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3
Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology:
What Is“Strong Objectivity”?
Sandra Harding
“Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges.”
—Donna Haraway’
1. Both Ways
For almost two decades, feminists have engaged in a complex and
charged conversation about objectivity. Its topics have included which
kinds of knowledge projects have it, which don’t, and why they don’t;
whether the many different feminisms need it, and if so why they do;
and if it is possible to get it, how to do so.2
This conversation has been
informed by complex and charged prefeminist writings that tend to
get stuck in debates between empiricists and intentionalists, objectiv¬
ists and interpretationists, and realists and social constructionists (including
poststructuralists).3
Most of these feminist discussions have not arisen from attempts
to find new ways either to criticize or carry on the agendas of the
disciplines. Frequently they do not take as their problematics the ones
familiar within the disciplines. Instead, these conversations have
emerged mainly from two different and related concerns. First, what
are the causes of the immense proliferation of theoretically and empirically
sound results of research in biology and the social sciences
that have discovered what is not supposed to exist: rampant sexist and
androcentric bias—“politics”!—in the dominant scientific (and popular)
descriptions and explanations of nature and social life? To put
the point another way, how should one explain the surprising fact that
politically guided research projects have been able to produce less
partial and distorted results of research than those supposedly guided
by the goal of value-neutrality? Second, how can feminists create reCopyrighted
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50 FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES
search that is for women in the sense that it provides less partial and
distorted answers to questions that arise from women’s lives and are
not only about those lives but also about the rest of nature and social
relations? The two concerns are related because recommendations
for future scientific practices should be informed by the best accounts
of past scientific successes. That is, how one answers the second question
depends on what one thinks is the best answer to the first one.
Many feminists, like thinkers in the other new social liberation
movements, now hold that it is not only desirable but also possible
to have that apparent contradiction in terms—socially situated knowledge.
In conventional accounts, socially situated beliefs only get to
count as opinions. In order to achieve the status of knowledge, beliefs
are supposed to break free of—to transcend—their original ties to local,
historical interests, values, and agendas. However, as Donna Haraway
has put the point, it turns out to be possible“ t o have simultaneously
an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims
and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own
‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment
to faithful accounts of a‘real’ world. . . . ”4
The standpoint epistemologists—and especially the feminists who
have most fully articulated this kind of theory of knowledge—have
claimed to provide a fundamental map or“logic” for how to do this:
“start thought from marginalized lives” and“ t a k e everyday life as
problematic. ”5
However, these maps are easy to misread if one doesn’t
understand the principles used to construct them. Critics of standpoint
writings have tended to refuse the invitation to “have it both ways”
by accepting the idea of real knowledge that is socially situated. Instead
they have assimilated standpoint claims either to objectivism or
some kind of conventional foundationalism or to ethnocentrism, relativism,
or phenomenological approaches in philosophy and the social
sciences.
Here I shall try to make clear how it really is a misreading to
assimilate standpoint epistemologies to those older ones and that such
misreadings distort or make invisible the distinctive resources that
they offer. I shall do so by contrasting the grounds for knowledge and
the kinds of subjects/agents of knowledge recommended by standpoint
theories with those favored by the older epistemologies. Then
I shall show why it is reasonable to think that the socially situated
grounds and subjects of standpoint epistemologies require and generate
stronger standards for objectivity than do those that turn away
from providing systematic methods for locating knowledge in history.
The problem with the conventional conception of objectivity is not
that it is too rigorous or too“objectifying,” as some have argued, but
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51Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology
that it is not rigorous or objectifying enough; it is too weak to accomplish
even the goals for which it has been designed, let alone the more
difficult projects called for by feminisms and other new social move-
ments.6
2. Feminist Standpoint versus Spontaneous Feminist
Empiricist Epistemologies
Not all feminists who try to explain the past and learn lessons for
the future of feminist research in biology and the social sciences are
standpoint theorists. The distinctiveness of feminist standpoint approaches
can be emphasized by contrasting them with what I shall
call“spontaneous feminist empiricist epistemology.”7
By now, two forms of feminist empiricism have been articulated:
the original“spontaneous” feminist empiricism and a recent philosophical
version. Originally, feminist empiricism arose as the “spontaneous
consciousness” of feminist researchers in biology and the
social sciences who were trying to explain what was and what wasn’t
different about their research process in comparison with the standard
procedures in their field.8
They thought that they were just doing more
carefully and rigorously what any good scientist should do; the problem
they saw was one of“ b a d science.” Hence they did not give a
special name to their philosophy of science; I gave it the name “feminist
empiricism” in The Science Question in Feminism to contrast
feminist standpoint theory with the insistence of empiricism’s proponents
that sexism and androcentrism could be eliminated from the
results of research if scientists would just follow more rigorously and
carefully the existing methods and norms of research—which, for
practicing scientists, are fundamentally empiricist ones.
Recently, philosophers Helen Longino and Lynn Hankinson Nelson
have developed sophisticated and valuable feminist empiricist philosophies
of science (Longino calls hers“contextual empiricism”) that
differ in significant respects from what most prefeminist empiricists
and probably most spontaneous feminist empiricists would think of
as empiricism.9
This is no accident, because Longino and Nelson both
intend to revise empiricism, as feminists in other fields have fruitfully
revised other theoretical approaches—indeed, as feminist standpoint
theorists revise the theory from which they begin. Longino and Nelson
incorporate into their epistemologies elements that also appear in the
standpoint accounts (many would say that they have been most forcefully
articulated in such accounts)—such as the inescapable but also
sometimes positive influence of social values and interests in the content
of science—that would be anathema to even the spontaneous
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52 FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES
feminist empiricists of the late 1970s and early 1980s as well as to
their many successors today. These philosophical feminist empiricisms
are constructed in opposition partly to feminist standpoint theories,
partly to radical feminist arguments that exalt the feminine and
essentialize“woman’s experience” (which they have sometimes attributed
to standpoint theorists), and partly to the prefeminist empir-
icists.
It would be an interesting and valuable project to contrast in greater
detail these important philosophical feminist empiricisms with both
spontaneous feminist empiricism and with feminist standpoint theory.
But I have a different goal in this essay: to show how strongly feminist
reflections on scientific knowledge challenge the dominant prefeminist
epistemology and philosophy of science that are held by all of
those people inside and outside science who are still wondering just
what are the insights about science and knowledge that feminists have
to offer. In my view, this challenge is made most strongly by feminist
standpoint epistemology.
One can understand spontaneous feminist empiricism and feminist
standpoint theory to be making competing arguments on two topicsscientific
method and history—in order to explain in their different
ways the causes of sexist and androcentric results of scientific re-
search.10
As already indicated, spontaneous feminist empiricists think
that insufficient care and rigor in following existing methods and
norms is the cause of sexist and androcentric results of research, and
it is in these terms that they try to produce plausible accounts of the
successes of empirically and theoretically more adequate results of
research. Standpoint theorists think that this is only part of the problem.
