Here’s some philosophy. Comments accepted.
Thesis: It seems that feminists have good reasons to accept standpoint epistemology and, by extension, Michael Root’s analysis of social science; the implications of these ideas, though, leave feminists in a quandary over how to argue about differing causal stories of oppression.
Feminist Epistemology and Social Science
What does it mean to be called a feminist? In other words, what are the necessary beliefs required for a feminist to believe? It seems possible to say something like, “I’m not a feminist, but I think that women should have equal rights.†Conversely, it also seems possible for one to say, “I’m a feminist, but I don’t buy the sex/gender distinction.†So, what is the necessary condition p needed to make the sentence “I’m not a feminist, but I believe that p†false?
What is needed here is two things: women are oppressed and one can give a certain causal story about how women came to be oppressed. Consider this quote from J. S. Mill:
[size=75]What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters… in the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters.[1][/size]
Mill’s is a typical example of a kind of causal story: what is called ‘women’s nature’ is something that was brought about by social pressures and men were the principal cause, though some women may have been complacent with the procedure. The central feature here is that the way women culturally exist now is illegitimate and that is due primarily to something that men have done at sometime in history.
How have these stories usually been argued for? Generally, not by looking to any kind of empirical data in the social sciences itself (i.e., most women are unhappy, most women believe that accepted social value p that pertains to women’s conduct is incorrect, etc.) but, rather, what is the best way to explain the data. It’s not enough to point at, say, women’s discontent in society because a non-feminist can accept that same data but give another reason for its existence.[2] Now the importance of a causal story of oppression can be seen: the real battleground of persuasion for the feminist is arguing for how certain social data came about in the first place.
This has recently been informed by the development of standpoint epistemology.[3] Standpoint epistemology denies the idea that “true†knowledge claims all and only take the form of propositions that make no reference to the subjectivity of the person making the proposition:
[size=75]There are facts that have to be respected: facts that constitute “the person one is†at any historical moment. …But the intriguing point about knowing people—and another reason why it is epistemologically instructive—is that even knowing all the facts about someone does not count as knowing her as the person she is. No more can knowing all the facts about oneself, past and present, guarantee self-knowledge. Yet none of these problems raise doubts that there is such a creature as the person I am or the person anyone else is now. Nor do they indicate the impossibility of knowing other people. If the limitations of these accumulated factual claims were taken seriously with respect to empirical knowledge more generally, the limitations of an epistemology built from S-knows-that-p claims would be more clearly apparent.[4] [/size]
All knowledge comes from a subject’s standpoint; forgetting this leads to notions that one’s standpoint is the “objective†one:
[size=75]
…it is not enough just to be more rigorously empirical in adjudicating such controversial knowledge claims with the expectation that the biases that may have infected the “context of discovery†will be eradicated in the purifying process of justification. Rather, the scope of epistemological investigation has to expand to merge with moral-political inquiry, acknowledging that “facts†are always infused with values and that both facts and values are open to ongoing critical debate. …Evidence is selected, not found, and selection procedures are open to scrutiny.[5] [/size]
Feminists can be helped by this, it could be said, because standpoint epistemology shows that when an anti-feminist social scientist makes a certain claim about women and then justifies it by saying that the process used to derive the data was “value-neutralâ€, the feminist can attack such a claim by showing that the terms used in the claim are infused with values, either from the community the social scientist works in or directly from values the social scientist holds himself.
