Hard Sand

by Lynn Koller

In “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology,” Sandra Harding argues for acknowledgement that the basis of scientific knowledge relies upon androcentric and Eurocentric sources and lacks the objectivity we could gain by creating research based on ideas and experiences of people who are not predominantly Caucasian males.  Essentially, Harding believes that scientists and researchers have marginalized marginalized people, including women, and that this creates inaccurate hypotheses and results, and a void of knowledge that could be filled by starting from the bottom of our perpetually stratified world.

Some key ideas in this piece are:

• Objectivity – is our concern with the root of knowledge;

• Socially situated  knowledge – is an understanding based on particular socially constructed circumstances;

• Standpoint epistemologies – “sets the relationship between knowledge and politics at the centre of its account in the sense that it tries to provide causal accounts—to explain—the effects that different kinds of politics have on the production of knowledge,” says Harding (p. 241);

• Feminist empiricism – feminist generally means those interested in the experiences of women; empiricism comes from a Greek word meaning test or trial (according to Wikipedia).  It is the theory that empirical inquiry must take into account the experiences of women;

• What she shall call “spontaneous feminist empiricist epistemology” (p. 237) – with proponents that “think that insufficient care and rigour 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,” says Harding (p. 238);

•  Standpoint theorists – essentially believe that everyone views the world from somewhere and that each individual’s view is incomplete.  In context here, standpoint theorists think that their spontaneous friends (cited above) identify only part of the problem, and 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,” says Harding (p. 238).

Here is a visual that more fully explains these concepts (see image, right) ...