This chapter argues that feminist epistemology identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. The central concept of feminist epistemology is that of a situated knower, and hence of situated knowledge: knowledge that reflects the particular perspectives of the subject. Feminist philosophers are interested in how gender situates knowing subjects. Different conceptions of how gender situates knowers informs feminist approaches to the central problems of the field: grounding feminist criticisms of science and feminist science, defining the proper roles of social and political values in inquiry, evaluating ideals of objectivity and rationality, and reforming structures of epistemic authority. The chapter thus explores these epistemological, metaphysical, scientific, and hermeneutics issues in feminist studies.
Top3.0 Introduction
Epistemology is a way of understanding and explaining how we know what we know. It is also concerned with answering the questions about ‘what is knowledge?’ and ‘what do we know about reality?’
Feminism questions the existing traditional knowledge system accusing it of being androcentric and highly influenced by positivism. As a result, feminism set up a theoretical-epistemological field, which presents diversified trends according to different critical traditions incorporating contributions from diverse schools of thought such as Marxism, patriarchy, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and post-modernism. Post-structuralism and post-modernism emphasize the matter of difference, of subjectivity and of the singularity of experiences, conceiving that subjectivities are produced discursively. In fact, the themes that characterise 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 have their sources in 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.
Feminist epistemology studies the ways in which gender influences our conceptions of knowledge, knowers, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies how dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform them to serve the interests of these groups. Various feminist epistemologists argue that dominant knowledge practices disadvantage women by excluding them from inquiry; denying them epistemic authority, denigrating feminine cognitive styles; producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests; producing theories of social phenomena that render women’s activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible; and producing knowledge that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines has generated new questions, theories, methods, and findings; show how gender and feminist values and perspectives have played a causal role in these transformations; promote theories that aid egalitarian and liberation movements; and defend these developments as epistemic advances.
The central concept of feminist epistemology is of situated knowledge: knowledge that reflects the particular perspectives of the knower. Feminist philosophers explore how gender situates knowing subjects.
This chapter explores epistemological, metaphysical, scientific and hermeneutics issues in feminist studies. The chapter starts by looking at the term and concept epistemology and the search for knowledge, followed by discussion of situated knower and knowledge before moving on to feminist metaphysics and feminist science studies. The chapter ends by discussing feminist hermeneutics, the theory, art and practice of interpretation in the interest of women. The objectives of the chapter are to describe the relationship between epistemology and the search for knowledge; explain the concept situated knower and situated knowledge in feminism; and discuss feminist metaphysics, feminist science studies and feminist hermeneutics.