[00:00:01.530] - Wesley
You're listening to journal entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. In this episode, Natalie Ashton and Robyn McKenna talk about their paper Situating Feminist Epistemology, published in Episteme in twenty eighteen. Natalie is a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Stirling, working on the AHRC funded project Norms for the New Public Sphere. Robin is a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, working mainly in epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of science. In what follows, you'll hear Robin's voice first.

[00:00:37.800] - Robin
Yeah, so I guess starting with in one sentence, what the paper argues is my way of it would be that it argues that feminist epistemologies are interestingly radical. So that is they're radical in the sense that they do reject some standard assumptions in mainstream epidemiology. And they're interesting that they have some good reasons rejecting these assumptions. So controversial, but also plausible. That's the way at the aim of the paper. 

[00:01:06.380] - Natalie
So we start off by explaining the hallmarks of traditional epistemological thinking or what you might call the classical conception of knowledge, and then we compare that to social constructivism.

[00:01:16.520] 
So you have an idea of what the the opposite view is as well. Then we introduced the two main strands of feminist epistemology and talk about which of these ways of thinking about knowledge they're closest to. So I wrote the section on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Robin wrote, the one on feminist empiricism. And we say that both strands have more in common with the traditional conception then most epistemology seem to think they do, but we also highlight the places where they differ from the classical conception and they seem to side more with social constructivists.

[00:01:47.480] 
We conclude in the end that the kind of constructivism which can be found in feminist epistemology is a plausible one that we should take seriously. 

[00:01:56.180] 
For me, this was my first time working on a paper collaboratively with somebody else, so I haven't got that much to compare to, and I was a bit daunted because it is something that in philosophy, I think collaboration doesn't happen as often as perhaps in other disciplines. But I was really surprised at how quickly it came together and how smoothly it all worked, really.

[00:02:16.530] 
I think it did help that we had quite a clear division of labor in terms of like who would write which sections, because we both had kind of different like I knew more about standpoint theory and Robin knew more about feminist empiricism. So that was kind of a clear division of labor. But yeah, one thing that I found, which was really good was that having somebody else waiting for you to finish your part is a really effective motivator for making sure it happens. So, yeah, thought that was pretty good. 

[00:02:44.280] - Robin
There's actually there's no not this kind of an origin story behind the paper, so Natalie organized a reading group and feminist epistemology in Vienna, Austria, with postdocs in Vienna at the time. And we read exactly, I guess, some of the classic stuff like Harding. I'm just a of people at that time were both trying to figure out what exactly did some people think was so problematic about these views, like when you read the book that the published attempts to criticize the symbology let there is it's pretty pretty bad.

[00:03:16.130] 
Like it was really hard to see what exactly everyone was getting so angry about because the paper was like trying to see what exactly someone might find controversial about feminist epistemology. Using Boghossian seemed like a very orthodox traditional way of thinking about this is kind of the. I mean, if this view is not in opposition to feminist epistemology, then what is going to be an opposition to it sounds kind of idea like seeing what exactly could be so controversial about this general approach.

[00:03:48.710] 
What Boghossian tries to do in the book Fear of Knowledge is to defend a traditional, some might say, quite simplistic picture of knowledge. So roughly, there's a world out there that is independent of us with our beliefs about that world and the basis of evidence that we have. And these beliefs are justified if they're supported by the evidence. A very traditional picture of of knowledge and justification and so on. On this picture social context might influence which beliefs we form and what evidence we have in the first place.

[00:04:22.250] 
But the social stuff is irrelevant, whether our beliefs are justified, Boghossian's strategy for defending this traditional picture is to argue that we he sees as the alternative, a kind of relativistic form of social constructivism about knowledge is just incoherent. So you can assess that out of this picture and you can't even make sense of it. And from that, you conclude the traditional picture must be the right one. The kind of constructivism he's interested in, I guess, is the kind associate of Richard Rorty usually.

[00:04:53.330] 
So this is the view that like beliefs believe justified depends on the social context, the kind of justified or not justified relative to epistemic frameworks and different people. Different societies make them different frameworks. So Rorty's the usual target. But he also discusses Kuhn. But I guess the obvious issue I have with this book is that that's not the choice, right? You don't have to choose between his picture and kind, a radical kind of social constructivism.

