Debating the Feminist Standpoint

But, it might still be asked, what is epistemological about this? We have been presented with some strong reasons for expecting that in virtue of their place in the social division of labour and the way they establish their independent personalities women will tend to understand the world differently from men.

The main contributors to the debate have shifted ground considerably in the way they respond to this set of questions, and there remain important differences of opinion. What we might think of as the ‘classic’ standpoint answer is that the distinctive women's/ feminist viewpoint of itself confers the superior view. The standpoint from which the view is generated is what confers on it the right to be accepted as ‘true’ (or ‘more reliable’, ‘less false’). In Hartsock’s original version, for example, the metaphors of ‘levels’, ‘depth’ and ‘visibility’ are used to sustain the privileging of women’s standpoint:

If the reality of class domination only becomes apparent at the epistemological level of production, what epistemological level can allow us to understand the systematic domination of women? I argue that the domination of one gender by the other can only be made visible at a still deeper level, an epistemological level defined by reproduction. Thus, rather than argue, with Marx, that reality must be understood as bi-leveled, I am suggesting that it must be understood as three-tiered.

(Hartsock 1983b: 9-10)

These topographical terms go well with the basic standpoint metaphor, though they interestingly invert the location from which one might expect the best view: not from the top of the social structure, but from tunnelling through its foundations. The most common justification for this is that the view from the top is necessarily distorted by the deceptions and self-deceptions made necessary by social domination. There is also an echo of the Renaissance thinker Vico’s view that we understand what we have ourselves created. Women and workers are the social groups who make society, and so understand it in ways which the ruling groups, who merely depend upon and appropriate what others create, do not.

This is the ‘classic’ feminist standpoint approach and is closest to ‘classic’ Lukacs’s Marxian standpoint epistemology, with which it shares the same problems. It also stands in the sharpest contrast to the insistence of ‘traditional’ epistemology (such as the empiricist and Kantian approaches we have considered in earlier chapters of this book) on separating questions of truth and falsity from the identity of the people who make the truth-claims. It is worth noting that the motivation for this was precisely to deprive the powerful of their right to dictate what was to count as knowledge (note requirement (c) in the list on p. 141), and so was egalitarian in its intent.

The key difficulty for the classic standpoint, whether Marxian or feminist, is that the theory used to identify the preferred standpoint, to characterize the group which occupies it, and to justify the privileging of their forms of knowledge as better knowledge, itself stands in need ofjustification. Standpoint theorists have to make knowledge-claims about historical change, the sexual division of labour, the formation of gendered identities and so on, prior to and as a means of establishing the epistemology in terms of which truth claims are to be evaluated. The exercise is, in other words, circular.

This argument is a direct and powerful one. However, perhaps it is too powerful! A critical look at the traditional epistemologies reveals that they, too, rely on assumptions - about the nature of the human mind, the validity of certain forms of reasoning, the relationship of the thinking self to the external world, the reliability of sensory experience and so on. These assumptions, like those of the standpoint epistemology, are open to challenge, and stand in need of independent justification.

So far, then, it seems that standpoint theories are no worse than the more established epistemologies when it comes to the charge of circularity. There are two basic options for dealing with this situation. One of them is to take up a relativist position about epistemologies themselves, and accept that there can be no good reasons for accepting one rather than another, so that choice is merely a matter of subjective preference (based on political values, social interests, the toss of a coin or whatever). This takes us in the direction of post-modernist criticisms of standpoint epistemology, and, indeed, of epistemology as such. We will return to consider these criticisms a little later.

A second way of dealing with the circularity of attempts to ground approaches to the theory of knowledge in prior assumptions is to see if we can find good reasons for preferring one set of assumptions and the epistemology they give rise to as against the alternatives. For this to be possible, there has to be some common ground between the epistemologies, some basis for bringing them into dialogue with each other (that is, they shouldn't be completely incommensurable - see p. 31). There are, in fact, two very basic features which feminist standpoint theorists and traditional epistemologies have in common. One is a commitment to logical consistency, to attempting to construct theory in ways which avoid self-contradiction.

