The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

Defining “feminist philosophy of social science” is a tricky business, not least because philosophy of social science is itself such a sprawling, heterogeneous field. I begin with a brief account of these field-defining difficulties as a way of situating the focus of this chapter: the work analytic feminist philosophers of science have done, often in dialog with practitioners, on a set of epistemic and methodological questions raised by explicitly feminist research programs in the social sciences. Most fundamentally the issue here is how to make sense of the fact that feminists, who bring to bear an explicitly situated, political angle of vision, have made significant, often transformative contributions across the social sciences. Their critical and constructive interventions pose a significant philosophical challenge to dominant “value free” ideals of epistemic integrity and objectivity. I consider two points of feminist engagement with this challenge. One is the “feminist method” debate of the 1970s and 1980s in which feminist social scientists, joined by feminist philosophers, wrestled with the question of what it means to do social science as a feminist. The second is feminist standpoint theory, as developed since the early 1980s by feminist social scientists and philosophers who take on directly the question of why it is that, contra dominant wisdom, situated interests and values not only play an ineliminable role in inquiry but, time and again, prove to be a crucial resource in improving the reach and credibility of social research. This analytic, epistemic engagement with feminist social science is just one area in which feminist philosophers have addressed issues central to philosophy of social science, anticipating by several decades a number of themes that are now coming to prominence in philosophy of social science.

The social sciences are themselves enormously diverse in subject and method, and they raise issues that have been taken up by philosophers working in virtually all the major subfields and traditions of philosophy. These include just the kinds of issues that interest feminist philosophers given a commitment to rethink the conceptions of moral, political, and epistemic agency that underpin mainstream philosophy, bringing into focus features of the social, relational contexts of action that “ideal philosophy” (Mills 2005) has systematically read out of account. Most obviously, feminist philosophers address questions of social ontology and action theory that are the conceptual core of philosophy of social science; they ask how individual agency is enacted in social contexts, and whether social institutions and collectives reduce to the intentions and behaviors of their members, as individualists would claim, or have standing as entities in their own right, as holists have argued. Feminist ethicists and political theorists also address questions that fall within the ambit of philosophy of social science when they investigate the scope of moral responsibility when social conditions that constrain or enable agency. In contesting conventional ideals of rationality and asking how understanding is possible across differences in worldview, feminist epistemologists engage many of the issues central to the “rationality and relativism” debate of the 1970s and 1980s that set the framework for contemporary analytic philosophy of social science.

There is, then, a case to be made that feminist philosophers have contributed to philosophy of social science on many different fronts—contributions that are well represented in this volume. But despite these points of connection, little explicitly feminist work figures in the various anthologies, handbooks, and companion volumes on philosophy of social science that have appeared in recent decades. Indeed, with one exception, the representation of women authors in these collections is low: closer on average to the 15 percent reported for women in philosophy of science (Solomon and Clarke 2010) than the 20 percent to 30 percent reported for women in Anglophone philosophy generally (Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013). Take as a baseline for comparison the influential collection, Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, edited by May Brodbeck in 1968. She and one other woman contributed 4 of the 41 entries. They account for 5 percent of contributing authors and 10 percent of the entries; not surprisingly, there was no feminist content. Since the mid-1990s when the first of the contemporary anthologies appeared (Martin and MacIntyre 1994), a pattern emerges that is remarkably stable whether these collections are made up of new work by currently active scholars or, as in the case of Brodbeck’s Readings, they include reprints of classic articles that date to periods when the field was more heavily male dominated and feminist philosophy was yet to take shape. The representation of feminist work in these anthologies ranges from 4 percent to 8 percent of contributions, and 8 percent to 18 percent of authors are women. The one exception is the 2015 collection, Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, for which Nancy Cartwright and Eleanora Montuschi assembled sixteen contributions, all by women, many of whom directly engage or are clearly cognizant of relevant work by feminist philosophers.

More work is needed to fully understand the feminist and gender profile of philosophy of social science, but this snapshot, based on field-defining anthologies, does raise the question of why more feminist philosophers have not made philosophy of social science their disciplinary home. They have taken up philosophical issues raised by and about the social sciences in other contexts: in feminist philosophy journals and collections, and in publications on feminist social science.