[00:05:24.170] 
There are all sorts of positions that in between. So the idea was that feminist epistemology or some of epistemology give you one of these positions that are in between a more nuanced picture of the influence of social contact on knowledge and knowledge production. So that's kind of yeah, that's what the book says and partly why we chose that as the target. The other thing is something I said a minute ago, that if you can show that there are some strands of feminist epistemolgoy that are entirely compatible with what Paul Boghossian thinks knowledge and knowledge is like, then surely that's you showing that like there's nothing controversial about them.

[00:06:02.090] 
So, like, if you can assimilate them into standpoint theory to this classical conception of knowledge, then there really is nothing to be worried about. I mean, it might not be a good thing, but, you know, that's kind of the ultimate demonstration that these views are not implausible, I would say. 

[00:06:19.240] 
There are some really nice things in Boghossian's book, because he's a philosopher, that means that he's very good on a nice, neat distinctions.

[00:06:27.980] 
So one is nicely distinguishes between, I guess, kind of a metaphysical version of social constructivism. So that kind of interested in construction of facts versus the more epistemological version, less interested in the question of whether. The rule of social values and the like and the justification of beliefs, so our interests in the paper is is in the epistemological version of social constructivism, not in the metaphysical one. And here he also makes another nice distinction that I mean, it's not original to him, but it makes it quite nicely between kind of two ways in which you might think that knowledge depends on social factors, one of which is not particularly troubling to Boghossian the other of which is is a lot more troubling, the causal constitutive social dependence distinction.

[00:07:19.060] 
So Boghossian wants to distinguish in two ways in which two ways in which knowledge might depend on on social stuff like our needs and interests, we use as an example to do this because we've got an extensive fossil record which provides us with lots of evidence that dinosaurs existed about what they were like, what the things like that with a lot of knowledge or very justified beliefs about dinosaurs. You can ask, you know, to what extent does this knowledge depend on social factors?

[00:07:48.220] 
And he says, well, there's a sense in which this knowledge does depend on social factors because there's a broadly social explanation how we came to have the evidence that we have. Right. So why do we have this fossil record? Because we're interested in covering it. The authority of the church was not such that we were prevented from taking all these fossils because whatever. So you can tell a social story about how we come to have the evidence that we have. So in that sense that we have this knowledge does depend on social factors, but that's not a sense of dependence that anyone in epistemology is going to worry about.

[00:08:19.510] 
I'm just saying, you know, there can be all sorts of explanations how we come to have the beliefs that we have and have the evidence that we have that then goes on to justify them. So what social constructivists as Boghossian sees it are interested in is a deeper kind of dependence, which we call constituent dependence, that's a label Boghossian user, although he makes the distinction. So this kind of dependence would say that this fossil record we've uncovered well that constitutes evidence.

[00:08:46.960] 
For example, the faces of the dinosaurs because of something social, like for example, because we accept a scientific worldview that interprets the fossil record as evidence. That's the kind of things that Rorty would say. Right. So like he would say that we've got this kind of way of interpreting the fossil record that's influenced by science, and that's why it constitutes evidence for the existence of dinosaurs. So what's important to note that, you know. The kind of social constructiveness that says that there are social dependents in the dinosaur example is a pretty radical kind of social construct.

[00:09:21.120] 
That's right. That's kind of the Rorty view that says that, like all knowledge is socially constructed. What we're interested in with feminist epistemology are more restricted forms of social constructivism, which says that while in some cases you have this kind of dependence of knowledge on social factors, not on the dinosaur example, but the kinds of examples that we go on to talk about in the rest of the paper. So we take this distinction from Boghossian and then we use it to argue that you have an interesting kind of social dependence in some feminist epistemologies.

[00:10:00.620] 
And that's kind of how we try and show that these views can be justifiably interpreted as socially constructed. 

[00:10:10.530] - Natalie
So standpoint theory starts with the basic idea, which is key to feminist epistemology more generally, which is that knowledge is situated. And so what this means is that when thinking about who has knowledge and how they have knowledge, we don't try to abstract all of the social elements of a subject situation away from from that understanding. So we're not like disembodied minds that are engaging with pure facts. We're people who have bodies who are embedded in communities and all of this makes a difference to what and how we know.