Noting that traditional and standpoint epistemologies have these features in common, we can begin to assess their relative merits. Since both are committed to consistency, we can, for example, consider how well each of them lives up to this commitment. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the empiricist epistemology which is used to defend the rationality of science is inconsistent with what seem to be unavoidable features of scientific explanation - the role of values and interests in theory choice, the theory dependence of empirical evidence, the role of unobservable entities and so on. By contrast, feminist standpoint epistemology offers a socio-historical account of the gendered processes of knowledge creation which is not obviously inconsistent with its epistemology. This is clearly an area of debate which could be taken much further, but feminist standpoint theories appear to be well placed.

The shared commitment to realism provides another basis for evaluating rival epistemologies. Both traditional epistemologies and feminist standpoint epistemologies offer ways of distinguishing between more and less reliable knowledge-claims, and generally do so in terms of procedures to be followed in order to arrive at more rather than less reliable beliefs. Implicit in either epistemology is a theory of knowledge as a process by which beliefs about reality are generated and evaluated. In Chapters 2 and 3 we discussed the account empiricists have given of this process, and at the beginning of this chapter (p. 141) we summarized in four points the key features shared by all the traditional epistemologies. We can now compare feminist standpoint with traditional epistemologies with respect to their shared commitment to accounting for and providing rules for the creation of reliable knowledge.

What about the proclaimed universality of the concepts of science? This is by no means uncontroversial in contemporary natural science, but in historical and social sciences it is still more problematic, for reasons discussed in Chapters 5 to 7. It is clear that forms of human social life and their cultural practices differ from place to place and time to time. And it follows that the social and historical sciences need to develop theories which are sensitive to specificity and difference. However, in order to detect difference it is necessary to have at least some concepts which span the different cultures under comparison. It is arguable that we need some basic concepts of human universals (birth, death, labour, sex, for example) for us to be able to make any sense at all of other cultures (see Chapter 6, pp. 97-8).

Feminist epistemology posits such human universals (sex differences, mothering, some form of social division of labour and so on), but simultaneously argues that socio-cultural processes combine with them to produce diversity and specificity. By contrast, the central concern in empiricism, rationalism and Kantian epistemology with universality is a part of the explanation of the difficulty the natural sciences have with particularity and difference. Attempts to apply abstract and general scientific and technological knowledge to very different concrete situations (large dam projects and green revolution agriculture are well-studied examples) often produce unwanted and disastrous social and ecological consequences.

The concern with objectivity is shared between the most influential standpoint epistemologists and traditional epistemology, in the sense that both are committed to the existence of an external world in virtue of whose character our beliefs are either justified or not. However, they differ markedly in the way they describe the conditions most favourable to arriving at reliable or justified beliefs. In the empiricist model, as we saw, value judgements were to be excluded from science.

So, who is right? We saw in Chapter 2 that the focus of empiricism is on devising criteria by which genuine knowledge (justified belief and so on) can be distinguished from falsehood (‘pseudo-science’ and so on), and the crucial role of testability by observation and experiment in their account of this. For them, the emphasis is on quality control in science. As we also saw (in Chapter 3, pp. 34-5), this emphasis, together with their very narrow view of rationality, led the empiricists (and Popper) to neglect the rationality involved in the processes of creation of new scientific ideas and hypotheses. For empiricists this is a matter of ‘psychology’, for Popper a matter of imaginative ‘conjectures’. However, critics of empiricism have shown how the invention and development of metaphors, the application of criteria of relevance, plausibility and so on are rational processes involved in the creation of scientific theories. Without these processes, there would be no theories or knowledge-claims to test by experiment and observation! The case can be made that they are absolutely central to an understanding of science as a dynamic and creative human activity.

By contrast, feminist standpoint epistemology and related sociological accounts of science expose the limitations of the ‘abstract individualism’ shared by the traditional epistemologies: the creation of knowledge is a thoroughly social process. Moreover, feminist standpoint epistemologies explain the potential resources, in terms of diverse experiences, perspectives and cultural meanings, available for creative work in science which are excluded or suppressed by the general exclusion of women and other groups from active participation in knowledge creation.