This debate took shape in the 1980s in response to feminist critiques of mainstream social science, which, by that time, had exposed some remarkable gaps and distortions in the treatment of women and gender. Particularly sharp criticism was directed at research programs that had traditionally pinned their authority on claims to scientific status, emphasizing their reliance on rigorously “objective” research tools and methodologies modeled on those of the natural sciences. These include, for example, hypothesis testing strategies designed to approximate experimental protocols, standardized interview and survey research, quantitative sampling strategies and statistical analysis. Despite their precision and analytic rigor, feminists found the results of these research programs rife with androcentric and, in some cases, manifestly sexist bias. Experimental and longitudinal studies of sex difference in cognitive function are an especially notorious example. Several recent retrospective studies document how gender-normative assumptions about sex/gender difference pervade not just the articulation of hypotheses, but also the definition of analytic categories and the choice of empirical measures used to evaluate them. This, feminist critics argue, has ensured that, for decades, these research programs have generated results that confirm bio-essentialist claims about sex differences. When confronted with evidence that does not fit these expectations a typical response had been to shift the terms of reference (Jordan-Young 2010), a pattern of insulating favored hypotheses from challenge that has been reinforced by ignoring the implications of a growing body of research which shows that even sex-gender differences that prove to be robust can often be explained in terms of patterns of gender socialization (Fine 2010). The issue is not (or, not necessarily) that this work is fraudulent, but that conventional assumptions about gender difference are so deeply embedded in the conceptual framing of these research programs they are simply taken for granted. Rigorously applied analytic and quantitative research methods can discriminate between hypotheses formulated within this framework but, on their own, they cannot be counted on to expose problematic assumptions that they all share (Okruhlik 1994); they reproduce gender-normative bias built into the research framework.

Similar critiques had been leveled against the design of census surveys and indices of national economic productivity based on these census data (GDP, GNP), to name just two such examples. In the late 1970s feminist economists, sociologists and political scientists drew attention to class-specific and ethnocentric as well as androcentric assumptions that predetermine, for example, what will count as economically productive “work” and which domestic arrangements constitute a “household.” In many jurisdictions, the data underlying official labor statistics had been gathered using survey tools that explicitly exclude the unpaid work women were doing “at home for their families” and on a volunteer basis in other contexts (Armstrong and Armstrong 1987: 56; Oakley and Oakley 1979: 180); those engaged in even the most casual and temporary work were counted as “economically productive” so long they were paid, but those doing unpaid domestic labor were considered “economically inactive” no matter how essential it might be. Questions about household structure likewise assumed that every household must have a “head” and that the “head of household” or “household maintainer” must be a man, regardless of who brings in the primary income or pays the expenses. These gender-normative background assumptions determine, for example, “the areas chosen for analysis, the data that are collected and the way in which the statistics are both processed and presented” so that, “far from being a superstructure imposed on raw unbiased data,” the data themselves and the statistics based on them are constituted by this underlying “conceptual scheme” (Oakley and Oakley 1979: 174). Although objections to this literal erasure of women’s labor resulted in changes to census questionnaires in many contexts, as Marilyn Waring argues in If Women Counted (1988) the proxies standardly used to measure economic wealth and productivity—GDP and GNP—still equate economically valuable work with cash (or profit) generating activity, excluding the reproductive and care work largely carried out by women that is required to maintain an employable workforce.

As critiques of these kinds proliferated, feminist social scientists came to question the conviction that the gaps and distortions they were identifying could be corrected by applying existing methodologies more systematically. Even the most rigorously “objective” methods—those it was hoped would establish the bona fides of social research as scientific—had failed to protect against the influence of gender normative assumptions which, when made explicit, were unsustainable on empirical and conceptual as much as on political grounds. Worse, the conviction that these methods are self-correcting had insulated the research programs that rely on them from critique. One response was to reject them as inherently patriarchal and incapable of recuperation. Dorothy Smith (1978) argued that, by enforcing a hierarchical dissociation of researcher from research subject and attributing epistemic authority exclusively to professional researchers, the social sciences had become “ruling practices” (1974: 8) that systematically “eclipse” the lives, activities, interests, and expertise of women (1987: 17–36). Others objected that the positivist rhetoric of objectivity and value neutrality compounded these problems, masking the context-specific interests that animate the social sciences (Mies 1983; Stanley and Wise 1983).