Michael Root, in his book Philosophy of Social Science[6], succinctly argues that this is the case in most of the social sciences by using what he calls the “argument from open textureâ€:
[size=75]When we define empirical terms… we cannot foresee all the cases to which we might wish to apply them… When possibilities arise that are not clearly covered by our definition, we can decide to either leave them uncovered or clarify the definition to cover them. If we decide to clarify the definition, we need to decide what to add. We can clarify the definition so that the term applies to the new cases or so that it doesn’t. The choice is a matter of practical rather than theoretical reason. Which clarification is best is not a matter of which best fits the facts, since if each refinement covers the new cases, each fits the facts equally well, but a matter of which best serves our interests.[7] [/size]
The decision of whether or not to include the new cases will, at some point, fall back on social values for their justification. Not only that, even if a scientist realizes that the terms being used in a study are loaded, it’s not enough to simply create some new term for study and be done with it. Eventually, that term will also take on certain values through the way future scientists decide about whether or not to use that term to some new or interesting case. Given what standpoint epistemology says about how subjectivity plays a significant role in knowledge claims, the social scientist has to do more:
[size=75]The scientist cannot invent “domestic partners†and decide to study whether the incidence of clinical depression in some community is higher for men with domestic partners than for men without them. To study the question, the fact of domestic partnerships has to be a fact for members of the partners’ community…
The social scientist who does not approve of the way in which men are sorted by the government or in the economy cannot merely interpose her values between the men and the practice of sorting them; she must undertake to change the practice itself. She cannot remain disinterested and stand apart from the lives of her subjects, but must join forces with them and work for social change. To add domestic partnerships to the categories of her science, she must see that the government or economy adds them to the ways is records, examines, normalizes, and regulates people.[8] [/size]
Thus, we have a nice picture for the feminist: empirical facts purported to have been gathered by “value-free†are not so; there are values implicit in the science and, importantly for the feminist, most likely to be patriarchal values. It’s now intellectually acceptable for the feminist social scientist (and epistemologist) to work to change the facts to conform to non-feminist ones.
A Foundational Problem
However, all is not well for the feminist. The question obviously presents itself as to which values one should use when discovering/creating empirical facts. Just saying that the traditional scientist’s procedures are infused with values isn’t enough, since the scientist can turn right around and accuse the feminist or Marxist of the same thing:
[size=75]If bias is ubiquitous and ineliminable, then what’s the good of exposing it? It seems to me that the whole thrust of feminist scholarship in this area has been to demonstrate that androcentric biases have distorted science and, indeed, distorted the search for knowledge generally. But if biases are distorting, and if we’re all biased in one way or another, then it seems there could be no such thing as an undistorted search for knowledge. So what are we complaining about? Is it just that we want it to be distorted in our favor, rather than in theirs? We must say something about the badness of the biases we expose or our critique will carry no normative force.[9] [/size]
Suppose a Marxist were to do social science and a liberal feminist wanted to critique his actions; why could the liberal feminist accuse the Marxist of using value-informed scientific terms when she herself would do the very same thing in her social science? Furthermore, on what grounds can the liberal feminist say that her own values should be the ones used to form social facts? What extra argument is needed to sustain the attack? Louise Antony give an answer:
[size=75]…we have a new route to the bias paradox—if biases are not now simply ineliminable, but downright good, how is it that some biases are bad?…
The real problem with the liberal conceptions of objectivity and neutrality begins with the fact that while they are unrealizable, it’s possible for those resting comfortably in the center of a consensus to find that fact invisible. Members of the dominant group are given no reason to question their own assumptions: Their worldview acquires, in their minds, the status of established fact. Their opinions are transformed into what “everybody†knows…
The real problem with the ruling-class worldview is not that it is biased; it’s that it is false. The epistemic problem with the ruling-class with ruling-class people is not that they are closed-minded; it’s that they hold too much power…
Whether we talking in general about the ideology of scientific objectivity, or about particular sexist and racist theories, we must be willing to talk about truth and falsity. If we criticize such theories primarily on the basis of their ideological function, we risk falling prey to the very illusions about objectivity that we are trying to expose. I think this has happened to some extent within feminist epistemology.[10] [/size]
Antony argues that the only way to argue that the Marxist (or patriarchal scientist) should not use their values in coming into judgments about the world is because using those values will lead to believing in falsehoods. Standpoint epistemology is true, and clinging to notions of value-neutrality only serves (a la Root’s argument from open texture) to further support the sexist attitudes prevalent in society.