So, feminist epistemology does much better than its traditional rivals in the way it understands and proposes to improve the processes of knowledge creation (this is close to the position developed by Sandra Harding (1991: ch. 6)). But this still leaves the matter of evaluation and testing of rival knowledge-claims once they have been produced. Are the traditional epistemologists right in insisting on value-neutrality, universality, impersonality and empirical testing for this aspect of science (sometimes called the ‘context of justification’ as opposed to the ‘context of discovery’)?

First, it should be noted that this distinction is not as clear as it is sometimes made out to be: quite a lot of ‘testing, often in the form of ‘thought experiments, goes on in the creative process of devising a theory or hypothesis (see Darwin’s notebooks (Darwin 1987) for an extraordinary example of this long-drawn-out process of mental ‘trial and error’). Second, there are important differences between the various scientific disciplines with respect to what should count as ‘evidence’. What feminist standpoint epistemology brings out very clearly is the way one and the same society can be seen very differently on the basis of the life experience and social practice of people differently situated within it. The experience of a ‘disabled’ person attempting to use public transport is not like the experience of reading a thermometer in a scientific experiment. The latter is one which is in principle replicable by ‘standard’ observers, irrespective of who they are, or where the experiment is conducted. By contrast, the experience of the disabled in relation to transport access is unavoidably located and particular. The authenticity of its status as a contribution to knowledge about the society derives from the identity and characteristics of that particular subject of the experience. It is precisely this aspect of the role of evidence and experience in historical and social scientific work which feminist standpoint epistemology grasps.

However, not all evidence that social scientists and historians use is like this. Much of it is provided by state bureaucracies, opinion surveys, large-scale quantitative research projects and so on. Moreover, its reliability, validity and theoretical significance remains open to debate. Surely classical epistemology has the edge over feminist standpoint epistemology when it comes to providing rules for conducting this debate? There is more to be said about this than we have space for, but if we take, for example, the traditional epistemological demand for anonymity and impersonality, this has good reasons behind it. The justification of these rules (we leave aside here the question whether they are really followed in actual scientific institutions) is that they provide a context for evaluating knowledge-claims in which the quality of evidence and argument can be considered independently of power and status hierarchies among participants to the debate.

However, there is another and more radical way of achieving this aim. It is to re­institutionalize scientific debate in ways which open it up to a more diverse and inclusive range of participants, and at the same time to resist the existing hierarchies of power and status. If the contributions of all are equally valued and respected, then the shield of anonymity and impersonality is no longer so crucial. This is very much in line with the project of increasing women's participation in a reformed practice of science which is shared by the main advocates of both so-called ‘feminist empiricism' and standpoint epistemology. It is also an interesting, if only partial, convergence with Habermas's idea of an ‘ideal speech situation' (see Chapter 7). A significant difference, of course, is that the idea of ‘standpoint' suggests the likelihood that diversity of outlooks will persist through even the most egalitarian dialogue.

The above considerations show at least one way in which the claims of feminist standpoint epistemology can be justified. However, in the process the ground has shifted to some extent. The approach being justified here is not the classic standpoint one, since it is not the standpoint itself which justifies the perspective it gives. Feminist epistemology is not justified simply and solely because it has been arrived at from the perspective of women, or feminists. Rather, the position we have arrived at is that feminist epistemology compares very well with traditional epistemologies, and offers insights and possibilities for reform inconceivable for them. This can be shown by giving reasons and citing evidence (for example, about the actual practice of contemporary science). No one is expected to accept these arguments just because they are uttered by feminists, but, equally, it is not just a coincidence that they have been developed by feminists. Feminist standpoint theory offers (testable) explanations of this fact (in terms of the sexual division of labour, gendered personality development and so on).

This takes us back in the direction of Sandra Harding's ‘feminist empiricism' (p. 146). We suggested earlier that the transformations already achieved by feminists working in some social science disciplines seem to be much more far-reaching than this somewhat disparaging term implies (see Holmwood 1995). The implications of the ‘revised' standpoint approach just discussed are that the struggle against ‘bad science' need not be limited to exposing factual biases and errors, but can extend to a much broader challenge to prevailing research programmes, conceptions of what counts as ‘good evidence', methodological procedures, social relations and institutional forms, the relationship of scientific work to popular social movements, and also access on equal terms to scientific work on the part of previously excluded or marginalized groups.