At this juncture some argued that what was needed as an antidote were precisely the qualitative, engaged, interpretive methods that had been rejected by the advocates of self-consciously “scientific” approaches to social inquiry. These would allow women’s voices to be heard, bringing into focus the experience, knowledge, and critical perspectives of insiders to the social worlds that social scientists had ignored. Smith advocated a program of ethnomethodological research designed to understand how the “everyday world” looks to those who operate off-stage, in gender-normative roles that put them in the position of maintaining social relationships and collective physical well being (Smith 1974). She studied the ways in which school-day routines and the work organization of women’s lives amplify rigidly gendered parenting responsibilities (Smith 1987: 181–187), documenting women’s own understanding of “mothering as work” and the “concrete actualities” (Howard 1988: 21) that are ignored or caricatured when “work” is equated with wage labor. Rather than impose categories that reflect the situated experience and assumptions of privileged outsiders, she urged feminist researchers to take as their point of departure the experience, perspectives, and categories of those who had been “eclipsed.” This would bring into focus oppressive institutions and norms that are often not visible to those who operate “center stage,” and whose privilege put them in a position to define the agenda of social sciences.

These research strategies are by no means unique to feminist social research. They are stock in trade in fields like social anthropology, qualitative sociology, and oral history, and they had been put to good use for just the purposes Smith cites in a number of well-established traditions of collaborative and participatory action research (Hickey and Mohan 2004: 3–10). In many contexts they provided the empirical and conceptual resources feminists needed to grasp what it was that dominant modes of practice had left out of account or misrecognized, and they continue to be a crucial resource for feminist research (Hesse-Biber 2012). But as Smith herself had argued, it is not the methods themselves that countered the “objectifying” effects of traditional social science; what has given feminist research its distinctive critical edge and opened up new lines of inquiry is the use of these methods in the context of research that “starts from the margins.” Moreover, it was quickly pointed out that, as powerful and useful as they are, “face-to-face,” interpretive modes of practice are no methodological panacea; androcentric and sexist partiality was as ubiquitous in the areas of social research that had traditionally relied on them as in those that staked their reputation as scientific on quantitative, “objectifying” methods.

For example, feminist critiques in anthropology of the 1960s documented a striking lack of attention to women’s roles and relationships, subcultures and activities in many of the most highly regarded ethnographic accounts; despite being deeply immersed in the lives and cultures of their subjects, anthropologists had routinely brought to bear “dominant male [androcentric] systems of perception” (Ardener 1975: xiii). This could sometimes be attributed to issues of access, but often the preoccupation with male-associated roles and activities reflected an entrenched assumption that these are what matter: men are the primary locus of authority; what they value defines what counts as cultural identity and accomplishment; masculine roles and activities determine the dynamics characteristic of society as a whole. A classic example is the research on “hunter-gatherers” that had largely ignored the “gathering” activities of women even though, on reanalysis, these proved to account for as much as 70 percent of the dietary intake in all but the most extreme arctic and subarctic environments. Recognizing the critical role of women not only reshaped the ethnography of “foragers,” as they came to be known, but also called into question “man the hunter” theories of human evolution that had assumed the activities of male hunters to be the primary determinant of group success and reproductive fitness in foraging societies (e.g., Dahlberg 1981; Slocum 1975).

In practice, few feminist social scientists advocated wholesale abandonment of any of the tools of social research—scientistic or otherwise. Why limit feminist initiatives to one particular set of methods or research strategy, they asked (Jayaratne, 1983)? By the mid-1990s feminist practitioners had made a decisive “move from [methodological] singularity to plurality” (Gottfried 1996: 12); the contributors to an influential collection, Feminist Methods in the Social Sciences (Reinharz 1992) make use of virtually every research method available to social scientists. The pressing question was how to do better, more inclusive research using these tools: How might feminists best address the questions that had been left out of account and are especially relevant for understanding and changing oppressive sex/gender systems? More generally, what research strategies could ensure that feminists would recognize and hold accountable assumptions of privilege that configure research and its results, including their own?