[00:10:45.420] 
So to put this really simply and this is how we put it in the paper, the point about situated knowledge is that differences in social situation, so things like a person's race and their gender, make for epistemic differences. So differences in what they justifiably believe or and what they know. And standpoint theorists then build on this key insight from feminist epistemology generally, and they add a further idea, which is the idea of epistemic advantage, and this fills out some more detail about the effects that social differences have on knowledge.

[00:11:20.460] 
So epistemic advantage says that people who are socially oppressed often have epistemic benefits. So people of color, for example, or white women might have better justification or knowledge than people who don't experience oppression. And there are some caveats to this idea. So it's not supposed to be absolutely true of everyone and it's not supposed to happen automatically. It's not like you're born into the identity of a person who is often oppressed and you just automatically have this advantage. It's something which has to be worked for and has to be earned.

[00:11:55.800] 
But the rough idea is that social oppression leads to epistemic advantage. So one reason you might think that oppression gives people an epistemic advantage is that being oppressed can give you access to more or better evidence. So in the paper we talk about Nazi Hartsock discussion of what she calls the sexual division of labor to make this point about access to evidence. And she was writing in the early 80s and she was only really thinking about white and Western households. So this analysis isn't complete.

[00:12:27.870] 
This definitely leaves some stuff, some important stuff out. That just to kind of summarize roughly her point, so she said that while men traditionally have tended to do what we call productive labor, so they go off to the factory and they make boots or chairs or whatever, women typically stay in the home and they participate in what we call reproductive reproductive labor. So rather than making objects that you can sell, they take care of the family, they do the cooking, the cleaning, that kind of thing, and they're kind of constantly maintaining the household and the people within that.

[00:13:02.440] 
And so the idea is that obviously the man and the woman in this hypothetical family have different experiences from one another, and so through that, they have access to different sets of evidence. And Hartsock argues that women have an important advantage when it comes to these two different sets of evidence because the evidence that they have access to relates to the more fundamental, essential elements of society. So it relates to caregiving. It relates to what it is that we need to make society function.

[00:13:37.400] 
And I kind of glibly sum this up in the paper by saying that women have an epistemic advantage because they have to clean up piss on a regular basis. And I think this is something we've we've seen recently with the stuff to do with covid-19 that the people who are doing these tasks, which previously the government have been saying are non-specialist jobs. Like caring for people when they're sick and things like that. These are the jobs that are really crucial to making society work.

[00:14:11.790] 
These are the jobs that now that most of us are locked in. You're a key worker if you take part in those kinds of caring roles. So the idea is that. Or what Hartsock was saying is that the subjective experiences of women or of other people who are oppressed and who do these caregiving roles, that subjective experiences as caregivers can affect what they know. And this sounds like kind of a radical claim, which you would probably think wouldn't be compatible with traditional epistemology, it sounds like the stereotypical like if you haven't really heard much about feminist epistemology, the idea that, like, women are more in touch with, like, I don't know, some mysterious feminine side or something.

[00:14:57.500] 
And that gives them an advantage. It sounds like that kind of a claim. But once you boil it down to just being about having access to different sets of evidence, if you're somebody who does caregiving, you just know more about the basics of how society works. I think, first of all, it sounds like a more plausible idea. But also at that point, it's just social factors affecting justification in the causal sense that Robyn was talking about.

[00:15:21.530] 
So this is something which is compatible with the classical conception of knowledge. The caregiver stuff comes from Hartsock, and she was trying to make this claim based on the sexual division of Labour, and I think there are reasons why that is maybe not the best way to make the distinction, even though that's the one that kind of traditionally has been used in this stuff. But I think another example, which is maybe a bit clearer, is if we're thinking about important, important elements of society like sexism and racism or like specific forms of oppression, the people that know the most about those forms of oppression are the people that experience them.

[00:16:01.550] 
So people who experience racism know what racism looks like and how it takes place and things like that, whereas people who don't experience racism, who aren't oppressed in that way are much less likely to have a clear idea of that kind of thing. I think that's maybe a clearer example. The second reason we might think oppression creates an epistemic advantage is that experiencing oppression seems not just to give someone access to different evidence, but also to lead to them being able to question important assumptions, including assumptions about what counts as evidence.

[00:16:38.110] 
So potentially having a different conception of evidence. So Patricia O'Collins has made this point, she's argued that black women sociologists have a unique view of sociology because they've been excluded from sociology for such a long time due to racism and sexism. So the discipline of sociology wasn't made with black women in mind. It was made by and for white men. And so certain elements of it are based on false, racist and sexist assumptions. Black women are especially well placed to identify and critique those in a way that white men perhaps aren't.