They point out that retroactively, and with the help of the insights
of the women’s movement, one can see these sexist or androcentric
practices in the disciplines. However, the methods and norms in the
disciplines are too weak to permit researchers systematically to identify
and eliminate from the results of research those social values,
interests, and agendas that are shared by the entire scientific community
or virtually all of it. Objectivity has not been “operationalized”
in such a way that scientific method can detect sexist and androcentric
assumptions that are“ t h e dominant beliefs of an age”—that is, that
are collectively (versus only individually) held. As far as scientific
method goes (and feminist empiricist defenses of it), it is entirely
serendipitous when cultural beliefs that are assumed by most members
of a scientific community are challenged by a piece of scientific
research. Standpoint theory tries to address this problem by producing
stronger standards for“good method,” ones that can guide more competent
efforts to maximize objectivity.11
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53Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology
With respect to history, spontaneous feminist empiricists argue that
movements of social liberation such as the women’s movement function
much like the little boy who is the hero of the folk tale about the
Emperor and his clothes. Such movements“ m a k e it possible for people
to see the world in an enlarged perspective because they remove
the covers and blinders that obscure knowledge and observation.”12
Feminist standpoint theorists agree with this assessment, but argue
that researchers can do more than just wait around until social movements
happen and then wait around some more until their effects
happen to reach inside the processes of producing maximally objective,
causal accounts of nature and social relations. Knowledge projects
can find active ways incorporated into their principles of “good
method” to use history as a resource by socially situating knowledge
projects in the scientifically and epistemologically most favorable historical
locations. History can become the systematic provider of scientific
and epistemological resources rather than an obstacle to or
the“accidental” benefactor of projects to generate knowledge.13
It is spontaneous feminist empiricism’s great strength that it explains
the production of sexist and nonsexist results of research with
only a minimal challenge to the fundamental logic of research as this
is understood in scientific fields and to the logic of explanation as this
is understood in the dominant philosophies of science. Spontaneous
feminist empiricists try to fit feminist projects into prevailing standards
of“good science” and“good philosophy.” This conservativism
makes it possible for many people to grasp the importance of feminist
research in biology and the social sciences without feeling disloyal to
the methods and norms of their research traditions. Spontaneous feminist
empiricism appears to call for even greater rigor in using these
methods and following these norms. However, this conservatism is
also this philosophy’s weakness; this theory of knowledge refuses fully
to address the limitations of the dominant conceptions of method and
explanation and the ways the conceptions constrain and distort results
of research and thought about this research even when these dominant
conceptions are most rigorously respected. Nevertheless, its radical
nature should not be underestimated. It argues persuasively that the
sciences have been blind to their own sexist and androcentric research
practices and results. And it thereby clears space for the next question:
are the existing logics of research and explanation really so innocent
in the commission of this“crime” as empiricism insists, or are they
part of its cause?14
The intellectual history of feminist standpoint theory is conventionally
traced to Hegel’s reflections on what can be known about the
master/slave relationship from the standpoint of the slave’s life versus
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54 FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES
that of the master’s life and to the way Marx, Engels, and Lukacs
subsequently developed this insight into the“standpoint of the proletariat”
from which have been produced marxist theories of how class
society operates.15
In the 1970s, several feminist thinkers independently
began reflecting on how the marxist analysis could be transformed
to explain how the structural relationship between women
and men had consequences for the production of knowledge.16
However,
it should be noted that even though standpoint arguments are
most fully articulated as such in feminist writings, they appear in the
scientific projects of all of the new social movements.17
A social history
of standpoint theory would focus on what happens when marginalized
peoples begin to gain public voice. In societies where scientific rationality
and objectivity are claimed to be highly valued by dominant
groups, marginalized peoples and those who listen attentively to them
will point out that from the perspective of marginal lives, the dominant
accounts are less than maximally objective. Knowledge claims are
always socially situated, and the failure by dominant groups critically
and systematically to interrogate their advantaged social situation and
the effect of such advantages on their beliefs leaves their social situation
a scientifically and epistmologically disadvantaged one for generating
knowledge. Moreover, these accounts end up legitimating exploitative“practical
politics” even when those who produce them
have good intentions.
The starting point of standpoint theory—and its claim that is most
often misread—is that in societies stratefied by race, ethnicity, class,
gender, sexuality, or some other such politics shaping the very structure
of a society, the activities of those at the top both organize and
set limits on what persons who perform such activities can understand
about themselves and the world around them.“ T h e r e are some perspectives
on society from which, however well-intentioned one may
be, the real relations of humans with each other and with the natural
world are not visible.”18
In contrast, the activities of those at the bottom
of such social hierarchies can provide starting points for
thought—for everyone's research and scholarship—from which humans’
relations with each other and the natural world can become
visible. This is because the experience and lives of marginalized peoples,
as they understand them, provide particularly significant problems
to be explained or research agendas. These experiences and lives
have been devalued or ignored as a source of objectivity-maximizing
questions—the answers to which are not necessarily to be found in
those experiences or lives but elsewhere in the beliefs and activities
of people at the center who make policies and engage in social practices
that shape marginal lives.” So one’s social situation enables and
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55Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology
sets limits on what one can know; some social situations—critically
unexamined dominant ones—are more limiting than others in this
respect, and what makes these situations more limiting is their inability
to generate the most critical questions about received belief.20
It is this sense in which Dorothy Smith argues that women’s experience
is the“grounds” of feminist knowledge and that such knowledge
should change the discipline of sociology.21
Women’s lives (our
many different lives and different experiences!) can provide the starting
point for asking new, critical questions about not only those women’s
lives but also about men’s lives and, most importantly, the causal
relations between them.22
For example, she points out that if we start
thinking from women’s lives, we (anyone) can see that women are
assigned the work that men do not want to do for themselves, especially
the care of everyone’s bodies—the bodies of men, babies, children,
old people, the sick, and their own bodies. And they are assigned
responsibility for the local places where those bodies exist as they
clean and care for their own and others’ houses and work places.23
This kind of“women’s work” frees men in the ruling groups to immerse
themselves in the world of abstract concepts. The more successful
women are at this concrete work, the more invisible it becomes
to men as distinctively social labor. Caring for bodies and the places
bodies exist disappears into“nature,” as, for example, in sociobiol¬
ogical claims about the naturalness of“altruistic” behavior for females
and its unnaturalness for males or in the systematic reticence of many
prefeminist marxists actually to analyze who does what in everyday
sexual, emotional, and domestic work, and to integrate such analyses
into their accounts of“working class labor.” Smith argues that we
should not be surprised that men have trouble seeing women’s activities
as part of distinctively human culture and history once we notice
how invisible the social character of this work is from the perspective
of their activities. She points out that if we start from women’s lives,
we can generate questions about why it is that it is primarily women
who are assigned such activities and what the consequences are for
the economy, the state, the family, the educational system, and other
social institutions of assigning body and emotional work to one group
and“head” work to another.24
These questions lead to less partial and
distorted understandings of women’s worlds, men’s worlds, and the
causal relations between them than do the questions originating only
in that part of human activity that men in the dominant groups reserve
for themselves—the abstract mental work of managing and adminis-
trating.
Standpoint epistemology sets the relationship between knowledge
and politics at the center of its account in the sense that it tries to
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56 FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES
provide causal accounts—to explain—the effects that different kinds
of politics have on the production of knowledge. Of course, empiricism
also is concerned with the effects politics has on the production
of knowledge, but prefeminist empiricism conceptualizes politics as
entirely bad. Empiricism tries to purify science of all such bad politics
by adherence to what it takes to be rigorous methods for the testing
of hypotheses. From the perspective of standpoint epistemology, this
is far too weak a strategy to maximize the objectivity of the results of
research that empiricists desire. Thought that begins from the lives
of the oppressed has no chance to get its critical questions voiced or
heard within such an empiricist conception of the way to produce
knowledge. Prefeminist empiricists can only perceive such questions
as the intrusion of politics into science, which therefore deteriorates
the objectivity of the results of research. Spontaneous feminist empiricism,
for all its considerable virtues, nevertheless contains distorting
traces of these assumptions, and they block the ability of this
theory of science to develop maximally strong criteria for systematic
ways to maximize objectivity.
Thus the standpoint claims that all knowledge attempts are socially
situated and that some of these objective social locations are better
than others as starting points for knowledge projects challenge some
of the most fundamental assumptions of the scientific world view and
the Western thought that takes science as its model of how to produce
knowledge. It sets out a rigorous“logic of discovery” intended to
maximize the objectivity of the results of research and thereby to
produce knowledge that can be for marginalized people (and those
who would know what the marginalized can know) rather than for
the use only of dominant groups in their projects of administering
and managing the lives of marginalized people.
3. What Are the Grounds for Knowledge Claims?
Standpoint theories argue for“starting off thought” from the lives
of marginalized peoples; beginning in those determinate, objective
locations in any social order will generate illuminating critical questions
that do not arise in thought that begins from dominant group
lives. Starting off research from women’s lives will generate less partial
and distorted accounts not only of women’s lives but also of men’s
lives and of the whole social order. Women’s lives and experiences
provide the“grounds” for this knowledge, though these clearly do
not provide foundations for knowledge in the conventional philosophical
sense. These grounds are the site, the activities, from which
scientific questions arise. The epistemologically advantaged starting
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57Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology
points for research do not guarantee that the researcher can maximize
objectivity in her account; these grounds provide only a necessary—
not a sufficient—starting point for maximizing objectivity. It is useful
to contrast standpoint grounds for knowledge with four other kinds:
the“God-trick,” ethnocentrism, relativism, and the unique abilities
of the oppressed to produce knowledge.
Standpoint Theories versus the “God-Trick”
First, for standpoint theories, the grounds for knowledge are fully
saturated with history and social life rather than abstracted from it.