These issues were also a matter of active interest for feminist philosophers. They figure prominently in Discovering Reality (Harding and Hintikka 1983) and were the focus of two essays that appeared in a special issue of Hypatia on “Feminism and Science”: “Can There Be a Feminist Science?” by Helen Longino (1987), and “The Method Question,” by Sandra Harding (1987a). Longino and Harding rejected the idea that there might be a distinctive “feminist science” (or method, or “way of knowing”) for reasons like those given by feminist social scientists; such claims simply reaffirm the faith in method that practitioners had called into question in mainstream social science, and they presuppose the very essentialism about gender difference that feminists were intent on challenging more generally. That said, they recognized that feminist research programs pose a distinctive challenge to conventional ideals of objectivity. As Harding put it in her 1983 essay, “Why Has the Sex/Gender System Become Visible Only Now?” there was little indication that business-as-usual in the social and biological sciences would ever have exposed the pervasive errors and distortions to which feminists drew attention (Harding 1983: 26); the “infusion of [feminist] politics into scientific inquiry” had improved research in these fields by many standard measures, including “empirical quality,” comprehensiveness and explanatory breadth, among other core epistemic virtues associated with “objectivity.” She further argued that none of the epistemologies then on offer—especially not “received view” empiricism (Suppe 1977)—had the resources to make sense of how research programs rooted in a political movement could have generated “transformative criticism” (as Longino (1990) describes it), destabilizing entrenched assumptions and bringing sex/gender systems into focus as a “newly visible object . . . of scientific scrutiny” (Harding 1983: 312–313). What was needed, she argued, is a “revolution in epistemology” (1983: 311). In their different ways, Harding and Longino both took up this challenge, addressing two issues that arise directly out of the method debate. One is the question of what methodological and epistemic norms of practice characterize feminist research; I focus here on Longino’s account. The other is the question of why these norms are epistemically salient, in connection with which I consider the formulations of feminist standpoint theory associated with by Harding.

Longino’s response to the method debate was to reframe its motivating question: the issue is not whether there is a distinctive “feminist science,” but what it means to “do science as a feminist” (1987: 53). A robust methodological pluralism, like that endorsed by feminist social scientists, follows directly; feminist research will be as diverse as the feminism(s) that inspire it, and as situationally specific as the challenges posed by research traditions they critique and the questions they take up. Longino does, however, locate common ground in a set of “community values” that inform feminist research across the sciences.

Longino’s point of departure was a suite of well-established philosophical arguments for recognizing that social, contextual values and interests pervade scientific inquiry of all kinds. These presuppose a distinction between these “non-cognitive” values—considerations that, on standard accounts, should never intrude into the practice of science—and the “cognitive,” epistemic values, like truth-seeking and empirical adequacy, that were widely assumed to be the only factors that can legitimately play a role in scientific “contexts of justification” (Longino 1990: 4–7). Longino has since called into question this “cognitive/social” divide. But even if you accept it, she argued, “underdetermination” arguments establish that purely epistemic, cognitive considerations rarely, if ever, determine theory choice.

The underdetermination arguments Longino drew on arise from an appreciation that the evidence we rely on to judge the empirical adequacy of a claim is inevitably “theory laden” (Hanson 1958: 19). Empirical observations stand as evidence only under interpretation given an array of “auxiliary hypotheses” that link observational data to the phenomena under investigation. These include, for example, the normative, evaluative assumptions that justify treating data on paid employment as a proxy for economic productivity described above. This means that a requirement of empirical adequacy—the central “cognitive” value invoked as a guide for scientific practice—cannot, on its own, determine whether a given body of evidence “confirms” (or disconfirms) a hypothesis. Longino draws the conclusion that “whatever grounds for knowledge we have, they are not sufficient to warrant the assertion of claims beyond doubt” (Longino 1994: 472); scientists must inevitably take an inferential leap that is guided by other considerations. For a “critical contextual empiricist” (2002: 208) like Longino, what follows from these “inferential gap” arguments (Intemann 2005) is a recognition that social, contextual factors must take up the slack; they are essential to scientific reasoning, not a regrettable intrusion that compromises its integrity. Whatever counts as epistemic integrity and credibility, it cannot plausibly be equated with “value free” ideals of objectivity that require the elimination of non-cognitive values. Longino’s response to the epistemic challenge posed by the successes of explicitly feminist research programs is to argue that any viable philosophical theory of science must take into account the irreducibly situated nature of social scientific inquiry and inquirers. On this view, doing (social) science as a feminist is a matter of insisting that researchers be accountable for the values and interests that inevitably play a role in all aspects of scientific inquiry.