[00:17:14.330] 
So the example that we use in the paper to make this point is from a different discipline. So we talk about an example from behavioral endocrinology. So this is people who study the effects of hormones on behavior. And a lot of this work is done by observing the behavior of rhesus monkeys in controlled environments. So one interesting observation that these researchers have made over the years is that sexual activity amongst rhesus monkeys peaks when the female monkeys are ovulating. So at the point when they're most fertile, the most likely to be able to conceive baby monkeys, that's when the sexual activity peaks.

[00:17:53.180] 
And so for years, researchers try to work out how the male monkeys knew when to initiate. Yeah, when to initiate sex at this optimal time. So they tried looking into the possibility of pheromones. So maybe like the female monkeys were giving off hormones that the male monkeys could, like, smell and pick up on or something. And they went down a couple of different routes like that and they just could not find an answer. They couldn't figure out how these male monkeys knew when it was the right time to initiate sex.

[00:18:23.620] 
And after over 30 years, they finally made a breakthrough when eventually people started to realize that the male monkeys didn't know when to initiate sex, instead, when the female monkeys were ovulating, the female monkeys initiated sex. So they would go over, they would approach the male monkeys, they would slap the floor, the floor in front of them, which is apparently a very sexy behavior in monkeys. And they like wiggle around seductively and stuff like that.

[00:18:52.030] 
So that was why sexual activity peaks at that point. It was because of the female monkeys behavior, not the male monkeys behavior. So that cleared up that confusion about why sexual activity peaked at that point, but then there's been interesting work done by an endocrinologist called Kim Wollen who has claimed that this breakthrough, which happened in the mid 70s, he claims that it was a result of the women's movement and an increase in the number of female graduate students working in the field.

[00:19:23.750] 
And he says that that wider cultural shift that happened was what made it possible for people to question assumptions about females being passive and sexual in sexual dynamics and questioning that helped them to realize that what they were, what they were seeing as evidence and what they weren't seeing is evidence of it. Help them to see that the way they were framing the question was wrong for a start, but then by questioning that they were able to see new things as evidence.

[00:19:58.070] 
So the sexy handclap that these female monkeys were doing, this was first recorded 30 years before this breakthrough was made. And it took that long for these for these assumptions to be questioned and for that to then be taken up as evidence. So we use this example to show. How questioning values in this way or how the importance of questioning values in this way to knowledge makes this kind of theory incompatible with the classical conception of justification? So in this kind of view, we don't just see observations like the hand slap as kind of pure data, and that's just we don't just see it as evidence that we can access and that different people can access in different ways.

[00:20:50.430] 
But it's a case where what we consider to be evidence, what our conception of evidence is, changes because those researchers had access to that information. Everyone had that available to them for a long time. But it wasn't until the values were questioned that. That they were able to see it as evidence. These kinds of examples from science are really interesting because once you look back at them and show that, look, this is something that's now widely accepted, everyone accepts that that handclap is evidence of of the female monkeys initiating sex.

[00:21:31.100] 
And and it's easy to look back and say that the assumptions that people made before were just kind of silly and unjustified. But that's ignoring the fact that for 30 years, that was how that that was a key assumption of that discipline and that guided all sorts of research projects for decades. This isn't something that we talked about in the paper, and it's it's not like this isn't the main point we wanted to make, but it's just kind of relevant to this.

[00:21:57.080] 
So I'm going to say anyway, but so in Kim Wolens description of how this change happened in this field. He he points out that this kind of breakthrough moment, the reason that happened is this breakthrough moment with the publication of one paper was because one of the kind of I think there were like three, two or three like main kind of patriarchs in this discipline. And one of them published something that had this new term, which created conceptual space for female monkeys to be active rather than passive in sexual encounters.

[00:22:33.750] 
And the I don't think he explicitly says this, but the impression I got was that this is something that people have kind of slowly started to realize and was being talked about anyway. But it wasn't something that people were able to talk about until this paper was published where this big patriarchy guy was like, here is the word, we have to talk about this. And then it kind of opened the floodgates for that to be the understanding. So. Like, this isn't this is kind of orthogonal, but like it does.