Standpoint knowledge projects do not claim to originate in purportedly
universal human problematics; they do not claim to perform the
“God-trick.”25
However, the fact that feminist knowledge claims are
socially situated does not in practice distinguish them from any other
knowledge claims that have ever been made inside or outside the
history of Western thought and the disciplines today; all bear the fingerprints
of the communities that produce them. All thought by humans
starts off from socially determinate lives. As Dorothy Smith puts
the point,“women’s perspective, as I have analyzed it here, discredits
sociology’s claim to constitute an objective knowledge independent
of the sociologists’s situation. Its conceptual procedures, methods,
and relevances are seen to organize its subject matter from a determinate
position in society.”26
It is a delusion—and a historically identifiable one—to think that
human thought could completely erase the fingerprints that reveal its
production process. Conventional conceptions of scientific method
enable scientists to be relatively good at eliminating those social interests
and values from the results of research that differ within the
scientific community, because whenever experiments are repeated by
different observers, differences in the social values of individual observers
(or groups of them from different research teams) that have
shaped the results of their research will stand out from the sameness
of the phenomena that other researchers (or teams of them) report.27
But scientific method provides no rules, procedures, or techniques
for even identifying, let alone eliminating, social concerns and interests
that are shared by all (or virtually all) of the observers, nor does
it encourage seeking out observers whose social beliefs vary in order
to increase the effectiveness of scientific method. Thus culturewide
assumptions that have not been criticized within the scientific research
process are transported into the results of research, making visible
the historicity of specific scientific claims to people at other times,
other places, or in other groups in the very same social order. We
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58 FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES
could say that standpoint theories not only acknowledge the social
situatedness that is the inescapable lot of all knowledge-seeking projects
but also, more importantly, transform it into a systematically
available scientific resource.
Standpoint Theories versus Ethnocentrism
Universalists have traditionally been able to imagine only ethnocentrism
and relativism as possible alternatives to“ t h e view from
nowhere” that they assert grounds universal claims, so they think
standpoint epistemologies must be supporting (or doomed to) one or
the other of these positions. Is there any reasonable sense in which
the ground for knowledge claimed by feminist standpoint theory is
ethnocentric?
Ethnocentrism is the belief in the inherent superiority of one’s own
ethnic group or culture.28
Do feminist standpoint theorists argue that
the lives of their own group or culture is superior as a grounds for
knowledge?29
At first glance, one might think that this is the case if
one notices that it is primarily women who have argued for starting
thought from women’s lives. However, there are several reasons why
it would be a mistake to conclude from this fact that feminist standpoint
theory is ethnocentric.
First, standpoint theorists themselves all explicitly argue that marginal
lives that are not their own provide better grounds for certain
kinds of knowledge. Thus the claim by women that women’s lives
provide a better starting point for thought about gender systems is
not the same as the claim that their own lives are the best such starting
points. They are not denying that their own lives can provide important
resources for such projects, but they are arguing that other, different
(and sometimes oppositional) women’s lives also provide such
resources. For example, women who are not prostitutes and have not
been raped have argued that starting thought from women’s experiences
and activities in such events reveals that the state is male because
it looks at women’s lives here just as men (but not women) do.
Dorothy Smith writes of the value of starting to think about a certain
social situation she describes from the perspective of Native Canadian
lives.30
Bettina Aptheker has argued that starting thought from the
everyday lives of women who are holocaust survivors, Chicana cannery
workers, older lesbians, African-American women in slavery,
Japanese-American concentration camp survivors, and others who
have had lives different from hers increases our ability to understand
a great deal about the distorted way the dominant groups conceptualize
politics, resistance, community, and other key history and so¬
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cial science notions.” Patricia Hill Collins, an African-American sociologist,
has argued that starting thought from the lives of poor and
in some cases illiterate African-American women reveals important
truths about the lives of intellectuals, both African-American and European-American,
as well as about those women.32
Many theorists who
are not mothers (as well as many who are) have argued that starting
thought in mother-work generates important questions about the social
order. Of course some women no doubt do argue that their own
lives provide the one and only best starting point for all knowledge
projects, but this is not what standpoint theory holds. Thus, although
it is not an accident that so many women have argued for feminist
standpoint approaches, neither is it evidence that standpoint claims
are committed to ethnocentrism.
Second, and relatedly, thinkers with“center” identities have also
argued that marginalized lives are better places from which to start
asking causal and critical questions about the social order. After all,
Hegel was not a slave, though he argued that the master/slave relationship
could better be understood from the perspective of slaves’
‘activities. Marx, Engels, and Lukacs were not engaged in the kind of
labor that they argued provided the starting point for developing their
theories about class society. There are men who have argued for the
scientific and epistemic advantages of starting thought from women’s
lives, European-Americans who understand that much can be learned
about their lives as well as African-American lives if they start their
thought from the latter, and so on.33
Third, women's lives are shaped by the rules of femininity or womanliness;
in this sense they“express feminine culture.” Perhaps the
critic of standpoint theories thinks feminists are defending femininity
and thus“ t h e i r own culture.” But all feminist analyses, including
feminist standpoint writings, are in principle ambivalent about the
value of femininity and womanliness. Feminists criticize femininity
on the grounds that it is fundamentally defined by and therefore part
of the conceptual project of exalting masculinity; it is the “other”
against which men define themselves as admirably and uniquely human.
Feminist thought does not try to substitute loyalty to femininity
for the loyalty to masculinity it criticizes in conventional thought.
Instead, it criticizes all gender loyalties as capable of producing only
partial and distorted results of research. However, it must do this while
also arguing that women’s lives have been inappropriately devalued.
Feminist thought is forced to“speak as” and on behalf of the very
notion it criticizes and tries to dismantle—women. In the contradictory
nature of this project lies both its greatest challenge and a source
of its great creativity. It is because the conditions of women’s lives
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are worse than their brothers’ in so many cases that women’s lives
provide better places from which to start asking questions about a
social order that tolerates and in so many respects even values highly
the bad conditions for women’s lives (women’s double-day of work,the
epidemic of violence against women, women’s cultural obligation to
be“beautiful,” and so on).34
Thus research processes that proble¬
matize how gender practices shape behavior and belief—that interrogate
and criticize both masculinity and femininity—stand a better
chance of avoiding such biasing gender loyalties.
Fourth, there are many feminisms, and these can be understood to
be starting off their analyses from the lives of different historical
groups of women. Liberal feminism initially started off its analyses
from the lives of women in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
European and U.S. educated classes; Marxist feminism, from the lives
of wage-working women in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
industrializing or“modernizing” societies; Third World feminism,
from the lives of late twentieth-century women of Third World
descent—and these different Third World lives produce different feminisms.
Standpoint theory argues that each of these groups of women’s
lives is a good place to start in order to explain certain aspects of the
social order. There is no single, ideal woman’s life from which standpoint
theories recommend that thought start. Instead, one must turn
to all of the lives that are marginalized in different ways by the operative
systems of social stratification. The different feminisms inform
each other; we can learn from all of them and change our patterns
of belief.
Last, one can note that from the perspective of marginalized lives,
it is the dominant claims that we should in fact regard as ethnocentric.
It is relatively easy to see that overtly racist, sexist, classist, and het¬
erosexist claims have the effect of insisting that the dominant culture
is superior. But it is also the case that claims to have produced universally
valid beliefs—principles of ethics, of human nature, episte¬
mologies, and philosophies of science—are ethnocentric. Only members
of the powerful groups in societies stratified by race, ethnicity,
class, gender, and sexuality could imagine that their standards for
knowledge and the claims resulting from adherence to such standards
should be found preferable by all rational creatures, past, present, and
future. This is what the work of Smith, Hartsock, and the others discussed
earlier shows. Moreover, standpoint theory itself is a historical
emergent. There are good reasons why it has not emerged at other
times in history; no doubt it will be replaced by more useful episte¬
mologies in the future—the fate of all human products.35
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Standpoint Theory versus Relativism, Perspectivalism, and Pluralism
If there is no single, transcendental standard for deciding between
competing knowledge claims, then it is said that there can be only
local historical ones, each valid in its own lights but having no claims
against others. The literature on cognitive relativism is by now huge,
and here is not the place to review it.36
However, standpoint theory
does not advocate—nor is it doomed to—relativism. It argues against
the idea that all social situations provide equally useful resources for
learning about the world and against the idea that they all set equally
strong limits on knowledge. Contrary to what universalists think,
standpoint theory is not committed to such a claim as a consequence
of rejecting universalism. Standpoint theory provides arguments for
the claim that some social situations are scientifically better than
others as places from which to start off knowledge projects, and those
arguments must be defeated if the charge of relativism is to gain plau-
sibility.”
Judgmental (or epistemological) relativism is anathema to any scientific
project, and feminist ones are no exception.38
It is not equally
true as its denial that women’s uteruses wander around in their bodies
when they take math courses, that only Man the Hunter made important
contributions to distinctively human history, that women are
biologically programmed to succeed at mothering and fail at equal
participation in governing society, that women’s preferred modes of
moral reasoning are inferior to men’s, that targets of rape and battering
must bear the responsibility for what happens to them, that the
sexual molestation and other physical abuses children report are only
their fantasies, and so on—as various sexist and androcentric scientific
theories have claimed. Feminist and prefeminist claims are usually
not complementary but conflicting, just as the claim that the earth is
flat conflicts with the claim that it is round. Sociological relativism
permits us to acknowledge that different people hold different beliefs,
but what is at issue in rethinking objectivity is the different matter of
judgmental or epistemological relativism. Standpoint theories neither
hold nor are doomed to it.
