemic virtues
in ways that allow for the re-integration of faculties or aspects of
knowledge that have been excluded from analyses of epistemic virtue
because of their alignment in the "imaginary" of philosophy with women
or with the forces of irrationality.
Lorraine Code's work (1987, 1991, 1995, 1996) argues for the epistemic
salience of, among other things, testimony, gossip, and the affective
and political operations according to which identities are constructed
and maintained. Code and other feminists working in this area
emphasize the ways in which social and political forces shape our
identities as epistemic authorities and as rational agents and how
these, in turn, lead to a different understanding of epistemic
responsibility.
Code's work has also been influential in the development of another
strand of feminist epistemology. This strand can be characterized as a
version of naturalism [[that]] takes issue with the ways in which
traditional epistemological paradigms derive from cases of simple and
uncontroversial empirical beliefs. For instance, beliefs like, "I know
that I am seeing a tree," deform the epistemic landscape. This
includes a criticism of the paradigm of knowledge as propositional and
a related criticism of the presumed individualism of epistemic
pursuits. In addition, this naturalistic turn in feminist epistemology
takes issue with the traditional epistemological concern with the
skeptical problem, in most instances simply ignoring it as an
epistemological issue rather than arguing against its importance. The
skeptical problem is often taken to be a problem primarily for
individualist epistemologies that also assume that knowledge is
essentially propositional and that it is to be explained in terms of
individual mental states. Since many feminist epistemic virtue
theorists reject all or most of these assumptions, the skeptical
problem cannot get any traction and is consequently ignored in virtue
of its status as a pseudo-problem.
7. Pragmatism and Feminist Epistemologies
For feminist pragmatist approaches, the skeptical problem becomes a
non-problem as well, but this is in virtue of the major change wrought
in philosophical thinking about knowledge in the wake of Darwin and
the pragmatists. Early pragmatists like John Dewey and William James
were already recognizing that key terms used in epistemological
discourse require revision: terms like "belief" as opposed to
"emotion" or "desire," issues of truth and reference, and
representational theories of belief and knowledge are all radically
de-stabilized by pragmatist thinkers. Richard Rorty's development of
this theme in the twentieth century led him to conclude that
epistemology is dead and that philosophy is the better for it.
Feminist pragmatists share this suspicion of epistemology, although
they continue to work on issues related to knowledge. However,
theorists like Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996) argue that since
epistemology is importantly tied to terms for which feminist
pragmatists have no use, they ought to see themselves as doing
something other than epistemology.
Feminist pragmatism has its own version of a naturalized epistemology,
but it is a naturalism that, like the naturalism found in feminist
epistemic virtue theories, resists reduction to cognitive psychology
or neuroscience. Instead, and similar to feminist epistemic virtue
theories, it begins with the common problems of knowledge that occur
at the crossroads of ordinary experience. Knowledge and its problems
present themselves in the same way that other social problems present
themselves: as opportunities for melioration and the improvement of
life.
The basic epistemic building block for pragmatist feminist approaches
is the organism rather than the mind or the body. "Experience" is more
complex than sensory states, since it is the way in which the organism
interacts with its world, a world that includes not just objects but
also social institutions, relationships, and politics. As a result,
knowledge pursuits are already implicated with values, politics, and
bodies.
Pragmatist feminist approaches to accounts of knowledge, thus, share
much with naturalized accounts of epistemology, but the idea of
science that operates in feminist pragmatist theories is science as
characterized by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John
Dewey, rather than the characterization of science as it appears in
the analytic tradition of philosophy. There are, of course,
differences among Peirce, James, and Dewey in their characterization
of science, but it is fair to understand their views as underwritten
by an understanding of science as a way of interacting with the world
that is also enmeshed in human values and human endeavors. Feminist
pragmatist epistemologies share this understanding of science,
emphasizing its liberatory project and its role in the melioration of
social problems.
Thus, feminist pragmatist epistemological projects attempt to keep our
knowledge endeavors true to the liberatory impulse while also
re-configuring problems of knowledge in terms that take seriously the
insights of evolutionary theory, humanistic empirical psychology, and
the understanding of the knowing subject as an organism whose
knowledge endeavors are taken up in both a material and a social
world.
8. References and Further Reading
Alcoff, Linda Martín, Real Knowing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1996). (Feminist coherentist epistemology)
Alcoff, Linda Martín and Potter, Elizabeth (eds.) Feminist
Epistemologies, (New York: Routledge, 1993). (Classic anthology)
Antony, Louise and Witt, Charlotte, (eds.) A Mind of One's Own:
Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1993). (Classic anthology)
Barad, Karen "Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in
Understanding Scientific Practices" in the Science Studies Reader,
Mario Biagioli, ed., (New York: Routledge, 1999) pp. 1-11.
Benjamin, Jessica The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the
Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). (Feminist
psychoanalytic theory)
Bleier, Ruth Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and its
Theories on Women (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984).
Bordo, Susan, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and
Culture, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).
Caine, Barbara, Grosz, E, A., and de Levervanche, Marie, Crossing
Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledge, (Boston: Allen
and Unwin, 1988).
Code, Lorraine, Epistemic Responsibility, (Hanover, NH: University of
New England Press, 1987). (Feminist epistemic virtue theory).
Code, Lorraine, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the
Construction of Knowledge, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Code, Lorraine, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations, (New
York: Routledge, 1995). (Collected essays)
Code, Lorraine, "What is Natural about Naturalized Epistemology?"
American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 1-22 (1996).
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