However, we have to ask what Antony means by ‘true’ here. The most obvious reading is something like “conforming to realityâ€. But, given that we know that a feminist must buy into a causal story of oppression, an interesting situation develops: if she changes the structure of social institutions to agree with the values she believes will lead to the truth, and her values will be informed by the causal story she believes, then the structure of society might end up resembling what the causal story dictates the outcome of the forces of oppression would be, even if it didn’t happen that way. She is now caught in a dilemma: she can’t point toward empirical social facts to justify her causal story of oppression because, in following through with her values and working to change society, those facts will be laden with values consistent with that very same causal story, thus being open to the charge of question-begging. Since to be a feminist one has to have a causal story of some kind, how does the feminist justify her belief in one particular story of oppression over another?
The only way that seems left is to argue that her causal story of oppression should be adopted because it is grounded by the correct ethical values. I believe it is morally correct to protect women’s sexual autonomy, for example, so I need to use this value in my construction of social facts. It may turn out that the world will change so as it looks as if the causal story of oppression I buy into were true, but that’s fine since the story is supported with the correct ethical values.
Two problems emerge, though: first, this runs counter to the idea that the necessary condition for being a feminist is having a causal story in the first place. The statement “I’m not a feminist, but I think the sexual autonomy of women should be respected†seems patently consistent with itself, but this can’t be so if to be a feminist means to first accept a certain set of values before buying into a causal story of oppression. Supposing that it is correct to accept that sexual autonomy should be respected[11], saying “I support sexual autonomy for women†means “I am a feminist†in some substantive way. Yet, I could accept the sexual autonomy of women and still claim that the woman’s place is in the home or that women “by nature†are less intelligent than men, things most feminists deny. Saying that women are oppressed implies recognition of the need to change women’s situations.
Secondly, your theory of oppression will affect the moral terms you deem acceptable. On a very broad level, say, between a Marxist and a feminist, there could be some kind of back-and-forth moral argument between the two. Once broad concepts are agreed upon, though, the details quickly become intractable: how does one cash out the ethical concepts involved in a word like “abortion†while disagreeing about whether or not a value connected to your causal story will trump (or render useless) one or all of those concepts? Two feminists with differing conceptions of oppression might not be able to have a debate attacking the moral grounds of the other’s theory, since they will not be able to agree on how moral terms will be used without one of them rejecting some part of her theory of oppression (or, agreeing in part to the other’s).
So since, according to standpoint epistemology, your moral terms affect how you construct social facts, your theory of oppression affects how you use your moral terms, and the social facts you construct as a social scientist seem to be the only real grounding for one specific theory of oppression, it looks like feminists’ acceptance of standpoint epistemology is on rocky grounds.
[1] p. 24 from John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women†in Cudd, Ann and Robin Andreasen, Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology; Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2005.
[2] e. g. Quine, Putnam and the like. See the entry “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science†in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology); also, Louise M. Antony’s “Quine as Feminist†in Antony, Louise M. and Charlotte E. Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity; Westview Press: Boulder, CO, 2002 (2nd ed.).
[3] The classic text is Alcoff, Linda and Elizabeth Potter, Feminist Epistemologies; Routledge: New York, 1993.
[4] p. 38 of Lorraine Code, “Taking Subjectivity into Accountâ€, in Feminist Epistemologies.
[5] Code, p. 30.
[6] Blackwell: Cambridge, 1993.
[7] Root, p. 210.
[8] Root, p. 169.
[9] Antony, “Quine as Feminist,†p. 136.
[10] Antony, p. 140-1.
[11] Even here, there are major problems: one could accept the respect for sexual autonomy and yet gravely differ on specific ethical issues such as prostitution, abortion, etc. See Scott Anderson’s “Prostitution and sexual autonomy: making sense of the prohibition of prostitution†(Ethics, v112 i4 p748 [July 2002]) for an example.