Both moral and cognitive forms of judgmental relativism have determinate
histories; they appear as intellectual problems at certain
times in history in only some cultures and only for certain groups of
people. Relativism is not fundamentally a problem that emerges from
feminist or any other thought that starts in marginalized lives; it is
one that emerges from the thought of the dominant groups. Judgmental
relativism is sometimes the most that dominant groups can
stand to grant to their critics—“OK, your claims are valid for you, but
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mine are valid for me.”39
Recognizing the importance of thinking
about who such a problem belongs to—identifying its social locationis
one of the advantages of standpoint theory.
Standpoint Theory versus the Unique Abilities of the Oppressed
to Produce Knowledge
This is another way of formulating the charge that standpoint theories,
in contrast to conventional theories of knowledge, are ethnocentric.
However, in this form the position has tempted many feminists,
as it has members of other liberatory knowledge projects.40
We
can think of this claim as supporting“identity science” projects—the
knowledge projects that support and are supported by“identity politics.”
In the words of the Combahee River Collective’s critique of
liberal and marxist thought (feminist as well as prefeminist) that failed
to socially situate anti-oppression claims:“Focusing upon our own
oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe
that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come
directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody
else’s oppression.”41
(They were tired of hearing about how they
should be concerned to improve others’ lives and how others were
going to improve theirs.)
To pursue the issue further, we will turn to examine just who is the
“subject of knowledge” for standpoint theories. But we can prepare
for that discussion by recollecting yet again that Hegel was not a slave,
though he grasped the critical understanding of the relations between
master and slave that became available only if he started off his
thought from the slave’s activities, and that Marx, Engels and Lukacs
were not proletarians. Two questions are raised by these examples:
What is the role for marginalized experience in the standpoint projects
of members of dominant groups? And what are the special resources,
but also limits, that the lives of people in dominant groups provide
in generating the more objective knowledge claims standpoint theories
call for? We shall begin to address these issues in the next section.
To conclude this one, marginalized lives provide the scientific problems
and the research agendas—not the solutions—for standpoint theories.
Starting off thought from these lives provides fresh and more
critical questions about how the social order works than does starting
off thought from the unexamined lives of members of dominant
groups. Most natural and social scientists (and philosophers!) are
themselves members of these dominant groups, whether by birth or
through upward mobility into scientific and professional/managerial
careers. Those who are paid to teach and conduct research receive a
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disproportionate share of the benefits of that very nature and social
order that they are trying to explain. Thinking from marginal lives
leads one to question the adequacy of the conceptual frameworks that
the natural and social sciences have designed to explain (for themselves)
themselves and the world around them. This is the sense in
which marginal lives ground knowledge for standpoint approaches.
4. New Subjects of Knowledge
For empiricist epistemology, the subject or agent of knowledge—
that which“knows” the“best beliefs” of the day—is supposed to have
a number of distinctive characteristics. First, this subject of knowledge
is culturally and historically disembodied or invisible because knowledge
is by definition universal.“Science says . . . , ” we are told. Whose
science, we can ask? The drug and cigarette companies? The Surgeon
General’s? The National Institute of Health’s? The science of the critics
of the NIH’s racism and sexism? Empiricism insists that scientific
knowledge has no particular historical subject. Second, in this respect,
the subject of scientific knowledge is different in kind from the objects
whose properties scientific knowledge describes and explains, because
the latter are determinate in space and time. Third, though the
subject of knowledge for empiricists is transhistorical, knowledge is
initially produced (“discovered”) by individuals and groups of individuals
(reflected in the practice of scientific awards and honors), not
by culturally specific societies or subgroups in a society such as a
certain class or gender or race. Fourth, the subject is homogeneous
and unitary, because knowledge must be consistent and coherent. If
the subject of knowledge were permitted to be multiple and heterogeneous,
then the knowledge produced by such subjects would be
multiple and contradictory and thus inconsistent and incoherent.
The subjects of knowledge for standpoint theories contrast in all
four respects. First, they are embodied and visible, because the lives
from which thought has started are always present and visible in the
results of that thought. This is true even though the way scientific
method is operationalized usually succeeds in removing all personal
or individual fingerprints from the results of research. But personal
fingerprints are not the problem standpoint theory is intended to address.
The thought of an age is of an age, and the delusion that one’s
thought can escape historical locatedness is just one of the thoughts
that is typical of dominant groups in these and other ages. The “scientific
world view” is, in fact, a view of (dominant groups in) modern,
Western societies, as the histories of science proudly point out. Standpoint
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herent claim that the content of“ m o d e r n and Western” scientific
thought is also, paradoxically, not shaped by its historical location.
Second, the fact that subjects of knowledge are embodied and socially
located has the consequence that they are not fundamentally
different from objects of knowledge. We should assume causal symmetry
in the sense that the same kinds of social forces that shape
objects of knowledge also shape (but do not determine) knowers and
their scientific projects.
This may appear to be true only for the objects of social science
knowledge, not for the objects that the natural sciences study. After
all, trees, rocks, planetary orbits, and electrons do not constitute themselves
as historical actors. What they are does not depend on what
they think they are; they do not think or carry on any of the other
activities that distinguish human communities from other constituents
of the world around us. However, this distinction turns out to be
irrelevant to the point here because, in fact, scientists never can study
the trees, rocks, planetary orbits, or electrons that are “out there”
and untouched by human concerns. Instead, they are destined to study
something different (but hopefully systematically related to what is
“out there”): nature as an object of knowledge. Trees, rocks, planetary
orbits, and electrons always appear to natural scientists only as they
are already socially constituted in some of the ways that humans and
their social groups are already socially constituted for the social scientist.
Such objects are already effectively “removed from pure nature”
into social life—they are social objects—by, first of all, the contemporary
general cultural meanings that these objects have for
everyone, including the entire scientific community.42
They also become
socially constituted objects of knowledge through the shapes
and meanings these objects gain for scientists because of earlier generations
of scientific discussion about them. Scientists never observe
nature apart from such traditions; even when they criticize some aspects
of them they must assume others in order to carry on the criticism.
They could not do science if they did not both borrow from
and also criticize these traditions. Their assumptions about what they
see are always shaped by“conversations” they carry on with scientists
of the past. Finally, their own interactions with such objects also culturally
constitute them; to treat a piece of nature with respect, violence,
degradation, curiosity, or indifference is to participate in culturally
constituting such an object of knowledge. In these respects,
nature as an object of knowledge simulates social life, and the processes
of science themselves are a significant contributor to this phenomenon.
Thus the subject and object of knowledge for the natural
sciences are also not significantly different in kind. Whatever kinds
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of social forces shape the subjects are also thereby shaping their objects
of knowledge.
Third, consequently, communities and not primarily individuals
produce knowledge. For one thing, what I believe that I thought
through all by myself (in my mind), which I know, only gets transformed
from my personal belief to knowledge when it is socially legitimated.
Just as importantly, my society ends up assuming all the
claims I make that neither I nor my society critically interrogate. It
assumes the eurocentric, androcentric, heterosexist, and bourgeois
beliefs that I do not critically examine as part of my scientific research
and that, consequently, shape my thought and appear as part of my
knowledge claims. These are some of the kinds of features that subsequent
ages (and Others today) will say make my thought characteristic
of my age, or society, community, race, class, gender, or sexuality.
The best scientific thought of today is no different in this respect
from the thought of Galileo or Darwin; in all can be found not only
brilliant thoughts first expressed by individuals and then legitimated
by communities but also assumptions we now regard as false that
were distinctive to a particular historical era and not identified as part
of the“evidence” that scientists actually used to select the results of
research.43
Fourth, the subjects/agents of knowledge for feminist standpoint
theory are multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory or incoherent,
not unitary, homogeneous, and coherent as they are for empiricist
epistemology.44
Feminist knowledge has started off from women’s
lives, but it has started off from many different women’s lives; there
is no typical or essential woman’s life from which feminisms start
their thought. Moreover, these different women’s lives are in important
respects opposed to each other. Feminist knowledge has arisen
from European and African women, from economically privileged and
poor women, from lesbians and heterosexuals, from Protestant, Jewish,
and Islamic women. Racism and imperialism, local and international
structures of capitalist economies, institutionalized homophobia
and compulsory heterosexuality, and the political conflicts
between ethnic and religious cultures produce multiple, heterogeneous,
and contradictory feminist accounts. Nevertheless, thought
that starts off from each of these different kinds of lives can generate
less partial and distorted accounts of nature and social life.
