Feminist Epistemologies by Potter Elizabeth Alcoff Linda

Feminist Epistemologies by Potter Elizabeth Alcoff Linda

Author:Potter, Elizabeth, Alcoff, Linda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis


Notes

Research for this paper was supported by a Glassboro State College Faculty Research Grant. Its central argument, which uses a communal account of evidence to support the view that the agents of epistemology are communities, was prompted by Nancy Tuana's review of my Who Knows at the APA Pacific Division Meeting in March 1991 (see Tuana 1992). Some of the arguments advanced here for the view that knowing is fundamentally social were prompted by questions by Lawrence Mirachi of Hartwick College (private correspondence) and Caraway (1991), both of which suggested ways to develop arguments I advanced in Nelson (1990). Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Linda Alcoff, Elizabeth Potter, and Jack Nelson provided invaluable criticisms of earlier drafts.

1. See, for example, Collins (1986), Haraway (1988), and Harding (1991) and in this volume, and the collection in Nicholson (1990). The notion of “situation” or “location” is increasingly complex and fertile in feminist theory (and certainly more complex than prefeminist empiricist and Marxist epistemologies were capable of conceptualizing), and I view it as bridging recent feminist empiricist epistemologies, standpoint epistemologies, and some postmodern arguments. See also Code (1991), Hekman (1990), Longino (1990), Nelson (1990), and Tuana (1992).

2. Representative works in feminist epistemology include those cited in note 1 and Addelson and Potter (1991), Duran (1991), Harding (1986), Harstock (1983), and Smith (1987). In contemporary empiricism, they include Quine (1960) and van Fraassen (1980); in sociology of knowledge, Bloor (1977); and in sociology of science, Latour and Woolgar (1986). The “divisions” I have used here are somewhat artificial. Three of the works listed under feminist epistemology, Duran (1991), Longino (1990), and Nelson (1990), develop empiricist approaches, although each is different from the view frequently described as “feminist empiricism” (see also Harding and Longino, in this volume). Moreover, feminist epistemologies have consistently challenged the alleged distinction between sociology of knowledge and science, and epistemology—a distinction many (nonfeminist) empiricists and sociologists of knowledge still maintain. See Harding (1991) for extended discussion.

3. I use “foundationalist” to describe these frameworks to avoid the classification schema that currently defines the “modernism/postmodernism” dichotomy. The work of many feminists, including some in this volume and cited in notes 1 and 2, is not appropriately described as “modernist” or “postmodernist,” as many currently understand these classifications. I also use the terms foundationalist and nonfoundationalist to underscore the relationship between views of the agents of epistemology and views about evidence, a relationship explored throughout this discussion. Harding (1991) distinguishes between “Postmodernism” as “a specific set of claims and practices that have been self- or otherwise identified as Postmodernism” and “postmodernism” as the “work of many different social groups … to think their way out of the hegemony of modern Western political philosophy, and the worlds it has constructed” (183–84). My references to postmodernism in this discussion are to some aspects of the former.

4. See works cited in notes 1 and 2.

5. The assumption is common to the work of Kuhn, Quine, and van Fraassen in philosophy of science as well as to recent feminist studies of science.



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