In this spirit Longino’s contribution to the “method debate” was to make explicit and provide a justification for six “community values” that she finds cited by feminist researchers. These, she argues, are justified both on general epistemic grounds and in terms of an explicitly feminist “bottom line” principle: they “prevent gender from being disappeared” (1994: 481; 1995: 391). I organize them around four focal themes (Longino 1994: 476–478; 1995: 386–389):

1. Epistemic values: Doing science as a feminist requires, first and foremost, a commitment to empirical adequacy.

2. Ontological pluralism: Feminist researchers should give preference to hypotheses that are novel and to those that take full account of the causal complexity and ontological diversity of their objects of study.

3. Pragmatic values: Feminists should use the tools of scientific inquiry to produce knowledge that is “applicab[le] to current human needs.”

4. Diffusion of power: Feminists should “democratize” knowledge production in ways that foster an “equality of intellectual authority.”

Each of these “community values” is subject to a further principle of epistemic provisionalism; they must be held open to revision (Longino 1994: 483).

Although Longino was not specifically concerned with social science, there is a striking resonance between this roster of orienting commitments and the guidelines that feminist social scientists developed, from the ground up, as they pursued an increasingly diverse array of research initiatives (Wylie 1995; 2012a). The cornerstone of these guidelines for practice is a specification of Longino’s third value; the “human needs” that should be addressed by feminist researchers are defined by the interests of women or, more generally, of those who are oppressed by sex/gender systems of inequality. There was much debate about whether this required all feminist researchers to do intervention-oriented research, and whether research counts as “feminist” if, as intersectional analysis suggests it must, it focuses on factors other than gender. The wisdom of Longino’s “bottom line” commitment is that it requires an attentiveness to gender but does not assume that this will prove to be the only or the primary dimension of difference in a given context of inquiry or intervention.

Although the requirement of empirical adequacy seems generic to empirical inquiry, feminist social scientists often make the point that it has an ethical, political justification as well. Far from being a license to project expectations and gerrymander wished-for outcomes, a commitment to produce knowledge relevant to feminist political goals raises the epistemic stakes. If feminist research is to produce a robust understanding of sex/gender systems that can inform effective action it is especially important that it be empirically accurate and explanatorily probative. Even strengthened in this way, however, arguments from underdetermination establish that this guideline is never adequate on its own.

The arguments Longino gives for the second and fourth community values are also both ethical/political and epistemic and have wide relevance. A preference for novelty—a willingness to think outside the box—has been crucial for counteracting the gender-disappearing effects of conventional wisdom, and it has often led feminist social scientists to emphasize ontological and causal complexity that had been treated as irrelevant “noise.” Although Longino originally argued that this is a value that feminist researchers should embrace so long as ”feminism has oppositional status” (1994: 477), she has since made the case that a pragmatic pluralism—a commitment to support diverse lines of inquiry—is important for all of science (Kellert et al. 2006; Longino 2012).

Where the principle of “democratizing” research practice is concerned, Longino’s argument for giving priority to accessible, widely distributed, non-hierarchical forms of practice converges on a recurrent theme in the guidelines for feminist social science: that feminist research practice must not, itself, be exploitative or oppressive, consistent with feminist ethical commitments. She argues that such “diffusion of power is a key means of ensuring that gender will be recognized as “a relevant axis of investigation” wherever it is salient (Longino 1994: 481). Patricia Hill Collins powerfully illustrates the epistemic value of fostering an “equality of intellectual authority” among researchers when she describes the “mismatch” between her own working-class Black experience and the “taken-for-granted assumptions” of her discipline—sociology—about family structures, “human capital,” and the causes and effects of poverty (1991: 47–54). It was this dissonance that put her in a position to identify ways in which core sociological concepts reflect the dominantly white, middle-class, male-gendered experience of its practitioners, and to reframe them in terms adequate to the social and economic realities navigated by black women.