However, the subject/agent of feminist knowledge is multiple, heterogeneous,
and frequently contradictory in a second way that mirrors
the situation for women as a class. It is the thinker whose consciousness
is bifurcated, the outsider within, the marginal person now located
at the center,45
the person who is committed to two agendas
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that are by their nature at least partially in conflict—the liberal feminist,
socialist feminist, Sandinista feminist, Islamic feminist, or feminist
scientist—who has generated feminist sciences and new knowledge.
It is starting off thought from a contradictory social position
that generates feminist knowledge. So the logic of the directive to
“start thought from women’s lives” requires that one start one’s
thought from multiple lives that are in many ways in conflict with
each other, each of which itself has multiple and contradictory commitments.
This may appear an overwhelming requirement—or even
an impossible one—because Western thought has required the fiction
that we have and thus think from unitary and coherent lives. But the
challenge of learning to think from the perspective of more than one
life when those lives are in conflict with each other is familiar to
anthropologists, historians, conflict negotiators, domestic workers,
wives, mothers—indeed, to most of us in many everyday contexts.
Both empiricist philosophy and marxism could maintain the fiction
that unitary and coherent subjects of knowledge were to be preferred
only by defining one socially distinctive group of people as the ideal
knowers and arguing that all others lacked the characteristics that
made this group ideal. Thus, the liberal philosophy associated with
empiricism insisted that it was the possession of reason that enabled
humans to know the world the way it is and then defined as not fully
rational women, Africans, the working class, the Irish, Jews, other
peoples from Mediterranean cultures, and so on. It was said that no
individuals in these groups were capable of the dispassionate, disinterested
exercise of individual moral and cognitive reason that was
the necessary condition for becoming the ideal subject of knowledge.
Similarly, traditional marxism argued that only the industrial proletariat
possessed the characteristics for the ideal subject of marxist
political economy. Peasants’, slaves’ and women’s work, as well as
bourgeois activities, made these people’s lives inferior starting points
for generating knowledge of the political economy.46
In contrast, the
logic of standpoint theory leads to the refusal to essentialize its subjects
of knowledge.
This logic of multiple subjects leads to the recognition that the
subject of liberatory feminist knowledge must also be, in an important
if controversial sense, the subject of every other liberatory knowledge
project. This is true in the collective sense of “subject of knowledge,”
because lesbian, poor, and racially marginalized women are all
women, and therefore all feminists will have to grasp how gender,
race, class, and sexuality are used to construct each other. It will have
to do so if feminism is to be liberatory for marginalized women, but
also if it is to avoid deluding dominant group women about their/our
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own situations. If this were not so, there would be no way to distinguish
between feminism and the narrow self-interest of dominant
group women—just as conventional androcentric thought permits no
criterion for distinguishing between“best beliefs” and those that serve
the self-interest of men as men. (Bourgeois thought permits no criterion
for identifying specifically bourgeois self-interest; racist
thought, for identifying racist self-interest; and so on.)
But the subject of every other liberatory movement must also learn
how gender, race, class, and sexuality are used to construct each other
in order to accomplish their goals. That is, analyses of class relations
must look at their agendas from the perspective of women’s lives, too.
Women, too, hold class positions, and they are not identical to their
brothers’. Moreover, as many critics have pointed out, agendas of the
left need to deal with the fact that bosses regularly and all too successfully
attempt to divide the working class against itself by manipulating
gender hostilities. If women are forced to tolerate lower wages
and double-days of work, employers can fire men and hire women to
make more profit. Antiracist movements must look at their issues from
the perspective of the lives of women of color, and so forth. Everything
that feminist thought must know must also inform the thought of every
other liberatory movement, and vice versa. It is not just the women
in those other movements who must know the world from the perspective
of women’s lives. Everyone must do so if the movements are
to succeed at their own goals. Most importantly, this requires that
women be active directors of the agendas of these movements. But it
also requires that men in those movements be able to generate original
feminist knowledge from the perspective of women’s lives as, for example,
John Stuart Mill, Marx and Engels, Frederick Douglass, and
later male feminists have done.47
However, if every other liberatory movement must generate feminist
knowledge, it cannot be that women are the unique generators
of feminist knowledge. Women can not claim this ability to be
uniquely theirs, and men must not be permitted to claim that because
they are not women, they are not obligated to produce fully feminist
analyses. Men, too, must contribute distinctive forms of specifically
feminist knowledge from their particular social situation. Men’s
thought, too, will begin first from women’s lives in all the ways that
feminist theory, with its rich and contradictory tendencies, has helped
us all—women as well as men—to understand how to do. It will start
there in order to gain the maximally objective theoretical frameworks
within which men can begin to describe and explain their own and
women’s lives in less partial and distorted ways. This is necessary if
men are to produce more than the male supremacist“folk belief”
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about themselves and the world they live in to which female feminists
object. Women have had to learn how to substitute the generation of
feminist thought for the“gender nativism” androcentric cultures encourage
in them, too. Female feminists are made, not born. Men, too
must learn to take historic responsibility for the social position from
which they speak.
Patricia Hill Collins has stressed the importance to the development
of Black feminist thought of genuine dialogue across differences, and
of the importance of making coalitions with other groups if that dialogue
is to happen.
While Black feminist thought may originate with Black feminist intellectuals,
it cannot flourish isolated from the experiences and ideas of
other groups. The dilemma is that Black women intellectuals must place
our own experiences and consciousness at the center of any serious
efforts to develop Black feminist thought yet not have that thought become
separatist and exclusionary....
By advocating, refining, and disseminating Black feminist thought,
other groups—such as Black men, white women, white men, and other
people of color—further its development. Black women can produce an
attenuated version of Black feminist thought separated from other
groups. Other groups cannot produce Black feminist thought without
African-American women. Such groups can, however, develop self-defined
knowledge reflecting their own standpoints. But the full actualization
of Black feminist thought requires a collaborative enterprise with
Black women at the center of a community based on coalitions among
autonomous groups.48
It seems to me that Collins has provided a powerful analysis of the
social relations necessary for the development of less partial and distorted
belief by any knowledge community.
Far from licensing European-Americans to appropriate AfricanAmerican
thought or men to appropriate women’s thought, this approach
challenges members of dominant groups to make themselves
“fit” to engage in collaborative, democratic, community enterprises
with marginal peoples. Such a project requires learning to listen attentively
to marginalized people; it requires educating oneself about
their histories, achievements, preferred social relations, and hopes for
the future; it requires putting one’s body on the line for“their” causes
until they feel like“ o u r ” causes; it requires critical examination of
the dominant institutional beliefs and practices that systematically
disadvantage them; it requires critical self-examination to discover
how one unwittingly participates in generating disadvantage to
them . . . and more. Fortunately, there are plenty of models available
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to us not only today but also through an examination of the history
of members of dominant groups who learned to think from the lives
of marginalized people and to act on what they learned. We can choose
which historical lineage to claim as our own.
To conclude this section, we could say that since standpoint analyses
explain how and why the subject of knowledge always appears
in scientific accounts of nature and social life as part of the object of
knowledge of those accounts, standpoint approaches have had to learn
to use the social situatedness of subjects of knowledge systematically
as a resource for maximizing objectivity. They have made the move
from declaiming as a problem or acknowledging as an inevitable fact
to theorizing as a systematically accessible resource for maximizing
objectivity the inescapable social situatedness of knowledge claims.
5. Standards for Maximizing Objectivity
We are now in a position to draw out of this discussion of the
innovative grounds and subject of knowledge for feminist standpoint
theories the stronger standards for maximizing objectivity that such
theories both require and generate. Strong objectivity requires that
the subject of knowledge be placed on the same critical, causal plane
as the objects of knowledge. Thus, strong objectivity requires what we
can think of as“strong reflexivity.” This is because culturewide (or
nearly culturewide) beliefs function as evidence at every stage in scientific
inquiry: in the selection of problems, the formation of hypotheses,
the design of research (including the organization of research
communities), the collection of data, the interpretation and
sorting of data, decisions about when to stop research, the way results
of research are reported, and so on. The subject of knowledge—the
individual and the historically located social community whose unexamined
beliefs its members are likely to hold“unknowingly,” so to
speak—must be considered as part of the object of knowledge from
the perspective of scientific method. All of the kinds of objectivitymaximizing
procedures focused on the nature and/or social relations
that are the direct object of observation and reflection must also be
focused on the observers and reflectors—scientists and the larger society
whose assumptions they share. But a maximally critical study of
scientists and their communities can be done only from the perspective
of those whose lives have been marginalized by such communities.
Thus, strong objectivity requires that scientists and their communities
be integrated into democracy-advancing projects for scientific and
epistemological reasons as well as moral and political ones.