[00:23:05.790] 
I think that's kind of interesting for thinking about whether it was justified before or after and what it takes for something to be justified, like you had to have one of the big kind of well-known, established guys in the field say this for it to be something that could even become. Justified or could be considered to be justified. 

[00:23:29.260] - Robin
Yeah, so, I mean, in feminist epistemologically, there's usually a distinction made between what Natalie just talked about, feminist standpoint theory and feminist empiricism. And whether these two approaches are really distinct is an open question.

[00:23:45.270] 
And they're certainly not incompatible. And you could have both. So it's not kind of like you either have standpoint, theory or empiricism. It's just tendencies that manifest themselves in various ways. Anyway, feminist empiricism is a sort of naturalised epistemology inQuine's sense. So naturalised epistemologists are interested in the process of knowledge production and more generally kind of the process of inquiry, how we go about inquiry. So they're not so much interested in abstract questions to do with what knowledge or justification is not their focus.

[00:24:19.520] 
They're asking, how do we go about getting knowledge, how might we get more, more of it, how might we improve our ways of inquiring into the world around us? Feminist empiricism essentially add some stuff to naturalise epistemology as you find it in someone like Quine, and the tradition going out of Quine. So one thing is that it's interested, I guess, and kind of like social production of knowledge. So it's interested in groups producing knowledge, is also interested in the social context in which knowledge is produced.

[00:24:50.750] 
So it's not as Quine kind of wanted us to do, imagining that individual in a lab, looking at things and getting like stimuli in their heads or whatever. So, for example, a feminist empiricist is going to be interested in things like the gender of the researchers gathering survey evidence, because they might think that that actually makes a difference. Whether the woman is interviewing you or a man might make a difference to the kinds of answer that you have, the questions and that could make all sorts of differences in the end to the kind of theory that you are going to form on the basis of the evidence you collect interested in context and knowledge production.

[00:25:27.230] 
And the second thing is that they're interested in the role that social and political values play in the production of knowledge. So this is not just kind of an interest in what we've been talking about with this episode in the history of endocrinology and looking at monkeys. So it's not just kind of situations where some kind of bias or prejudice kind of slows down the growth of knowledge. It's also cases where what looked like political feminist considerations have played a positive role in the development of science and ultimately in the production of scientific knowledge.

[00:26:08.600] 
So this is in sharp contrast to Quine, because Quine, of course, is a very, very strong fact value distinction. So we think that like values have no role to play in a naturalized pathology, whereas for the feminist empiricist, values can be perfectly legitimate, which is not to say that you can just throw your values in whenever you want. They have lots of discussion of legitimate and illegitimate uses of values, but they don't think there's a problem in principle with bringing values into into science.

[00:26:41.990] 
That's kind of abstract, I guess. I can't think of a nice, simple example to kind of show what a feminist empiricts approach to a concrete question would be. So this is drawing on some more by Anderson. She has a nice paper talking about research into divorce. So a question you might frame of divorce research would be like, does divorce make people happy or not? That's a research question that you might have. So a feminist empiricist kind of thinking about this is going to think that, for instance, the gender of researchers carrying out surveys, asking divorcees about their experiences is going to matter.

[00:27:16.800] 
Right. So like a woman might get very different responses to a divorcee, to a man, for instance. And so the quality of evidence might differ. So I think that's important to evaluate in the research. And it's a consideration to have when deciding how to conduct your research. Maybe you should just have, like, men asking questions. I'm going to also be thinking about the values implicit in different ways you might frame divorce right, so you might frame divorce as being the breakup of a family or you might frame it as being kind of a transformation for the family unit.

[00:27:48.900] 
Either way of framing it. Obviously, there are values in forming that way of framing it. And you can't really avoid a value laden way of framing an issue like this. This is kind of the point that Anderson was going to generalize this point to most and be all social scientific research. But you can't avoid values infringing on the way in which you frame these issues. The important thing to do is to think about which values are legitimate to use, which framings or appropriate vs inappropriate, and think about it ultimately for the feminist empiricist it's an empirical question which way of framing something like divorce is is correct. Right. So like, if you think of a divorce as the breakup of family unit, you can ask, what does that lead to good research on divorce versus thinking about it in terms of a transformation of the family? She thinks you can give an empirical argument that the second is more feminist way of framing it is, is more productive and results in better quality research into divorce and its effects. So that's feminist empiricism.