A commitment to counteract “testimonial” and “hermeneutical” injustice (Fricker 2007; Chapter 22 in this volume) as it affects research practice is a reason for feminists to embrace the “democratizing” principle, and in guidelines for feminist social research this is often articulated as a demand for reflexivity. As Uma Narayan puts it, “one of the most attractive features of feminist thinking is its commitment to contextualizing [and critically scrutinizing] its claims” (1988: 32). Longino argues, however, that the justification for a norm of “tempered equality of epistemic authority” (2002: 131–133) extends well beyond research animated by social justice concerns. It is one of four social/cognitive norms central to her influential “proceduralist” account of objectivity, in connection with which she argues that the beliefs we ratify as knowledge should be those that arise from processes of critical scrutiny designed to ensure that contending beliefs are subject to “criticism from multiple points of view” (Longino 2002, 129): “not only must potentially dissenting voices not be discounted, they must be cultivated”; to fail to do this is “not only a social injustice but a cognitive failing” (2002: 132). Given that there is no self-warranting foundation or transcendent “view from nowhere” that can serve as a standard for assessing epistemic credibility, Longino argues that our evolving practices of vigilant empirical and conceptual critique are the only basis we have for determining which beliefs warrant acceptance (1994: 483; 2002: 128–133). And in identifying norms of inclusiveness as pivotal for ensuring that these practices will be accountable, she draws inspiration from the role of feminist community values in successful research programs across the sciences.

In the hands of feminist standpoint theorists, this commitment to democratize research is interpreted as requiring that “intellectual authority” be attributed, not just to all members of a research community, but to research subjects and a diversity of external stakeholders as well. Smith (1997) characterizes this as a methodological directive to “start from the margins,” while for Harding it was the centerpiece of a broader epistemic stance. Integrating and extending the insights of feminist social scientists, Harding elaborated standpoint theory as an alternative to empiricist and postmodern epistemologies that has the resources, she argues, to explain the (counterintuitive) successes of explicitly political feminist research programs (1986: 136–162). What is distinctive about feminist research practice she argued, in response to the “method debate,” is a commitment to “locate the researcher in the same critical plane” as those they study (Harding 1987b: 8), so that the epistemic resources of the excluded “standpoint” of women—their experience, understanding, critical angle of vision—can be brought to bear on all aspects of research, from agenda setting and research design to the interpretation of results. In its most radical formulations, the rationale for democratizing research practice is a conviction that those who suffer systematic oppression have an experience-grounded understanding of dimensions of the world we live in that those who benefit from social and political-economic privilege typically do not have, and of the ways in which these are obscured or misrecognized by dominant knowledge systems. They are, in this sense, epistemically privileged (Petras and Porpora 1993: 107), and for this reason researchers should deliberately subvert the conditions of epistemic injustice that systematically marginalize what they know and the critical insights about dominant social and epistemic norms that arise from their “bifurcated consciousness” as subjugated social agents.

The theoretical underpinnings of a distinctively feminist standpoint theory had been developed by political scientist Nancy Hartsock (1983). She reframed class-based, Marxist formulations of standpoint theory showing how, in a society structured by hierarchical sex-gender norms and institutions, our material conditions of life and social relations can result in systematic differences in what we experience and what we know that runs along gender as well as class lines (Hartsock 1983). Harding (2006) expanded the scope of this analysis to a wider range of dissident standpoints rooted, for example, in social divisions entrenched by systems of colonial and race-based oppression. Her influential argument for “strong objectivity” likewise reinforces and generalizes arguments for reflexivity that were central to feminist guidelines for social research (Harding 1991: 138–163; 1993). Rather than adjudicate knowledge claims strictly in terms of established conventions of “good method,” credible attributions of objectivity require, as well, systematic investigation of the conditions under which these conventions have arisen. If all knowledge production and all knowledge claims are situated—if there is no possibility of “purifying” research of contextual influences (Harding 1993: 56)—it is incumbent upon researchers to make “the relation[s] between knowledge and politics” an explicit subject of critical appraisal. An integral part of all inquiry must be the use of the tools of scientific inquiry to understand how particular research programs have been shaped by, and reflect the interests of elites in inegalitarian societies that are structured by racism and global imperialism, as well as gender and class divisions. This is, in effect, a matter of calibrating the claims made for accepting (or rejecting) research results in light of an appraisal of the ways in which these contexts of research practice “enable and set limits on what one can know” (Harding 1993: 55).