From the perspective of such standpoint arguments, empiricism’s
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Standards appear weak; empiricism advances only the “objectivism”
that has been so widely criticized from many quarters.49
Objectivism
impoverishes its attempts at maximizing objectivity when it turns away
from the task of critically identifying all of those broad, historical
social desires, interests, and values that have shaped the agendas, contents,
and results of the sciences much as they shape the rest of human
affairs.
Consider, first, how objectivism too narrowly operationalizes the
notion of maximizing objectivity.50
The conception of value-free, impartial,
dispassionate research is supposed to direct the identification
of all social values and their elimination from the results of research,
yet it has been operationalized to identify and eliminate only those
social values and interests that differ among the researchers and critics
who are regarded by the scientific community as competent to make
such judgments. If the community of“qualified” researchers and critics
systematically excludes, for example, all African-Americans and
women of all races and if the larger culture is stratified by race and
gender and lacks powerful critiques of this stratification, it is not plausible
to imagine that racist and sexist interests and values would be
identified within a community of scientists composed entirely of people
who benefit—intentionally or not—from institutionalized racism
and sexism. This kind of blindness is advanced by the conventional
belief that the truly scientific part of knowledge seeking—the part
controlled by methods of research—occurs only in the context of justification.
The context of discovery, in which problems are identified
as appropriate for scientific investigation, hypotheses are formulated,
key concepts are defined—this part of the scientific process is thought
to be unexaminable within science by rational methods. Thus “ r e a l
science” is restricted to those processes controllable by methodological
rules. The methods of science—or rather, of the special sciencesare
restricted to procedures for the testing of already formulated hypotheses.
Untouched by these methods are those values and interests
entrenched in the very statement of what problem is to be researched
and in the concepts favored in the hypotheses that are to be tested.
Recent histories of science are full of cases in which broad social
assumptions stood little chance of identification or elimination
through the very best research procedures of the day.51
Thus objectivism
operationalizes the notion of objectivity in much too narrow a
way to permit the achievement of the value-free research that is supposed
to be its outcome.
But objectivism also conceptualizes the desired value-neutrality of
objectivity too broadly. Objectivists claim that objectivity requires the
elimination of all social values and interests from the research process
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and the results of research. It is clear, however, that not all social
values and interests have the same bad effects upon the results of
research. Democracy-advancing values have systematically generated
less partial and distorted beliefs than others.52
Objectivism’s rather weak standards for maximizing objectivity
make objectivity a mystifying notion, and its mystificatory character
is largely responsible for its usefulness and its widespread appeal to
dominant groups. It offers hope that scientists and science institutions,
themselves admittedly historically located, can produce claims that
will be regarded as objectively valid without having to examine critically
their own historical commitments from which—intentionally or
not—they actively construct their scientific research. It permits scientists
and science institutions to be unconcerned with the origins or
consequences of their problematics and practices or with the social
values and interests that these problematics and practices support. It
offers the false hope of enacting what Francis Bacon erroneously
promised for the method of modern science:“ T h e course I propose
for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness
and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on
a level.” His“way of discovering science goes far to level men’s wits,
and leaves but little to individual excellence, because it performs
everything by surest rules and demonstrations. ”53
In contrast, standpoint
approaches requires the strong objectivity that can take the subject
as well as the object of knowledge to be a necessary object of
critical, causal—scientific!—social explanations. This program of
strong reflexivity is a resource for objectivity, in contrast to the obstacle
that de facto reflexivity has posed to weak objectivity.
Some feminists and thinkers from other liberatory knowledge projects
have thought that the very notion of objectivity should be abandoned.
They say that it is hopelessly tainted by its use in racist, imperialist,
bourgeois, homophobic, and androcentric scientific
projects. Moreover, it is tied to a theory of representation and concept
of the self or subject that insists on a rigid barrier between subject
and object of knowledge—between self and Other—which feminism
and other new social movements label as distinctively androcentric
or eurocentric. Finally, the conventional notion of objectivity institutionalizes
a certain kind of lawlessness at the heart of science, we
could say, by refusing to theorize any criteria internal to scientific
goals for distinguishing between scientific method, on the one hand,
and such morally repugnant acts as torture or ecological destruction,
on the other. Scientists and scientific institutions disapprove of, engage
in political activism against, and set up special committees to
screen scientific projects for such bad consequences, but these remain
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ad hoc measures, extrinsic to the conventional“logic” of scientific
research.
However, there is not just one legitimate way to conceptualize objectivity,
any more than there is only one way to conceptualize freedom,
democracy, or science. The notion of objectivity has valuable
political and intellectual histories; as it is transformed into “strong
objectivity” by the logic of standpoint epistemologies, it retains central
features of the older conception. In particular, might should not make
right in the realm of knowledge production any more than in matters
of ethics. Understanding ourselves and the world around us requires
understanding what others think of us and our beliefs and actions,
not just what we think of ourselves and them.54
Finally, the appeal to
objectivity is an issue not only between feminist and prefeminist science
and knowledge projects but also within each feminist and other
emancipatory research agenda. There are many feminisms, some of
which result in claims that distort the racial, class, sexuality, and gender
relationships in society. Which ones generate less or more partial
and distorted accounts of nature and social life? The notion of objectivity
is useful in providing a way to think about the gap that should
exist between how any individual or group wants the world to be and
how in fact it is.55
6. An Objection Considered
“Why not just keep the old notion of objectivity as requiring valueneutrality
and argue instead that the problem feminism raises is how
to get it, not that the concept itself should be changed? Why not argue
that it is the notion of scientific method that should be transformed,
not objectivity?”
This alternative position is attractive for several reasons. For one
thing, clearly feminist standpoint theorists no less than other feminists
want to root out sexist and androcentric bias from the results of research.
They want results of research that are not“loyal to gender”—
feminine or masculine. In this sense, don’t they want to maximize
value-neutrality—that is, old-fashioned objectivity—in the results of re-
search?
Moreover, in important respects an epistemology and a method for
doing research in the broadest sense of the term have the same consequences
or, at least, are deeply implicated in each other. What would
be the point of a theory of knowledge that did not make prescriptions
for how to go about getting knowledge or of a prescription for getting
knowledge that did not arise from a theory about how knowledge can
be and has been produced? So why not appropriate and transform
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what the sciences think of as scientific method, but leave the notion
of objectivity intact? Why not argue that the standpoint theories have
finally completed the quest for a“logic of discovery” begun and then
abandoned by philosophers some decades ago? They are calling for
an“operationalization” of scientific method that includes the context
of discovery and the social practices of justification in the appropriate
domain of its rules and recommended procedures.56
Scientific method
must be understood to begin back in the context of discovery, in which
scientific“problems” are identified and bold hypotheses conjectured.
Then“starting from marginalized lives” becomes part of the method
of maximizing value-neutral objectivity. This possibility could gain
support from the fact that some standpoint theorists consistently talk
about their work interchangeably as an epistemology and a method
for doing research.57
Attractive as this alternative is, I think it is not attractive enough
to convince that only method and not also the concept of objectivity
should be reconceptualized. For one thing, this strategy makes it look
reasonable to think it possible to gain value-neutrality in the results
of research. It implies that human ideas can somehow escape their
location in human history. But this no longer appears plausible in the
new social studies of science.
Second, and relatedly, this strategy leads away from the project of
analyzing how our beliefs regarded as true as well as those regarded
as false have social causes and thus, once again, to the assumption of
a crucial difference between subjects and objects of knowledge. It
would leave those results of research that are judged by the scientific
community to be maximally objective to appear to have no social
causes, to be the result only of nature’s impressions on our finally
well-polished, glassy-mirror minds. Objects of knowledge then become,
once again, dissimilar for the subjects of knowledge. Subjects
of real knowledge, unlike subjects of mere opinion, are disembodied
and socially invisible, whereas their natural and social objects of
knowledge are firmly located in social history. Thus the “ s t r o n g
method” approach detached from“strong objectivity” leaves the opposition
between subjects and objects firmly in place—an opposition
that both distorts reality and has a long history of use in exploiting
marginalized peoples. The“strong objectivity” approach locates this
very assumed difference between subject and object of knowledge in
social history; it calls for a scientific account of this assumption, too.
Third, this strategy leaves reflexivity merely a perpetual problem
rather than also the resource into which standpoint theorists have
transformed it. Observers do change the world that they observe, but
refusing to strengthen the notion of objectivity leaves reflexivity always
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threatening objectivity rather than also as a resource for maximizing
it.
Finally, it is at least paradoxical and most certainly likely to be
confusing that the“strong method only” approach must activate in
the process of producing knowledge those very values, interests, and
politics that it regards as anathema in the results of research. It is at
least odd to direct would-be knowers to go out and reorganize social
life—as one must do to commit such forbidden (and difficult) acts as
starting thought from marginal lives—in order to achieve value-neutrality
in the results of research. Standpoint approaches want to eliminate
dominant group interests and values from the results of research
as well as the interests and values of successfully colonized minorities—loyalty
to femininity as well as to masculinity is to be eliminated
through feminist research. But that does not make the results of such
research value-neutral. It will still be the thought of this era, making
various distinctive assumptions that later generations and others today
will point out to us.