[00:28:53.070] 
It's difficult, if not impossible, to frame your question in a neutral way. They're going to frame your question in a way that doesn't involve you making any value assumptions like they think this is going to extend to quite a lot of science, not just social science, but also biology. So the example Natalie had of the rhesus monkeys is a perfect example of that, actually. So clearly, certain assumptions about sex were integral to a way of framing the research question that turned out to be very unproductive.

[00:29:25.650] 
So this is not just going to fly in social sciences, although it will probably usually are most usually applied in social sciences because you kind of keep values out of the way that you frame questions. And that point applies to everyday life. Right. Like, you know, I was thinking about it in the context of politics. So I was thinking about kind of the importance we attach to neutrality in political journalism. So the idea that as a journalist, your your role is to kind of try and frame an issue for your readers in a neutral way and then present the various possible options in a neutral way and not take sides.

[00:30:02.750] 
If you apply the feminist critique of the value free ideas and the philosophy of science to that, then what you get is a kind of critique of this pretense to neutrality because that you can't you can't frame these things in a neutral way. It is not possible when you are conducting inquiries is very hard to keep values out of them. And it's not clear why it would make them better inquiries if you did so. The crucial question becomes like, well, given this, what is the right way to involve values in your inquiry?

[00:30:41.090] 
So it is fair to say that in a lot of the literature and also in our paper, a lot of attention is put, our focus is put on the idea of the undetermination of theory by evidence. Quickly the basic picture that we're often with here is this is a picture that Longino will take from the science. I mean, think simple question it, but it's pretty standard is not radical or anything like that. This picture says that you've got your body of scientific evidence and often that's not going to support one theory.

[00:31:14.450] 
It's going to support a lot of theories. And the question is which one is the right to choose? And unlike people like Boghossian, make a lot of the fact that, like, it's not going to support just any old theory. But that's not really what people like Longino are saying. They're saying that like, well, sure, some of these are just crazy and we can ignore them. But it's going to be consistent with lots of interesting theories that are very, very different than how the world works.

[00:31:41.960] 
So anyway, the thought then is that you need to use values to decide between these theories. So you might, for instance, argue that theory one is better than theory two, because they both explain the same data theory. One is simpler to accept if one and I can use this as part of an argument that those who accept theory one are justified in doing so. So what Longino wants to do is she wants to say that what she calls feminist values are often more often preferable to more traditional values like simplicity.

[00:32:14.070] 
Just a couple of things. So she doesn't claim that they're always better because she claims that they're sometimes better. And she calls the values the talk about the second feminist, not because they have any kind of inherent connection to feminism, but because as a matter of empirical fact, they have tended to be propounded by the feminist movement. So their connection to feminism for her is completely contingent. So there's no potential connection there at all. I think it's quite important to see kind of why she calls these feminist values at all, given there's no obvious connection with feminism.

[00:32:48.410] 
So what are values? Well, yeah, the ones we can focus on are the empirical novelty. So the idea that it's good if your theory is innovative or new complexity and complexity, both in the kind of in your metaphysics, kind of complicated things up there, but also in kind of explanatory mechanisms. So not looking for kind of one simple law that explains everything, but recognizing that maybe it's better to have like a bunch of different explanations for quite similar phenomena rather than trying to unify the whole thing and the applicability to human needs, which is kind of a bit like fruitfulness.

[00:33:26.540] 
But the kind of feminist version of it where you're kind of saying, well, it's kind of important that it serves the needs of everyone, not just the privileged class in society, because often fruitfulness is serves the needs of the privileged class in society. And to these, she adds, empirical adequacy which she thinks is essential. So she thinks any viable theory has to fit with the available evidence. This is kind of way very simply Logino doesn't run afoul of this idea that facts don't care about your feelings because she doesn't think that you can just decide what to think. Whatever you think has to fit with the data. It's just that the data fits a lots of things you could think. And then the other values you just talked about can play a role in making the decisions. And in terms of what makes them good, is that the work? So the point is that for long to understand, you can look back at the past 50 years in science and you can see multiple ways in which the feminist movement has improved certain parts of science as science has produced better theories.

[00:34:39.440] 
So this is why its empiricism, their argument is empirical. The claim is that as a matter of fact, the involvement of feminist values in science has often made science better as science, could politically as well. But that's not the argument. The argument is that it's been good for science and has resulted in more knowledge. 