Feminist standpoint theory has faced a number of critical challenges since its initial formulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Chief among them are two concerns raised by Longino in the context of the method debate when she cautioned against appeals to a generic women’s standpoint as the basis for positing a distinctive feminist method or “women’s way of knowing”: that women’s experience is too diverse to underwrite an epistemically robust “standpoint” and, even construed as “critically self-conscious female experience,” it cannot sustain any but the most limited claims of epistemic “privilege” (1994: 474–475). Although Harding, Hartsock, and Smith, among other prominent advocates of standpoint theory, share Longino’s mistrust of essentializing appeals to a “women’s” standpoint and do not invoke the resources of standpoint theory to support the claim that women, or feminists, have a distinctive “way of knowing,” objections of the kind she sketches were prominent in the 1990s and led many to reject standpoint theory as a crude form of epistemic identity politics (Hekman 1997): a counsel of relativist despair at best or, at worst, a capitulation to cynical arguments that science is just politics (Haack 2003 [1993]; Wylie 1995). In fact, standpoint theory is much more subtle and complex than this; its advocates give it a variety of formulations and Harding’s own account has evolved over time. Considered as a purpose-specific epistemic stance rather than an all-purpose epistemology, I argue that it is characterized by three central tenets that can be formulated in terms that do not assume or entail commitment to an untenable epistemic essentialism of the “girls-know-best-because-they’re-girls” variety (Wylie 2012b).

1. A structural “situated knowledge” thesis: Standpoint theorizing takes as its point of departure a recognition that all knowers and all research programs are shaped by their histories and social contexts, but focuses specifically on the epistemic effects of hierarchical systems of power relations.

2. An “inversion” thesis: Formulated in terms of contingent advantage rather than automatic privilege, this is the claim that those who occupy subdominant or marginal social positions often have epistemic resources that the comparatively privileged lack. These epistemic advantages can take a number of different forms: access to evidence, interpretive heuristics, explanatory resources and, crucially, critical dissociation from the taken-for-granteds of a dominant worldview (Wylie 2003).

3. An “accomplishment” thesis: Situated experience is a crucial resource, but articulating an epistemically salient standpoint requires, as well, “critical practice”: the articulation of a “disidentifying collective subject of critique” through systemic analysis of the social production of difference and the ways this configures the production and authorization of knowledge (Hennessy 1993).

Formulated in these terms, standpoint theorists need not invoke an “essential” gender, race, or class identity as the ground for an epistemically distinctive “standpoint on” the claims of a dominant worldview and the social/cognitive norms that legitimate them. Historical materialists like Hartsock (1983) emphasized the contingency of the lines of social differentiation that underpin systemic inequality, and Linda Alcoff (2006, 2010) has developed compelling arguments for recognizing that historically and culturally contingent collective identities can be a robust basis for mobilizing political and epistemic critique. Standpoint theorists certainly recognize the ways systems of oppression perpetuate epistemic disadvantages, but their emphasis is on bringing into focus the flip side of epistemic injustice in order to understand how it is that explicitly political research programs, like feminist social science, have repeatedly generated transformative criticism of dominant systems of knowledge. As such, standpoint theory is an innovative contribution to philosophical thinking about the social sciences that crystallizes three decades of close analysis by feminist philosophers and social scientists of the role these values play in social inquiry, questions that have always been central to philosophy of social science, and are especially relevant now. It also offers lessons that apply reflexively to philosophy social science.

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Rationality and objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); epistemic injustice, ignorance, and trans experience (Chapter 22); philosophy of science and the feminist legacy (Chapter 25); values, practices, and metaphysical assumptions in the biological sciences (Chapter 26).

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