On balance, these disadvantages outweigh the advantages of the
“strong method only” approach.
Can the new social movements“have it both ways”? Can they have
knowledge that is fully socially situated? We can conclude by putting
the question another way: if they cannot, what hope is there for anyone
else to maximize the objectivity of their beliefs?
Notes
1. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, 3 (1988): 581. Reprinted
and revised in Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York:
Routledge, 1991). I thank Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter for helpful comments
on an earlier draft.
2. Important works here include Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity:
Essays on Cartesianism & Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987); Anne Fausto¬
Sterling, Myths of Gender (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Elizabeth Fee,
“Women’s Nature and Scientific Objectivity,” in Woman’s Nature: Rationalizations
of Inequality, ed. Marion Lowe and Ruth Hubbard (New York: Per¬
gamon Press, 1981); Donna Haraway, op. cit. and Primate Visions: Gender,
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Race and Nature in the World of Modem Science (New York: Routledge, 1989);
Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1990); Evelyn Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Lynn Hankinson
Nelson, Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990). These are just some of the important works on
the topic; many other authors have made contributions to the discussion. I
have addressed these issues in The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986) and Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking
From Women’s Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); see also the
essays in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, ed., Discovering Reality: Feminist
Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and the Philosophy
of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel 1983). An interesting parallel discussion
occurs in the feminist jurisprudence literature in the course of critiques of
conventional conceptions of what“the rational man” would do,“ t h e objective
observer” would see, and“the impartial judge” would reason; see, for example
many of the essays in the special issue of the Journal of Legal Education on
Women in Legal Education—Pedagogy, Law, Theory, and Practice 39, 1–2
(1988), ed. Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Martha Minow, and David Vernon; and
Katharine T. Bartlett,“Feminist Legal Methods,” Harvard Law Review 103, 4
(1990).
3. This literature is by now huge. For a sampling of its concerns, see
Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality
and Relativism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982);
Michael Krausz and Jack Meiland, eds., Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); and Stanley Aronowitz,
Science and Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
4. Haraway,“Situated Knowledges,” loc. cit., 579. In the phrase“ a critical
practice for recognizing our own‘semiotic technologies’ for making
meanings,” she also raises here the troubling issue of reflexivity, to which I
shall return.
5. Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology,
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987) and The Conceptual Practices
of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge, (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1990); Nancy Hartsock,“ T h e Feminist Standpoint: Developing
the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Harding
and Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality; Hilary Rose,“Hand, Brain and Heart:
A Feminist Epistemology of the Natural Sciences,” Signs 9, 1 (1983); and my
discussion of these writings in chapter 6 of The Science Question in Feminism.
Alison Jaggar also developed an influential account of standpoint epistemology
in chapter 11 of Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman
& Allenheld, 1983). For more recent developments of standpoint theory
see Patricia Hill Collins, chapters 10 and 11 oi Black Feminist Thought: Knowl¬
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edge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman,
1990) and chapters 5, 6, 7, and 11 of my Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?
6. Chapter 6 of Whose Science?, “ ‘Strong Objectivity’ and Socially Situated
Knowledge,” addresses some of the issues I raise here. However, here
I develop further the differences between the“grounds” and the subject of
knowledge for standpoint theory and for other epistemologies. This is partly
an archeology of standpoint theory—bringing to full light the obscured aspects
of its logic—and partly a reformulation of some of its claims.
7. Scientists sometimes confuse the philosophy of science called “ e m piricism”
with the idea that it is a good thing to collect information about
the empirical world. All philosophies of science recommend the latter. Empiricism
is that account of such practices associated paradigmatically with
Locke, Berkeley and Hume and claiming that sensory experience is the only
or fundamental source of knowledge. It contrasts with theological accounts
that were characteristic of European science of the Middle Ages, with rationalism,
and with Marxist philosophy of science. However, from the perspective
of standpoint theory, it also shares key features with one or another of these
three philosophies. For example, it borrows the monologic voice that seems
proper if one assumes the necessity of a unitary and coherent subject of knowledge,
as do all three.
8. Roy Bhaskar writes that although positivism mystifies the processes
of science, nevertheless it has a certain degree of necessity in that it reflects
the spontaneous consciousness of the lab bench—the tenets of positivism reflect
how it feels like science is done when one is actually gathering observations
of nature. Similarly, from the perspective of standpoint approaches,
the“spontaneous” feminist empiricism I discuss here mystifies the processes
of feminist research, although it has a certain necessity in that it just felt to
these feminist empirical workers like what it was that they were doing as their
work overturned the results of supposedly value-free prefeminist research.
See Roy Bhaskar,“Philosophies as Ideologies of Science: A Contribution to
the Critique of Positivism,” in Reclaiming Reality (New York: Verso, 1989).
Not all forms of empiricism are reasonably thought of as positivist, of course,
but the most prevalent contemporary forms are. The philosophical feminist
empiricism noted below is not positivist.
9. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge; Nelson, Who Knows.
10. There are many standpoint theorists and many spontaneous feminist
empiricists. I present here ideal types of these two theories of knowledge. I
have contrasted these two theories in a number of earlier writings, most recently
on p. 111–37 of Whose Science: Whose Knowledge? The following passage
draws especially on pp. 111–20.
11. Dorothy Smith was right, I now think, to insist (in effect) that standpoint
theory appropriates and transforms the notion of scientific method, not
just of epistemology; see her comments on a paper of mine in American Philosophical
Association Newsletter on Feminism 88, 3 (1989). It is interesting to
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note that by 1989, even the National Academy of Science—no rabble-rousing
antiscience critic!—argues that the methods of science should be understood
to include“ t h e judgments scientists make about the interpretation or reliability
of data . . . , the decisions scientists make about which problems to
pursue or when to conclude an investigation,” and even“ t h e ways scientists
work with each other and exchange information” [On Being a Scientist (Washington
D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989), 5–6].
12. Marcia Millman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Editor’s Introduction”
to Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science (New
York: Anchor Books, 1975), vii. [Reprinted in S. Harding, ed., Feminism and
Methodology, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.)]
13. This description seems to imply that scientists are somehow outside
of the history they are using—for example, capable of determining which are,
in fact, the scientifically and epistemologically most favorable historical locations.
This is not so, of course, and that is why the reflexivity project Haraway
refers to is so important.
14. “Of course here and there will be found careless or poorly trained
scientists, but no real scientist, no good scientist, would produce sexist or
androcentric results of research.” This line of argument has the consequence
that there have been no real or good scientists except for feminists! See “What
Is Feminist Science?,” chapter 12 of Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, for
discussions of this and other attempts to resist the idea that feminist science
is exactly good science but that refusing to acknowledge the feminist component
in good science obscures what makes it good.
15. Frederic Jameson has argued that the feminist standpoint theorists
are the only contemporary thinkers fully to appreciate the Marxist epistemology.
See“History and Class Consciousness as an‘Unfinished Project,’ ”
Rethinking Marxism 1 (1988): 49–72. It should be noted that empiricist explanations
of Marxist accounts are common:“ M a r x had this puzzle. . . . He
made a bold conjecture and then attempted to falsify it. . . . The facts supported
his account and resolved the puzzle.” These make the accounts plausible
to empiricists but fail to engage both with Marx’s own different epistemology
and with the additional“puzzle” of the historical causes of the
emergence of his account, to which Marxist epistemology draws attention.
16. See note 6.
17. Cf., for example, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1989); Monique Wittig,“ T h e Straight Mind,” Feminist Issues 1, 1 (1980); Marilyn
Frye, The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press,
1983); and Charles Mills,“Alternative Epistemologies,” Social Theory and
Practice 14, 3 (1988).
18. Hartsock,“The Feminist Standpoint,” 159. Hartsock’s use of the term
“real relations” may suggest to some readers that she and other standpoint
theorists are hopelessly mired in an epistemology and metaphysics that have
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been discredited by social constructionists. This judgment fails to appreciate
the way standpoint theories reject both pure realist and pure social constructionist
epistemologies and metaphysics. Donna Haraway is particularly good
on this issue. (See her“Situated Knowledges,” cited in note 1.)
19. We shall return later to the point that, for standpoint theorists, reports
of marginalized experience or lives or phenomenologies of the “lived world”
of marginalized peoples are not the answers to questions arising either inside
or outside those lives, though they are necessary to asking the best questions.
20. For an exploration of a number of different ways in which marginal
lives can generate more critical questions, see chapter 5,“ W h a t is Feminist
Epistemology?” in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?