[00:35:00.340] - Natalie
We don't think that constructivism has to be seen as a bad thing, so one way to help see how constructivism can be unproblematic is to make a distinction between global constructivism and restricted constructivism.

[00:35:16.170] 
So you could be a global constructivists and think that all kinds of concepts are constructed or and that's the kind which is more difficult to defend. Or you could be a restricted constructivist and think that just certain things are constructed. So at the least or the less controversial end money is something which is socially constructed. You might think that gender is something socially constructed and then you can go up to to other kinds of things, which it's it's more controversial that they are socially constructed.

[00:35:53.050] 
And so. Yeah. So we think that. That the form of constructivism, which is present in the feminist epistemology is that we talk about is a restricted form, so it's less problematic for that reason. Did you have anything to add on that point, Robin? 

[00:36:11.890] - Robin
Yeah, I mean, just to say that the last thing Natlie said, one thing the Natalie talked about in the section on standpoint theory is that one theory usually is seen as primarily applying to knowledge of the social world, but knowledge of social relations.

[00:36:29.850] 
And that might be that may actually cover a lot of our knowledge, but it's still circumscribed in that way. So the kind of the class of knowledge that would be claimed as socially constructed is restricted to knowledge of the social world. Feminist empiricism. It very much grows out of the philosophy of science. So the focus is generally on scientific knowledge and within scientific knowledge. It's often been always in social scientific knowledge. And when it's all a natural scientific knowledge, it tends to be biology rather than say, like fundamental physics.

[00:37:02.130] 
So Anderson has as a nice line then the Stanford Encyclopedia article on feminist epistemolgoy, where she says that like feminists are not interested in arguing that our knowledge that two plus two equals four is socially constructed. I don't think that's a good paradigm for knowledge in general. I think that that paradigm for knowledge in general is like your knowledge that your boss is a creep or something like that. A lot of the resistance to feminist epistemolgoy is based on a failure to recognize that when when they talk about knowledge being situated, it's like in part this is like out of an injunction to focus on situated knowledge.

[00:37:39.000] 
Right. So, like, OK, there's things like our knowledge that two plus two equals four, but like to construct general theory of knowledge treating that as the paradigm. I mean, it's not wrong, but there's a sense in which you've chosen the phenomenon you're going to focus on because it's be very tough to extend that a theory of knowledge that's constructed on that basis to the kind of knowledge that feminists epistemologists are are interested in. It's just it's not going to work in is very different things.

[00:38:07.740] - Natalie
It's yeah. OK, so this is interesting. It's it's quite difficult to find good literature. Like in philosophy and in epistemology that's criticizing feminist epistemology, there's like there are criticisms which is sort of a little bit surface level and don't really properly engage with the work, I think don't engage with the work sort of in good faith. And then there's yeah, then there's kind of lots of discourse like on the Internet and like, I don't know Ben Shapiro, in fact, I don't care about your feelings and that kind of thing.

[00:38:49.080] 
And I I guess this paper. In practical terms, I don't know if this paper can be a bridge and can can help that kind of thing, because I don't think Ben Shapiro is going to read this paper. And if he if he did, I don't know whether he would engage with it in the way that we might hope. But, yeah, I think some of the stuff we say in this paper. So we emphasize how. Both versions of feminist epistemology that we talk about, although they also show constructivist, neither of them ever disregards the evidence entirely.

[00:39:23.470] 
So in the case of feminist empiricism, it's interested in so if we've if we've got several possible theories that are all empirically adequate, so they all meet the evidence, which of those theories should we should we choose between which which one should we favor? So that doesn't go against the evidence. It's all theories that have already met our evidential standards and then with a feminist standpoint theory. Again, it doesn't ever contradict evidence, it's more a case of thinking about how we interpret evidence and how people interpret evidence in different ways.

[00:40:01.370] 
So I think there is. Part of what we're talking about that is connected to this issue of like facts don't care about your feelings and that kind of thing that you hear about in practical terms, I have no idea if it if it could help ameliorate that issue. But, yeah, it definitely it definitely touches upon it. 

[00:40:28.820] - Wesley
That's it for today's episode. Visit our website at journal entries, that fireside chat for more information about Natalie Ashton and Robin McKenna, their work and some of the resources mentioned in this episode. Special thanks Two Cheers for  our theme music and Christopher McDonald for sound engineering.