21. See, for example, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology
of Knowledge, 54.
22. The image of knowledge seeking as a journey—“starting off thought
from women’s lives”—is a useful corrective to misunderstandings that more
easily arise from the visual metaphor—“thinking from the perspective of women’s
lives.” The journey metaphor appears often in writings by Hartsock,
Smith, and others.
23. Some women are assigned more of this work than others, but even
wealthy and aristocratic women with plenty of servants are left significantly
responsible for such work in ways their brothers are not.
24. Of course body work and emotional work also require head work—
contrary to the long history of sexist, racist, and class-biased views. See, for
example, Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (New York: Beacon Press, 1989).
And the kind of head work required in administrative and managerial work—
what Smith means by“ruling”—also involves distinctive body and emotional
work, though it is not acknowledged as such. Think of how much of early
childhood education of middle-class children is really about internalizing a
certain kind of (gender-specific) regulation of bodies and emotions.
25. This is Donna Haraway’s phrase in“Situated Knowledges” cited in
note 1.
26. Smith,“Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in
Feminism and Methodology, 91.
27. I idealize the history of science here as is indicated by recent studies
of fraud, carelessness, and unconscious bias that is not detected. See, for
example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton,
1981); L. Kamin, The Science and Politics of IQ (Potomac, Md.: Erlbaum,
1974); and William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of the Truth (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). The issue here can appear to be one about
the sins of individuals, which it is. But far more importantly, it is an issue
about both the unwillingness and impotence of scientific institutions to police
their own practices. They must do so, for any other alternative is less effective.
But science institutions will not want to or be competent to do so until they
are more integrated into democratic social projects.
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79Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology
28. Richard Rorty is unusual in arguing that because social situatedness
is indeed the lot of all human knowledge projects, we might as well embrace
our ethnocentrism while pursuing the conversations of mankind. His defense
of ethnocentrism is a defense of a kind of fatalism about the impossibility of
people ever transcending their social situation; in a significant sense this
comes down to and converges with the standard definition of ethnocentrism
centered in my argument here. (I thank Linda Alcoff for helping me to clarify
this point.) He does not imagine that one can effectively change one’s “social
situation” by, for example, participating in a feminist political movement,
reading and producing feminist analyses, and so on. From the perspective of
his argument, it is mysterious how any woman (or man) ever becomes a
feminist because our“social situation” is initially to be constrained by patriarchal
institutions, ideologies, and the like. How did John Stuart Mill or
Simone de Beauvoir ever come to think such thoughts as they did? See his
Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
29. Of course a gender is not an ethnicity. Yet historians and anthropologists
write of women’s cultures, so perhaps it does not stretch the meaning
of ethnicity too far to think of women’s cultures this way. Certainly some of
the critics of standpoint theory have done so.
30. “Women’s Perspective,” cited in note 26.
31. Bettina Aptheker, Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness,
and the Meaning of Daily Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1989).
32. Black Feminist Thought, cited in note 6.,
33. The preceding citations contain many examples of such cases.
34. “So many,” but not all. African-American and Latina writers have
argued that in U.S. society, at least, a poor African-American and Latino man
cannot be regarded as better off than his sister in many important respects.
35. What are the material limits of standpoint theories? Retroactively, we
can see that they require the context of scientific culture; that is, they center
claims about greater objectivity, the possibility and desirability of progress,
the value of causal accounts for social projects, and so on. They also appear
to require that the barriers between dominant and dominated be not absolutely
rigid; there must be some degree of social mobility. Some marginal
people must be able to observe what those at the center do, some marginal
voices must be able to catch the attention of those at the center, and some
people at the center must be intimate enough with the lives of the marginalized
to be able to think how social life works from the perspective of their lives.
A totalitarian system would be unlikely to breed standpoint theories. So a
historical move to antiscientific or to totalitarian systems would make standpoint
theories less useful. No doubt there are other historical changes that
would limit the resources standpoint theories can provide.
36. See the citations in note 3.
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80 FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES
37. All of the feminist standpoint theorists and science writers insist on
distinguishing their positions from relativist ones. I have discussed the issue
of relativism in several places, most recently in chapters 6 and 7 of Whose
Science? Whose Knowledge?
38. See S. P. Mohanty,“ U s and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political
Criticism,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 2, 2 (1989); and Donna Haraway’s
“Situated Knowledges” for especially illuminating discussions of why relativism
can look attractive to many thinkers at this moment in history, but why
it should nevertheless be resisted.
39. Mary G. Belenky and her colleagues point out that the phrase “It’s
my opinion . . . ” has different meanings for the young men and women they
have studied. For men this phrase means “I’ve got a right to my opinion,”
but for women it means “It’s just my opinion.” Mary G. Belenky, B. M. Clinchy,
N. R. Goldeberger, and J. M. Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: the Development
of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
40. Critics of standpoint theories usually attribute this position to standpoint
theorists. Within the array of feminist theoretical approaches, the claim
that only women can produce knowledge is most often made by Radical
Feminists.
41. The Combahee River Collective,“ A Black Feminist Statement,” in
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Latham, N.Y.: Kitchen Table: Women of Color
Press, 1983), 212.
42. For example, mechanistic models of the universe had different meanings
for Galileo’s critics than they have had for modern astronomers or, later,
for contemporary ecologists, as Carolyn Merchant and other historians of
science point out. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology
and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). To take
another case,“wild animals” and, more generally,“nature” are defined differently
by Japanese, Indian, and Anglo-American primatologists, as Donna
Haraway points out in Primate Visions (cited in note 2). The cultural character
of nature as an object of knowledge has been a consistent theme in Haraway’s
work.
43. Longino and Nelson’s arguments are particularly telling against the
individualism of empiricism. See Nelson’s“ W h o Knows,” chapter 6 in Who
Knows, and Longino’s discussion of how the underdetermination of theories
by their evidence insures that“background beliefs” will function as if they
were evidence in many chapters of Science as Social Knowledge (cited in
note 2) but especially in chapters 8, 9, and 10.
44. See Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in
Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988) for a particularly pointed critique
of essentialist tendencies in feminist writings. Most of the rest of this
section appears also in“Subjectivity, Experience and Knowledge: An Epis¬
temology from/for Rainbow Coalition Politics,” forthcoming in Questions of
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81Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology
Authority: The Politics of Discourse and Epistemology in Feminist Thought, ed.
Judith Roof and Robyn Weigman. I have also discussed these points in several
other places.
45. These ways of describing this kind of subject of knowledge appear in
the writings of, respectively, Smith (“Women’s Perspective”), Collins (Black
Feminist Thought) and Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory From Margin to Center
(Boston: South End Press, 1983).
46. Consequently, a main strategy of the public agenda politics of the new
social movements has been to insist that women, or peoples of African descent,
or the poor, and so on do indeed possess the kinds of reason that qualify them
as“rational men”; that women’s, industrial, or peasant labor makes these
groups also the“working men” from whose laboring lives can be generated
less partial and distorted understandings of local and international economies.
47. I do not say these thinkers are perfect feminists—they are not, and no
one is. But here and there one can see them generating original feminist
knowledge as they think from the perspective of women’s lives as women
have taught them to do.
48. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 35–36. Chapters I, 2, 10, and 11 of
this book offer a particular rich and stimulating development of standpoint
theory.
49. See the citations in note 3. The term“objectivism” has been used to
identify the objectionable notion by Bernstein, Keller, and Bordo (see earlier
citations), among others.
50. The following arguments are excerpted from pp. 143–48 in my Whose
Science? Whose Knowledge?
51. See note 27.
52. Many Americans—even (especially?) highly educated ones—hold fundamentally
totalitarian notions of what democracy is, associating it with mob
rule or some at least mildly irrelevant principle of representation but never
with genuine community dialogue. (A physicist asked me if by democracy I
really meant that national physics projects should be managed by, say, fiftytwo
people, one selected randomly from each state! This made me think of
the wisdom of William Buckley, Jr.’s desire to be governed by the first 100
people in the Boston phone book rather than the governors we have.) A good
starting point for thinking about how to advance democracy is John Dewey’s
proposal: those who will bear the consequence of a decision should have a
proportionate share in making it.
53. Quoted in Werner Van den Daele,“ T h e Social Construction of Science,”
in The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, ed. E. Mendelsohn,
P. Weingart, and R. Whitley (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), 34.
54. David Mura puts the point this way in“Strangers in the Village,” in
The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-cultural Literacy ed. Rick Simonson and Scott
Walker (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988), 152.
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55. These arguments for retaining the notion of objectivity draw on ones
I have made several times before, most recently in Whose Science? Whose
Knowledge? p. 157–61.
56. The National Academy of Sciences recommends such an expansion,
as indicated earlier.
57. For example, Smith and Hartsock, cited in note. 5.
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