feminism and epistemology

METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 21, No. 4, October 1990 0026-1068 $2.00

FEMINISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY

JOHN CHANDLER

Philosophy, like most other branches of scholarship, is largely the creation of males. Many feminists believe that the maleness of philosophy has been bad for it, a source of defect, and that a feminist critique of philosophy, and of epistemology in particular, is a pre- condition for a more adequate theory of knowledge. This critique can take several forms, some more radical than others. I shall distinguish several forms and examine in detail a particular variant of the more radical form.

In the past decade or so, feminist writers have produced a radical revision of accepted views in the social sciences, politics and history. They have demonstrated that much that passes as objective social research in fact is permeated by sexist values and assumptions, leaves women out of the story, ignores or devalues their achievements and lives, and consequently produces a distorted and partial understanding of human phenomena.

It is one thing to correct this imbalance by restoring women’s lives and experience as objects of research; it is another, and more radical, claim that existing forms of knowledge are defective because they fail to look at the world from the perspective of women. It is this claim 1 shall examine, the claim that feminism requires a revolution in epistemology, and not just adding a better understanding of women to existing bodies of knowledge. Feminism, in this conception, is not merely a movement devoted to securing justice for women; the claim that it implies an epistemology permits it to aspire to the status of a world view of virtually universal scope. The boldness of the aspiration is an index of the rapid evolution from a reformist to a revolutionary position that has marked contemporary feminism.

The Varieties of Male Bias (i) Epistemology, which with logic, metaphysics and the natural sciences is seen as the ‘hard core’ of abstract reasoning, has often been thought to be immune from infiltration by social values, unlike the social sciences. Contemporary feminists deny this. They hold that all thought, even the most abstract and theoretical, bears the marks of its class, racial, cultural - and gender - origins. The possibility must be conceded. Men not only write most philosophy; they control the ‘legitimation authorities’ of the profession such as journals, philosophical associations and appointments boards, which determine what is

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and what is not good philosophy, and who is qualified to teach and research philosophy. When feminists charge that philosophy is male (or patriarchal) however, they mean more than merely that it has been created and controlled by males. Without a variety of supplementary premisses this fact doesn’t entail that philosophy would have developed along different lines (or been benefited) had women been allowed to contribute to it. The central charge is that its maleness has resulted in male bias. Where the topic is human social relations what this means is clear. A number of writers have convincingly documented the sexism of much political philosophy for example (see e.g. Okin (1979)). Where the issues are as abstract as those of epistemology however, it’s initially unclear what would constitute male bias.

At least three kinds of male bias are alleged in feminist writing. (1) Philosophy is said to be masculine in the cultural or conventional

sense: it conforms to a cultural ideal of masculinity. Philosophy has indeed been culturally associated with masculinity. Genevieve Lloyd argues that reason, as a western cultural ideal, is male in this sense. She argues that ‘our ideals of Reason have historically incorporated an exclusion of the feminine, and that femininity itself has been partly constituted through such processes of exclusion’. (Lloyd, (1984)) Maleness has been equated with superiority, so that

What is valued - whether it be odd as against even numbers, ‘aggressive’ as against ‘nurturing’ skills or Reason as against emotion - has been readily identified with maleness. Within the context of this association of maleness with preferred traits, it is not just incidental to the feminine that female traits have been construed as inferior - or more subtly, as ‘complementary’ to male norms of human excellence. Rationality has been conceived as transcendence of the feminine (Lloyd p. 104).

As Lloyd argues, it is not merely that many philosophers have regarded women as less rational than men, but that what it is to be rational, and therefore fully human, has been seen as being male (or more accurately, masculine, since it is conceptions of gender rather than sex that are involved). Notice that Lloyd’s argument concerns cultural ideals or stereotypes of gender. It cannot be assumed that men in fact do possess more ‘masculine’ qualities in this sense than women, since cultural stereotypes often bear no relation to reality. Notice also that the content of cultural ideals of masculinity is not fixed, but in large part depends on whatever attributes are most valued in a given society or group at any one time. It does not follow from this that there is any reason to suppose that philosophy would have been different (or better) had women been philosophers, but it does seem that philosophy would be quite a different enterprise were the privileging of ‘male’ reason over ‘feminine’ emotion to be removed or reversed. Lloyd makes it clear however, that

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it is not because reason is seen as masculine that it is privileged, but that it is regarded as masculine because it is prized above feeling. Gender bias cannot therefore without circularity be invoked in explanation of the privilege accorded to it, as is suggested by, among others, Russell Keat (Keat 1983). The question of whether this privileging is justified would therefore appear not to depend on issues of gender or patriarchy. Moreover, the cultural maleness of philosophy or any other activity would appear in itself to have no cognitive implications, certainly not of deficiency - just as there is no rational basis for the traditional association of the ‘feminine’ with inferiority.

(2) A second sense in which philosophy is said to be male represents it as an ideology, a way of thinking which serves the interests of a social group, in this case males. In this conception, philosophical theorising has the social function of legitimating male domination over women. Ideologies function by, for example, portraying historically mutable and oppressive social relations as natural, rational, and universal. Much political philosophy is indeed guilty of doing so in respect of relations between the sexes. It is less obvious how abstract studies such as epistemology could serve male interests, though quite possibly a case could be made out. My main concern however, is with the final sense of maleness.

(3) Philosophy and science are said to be masculine in that they are grounded on male experience to the virtual exclusion of that of women. But male experience is significantly different from female experience, and therefore philosophy and science are partial. Unlike Lloyd’s critique, this depends on claims about what men and women are in fact like.

(ii) The possibility of such a position depends on a crucial shift in feminist thinking about gender. Earlier feminists such as Millett were concerned to minimise the differences between men and women. They saw ‘femininity’ as largely imposed on women by men, and as something to be overcome in the name of equality. From the middle seventies, many feminists have come to regard ‘feminine’ traits in a more positive light, as a source of strength, and have once again emphasised difference, not sameness. All feminists stress the social construction of gender, as opposed to biological determination. More recent feminists, however see gender as more deeply constitutive of individuality, and not to be explained merely in terms of social conditioning or the imposition of sex-roles. There is now a widespread acceptance among feminists that there are significant cognitive and affective differences between men and women. As a result of male domination, the male definition of self and world has been made the human norm, in philosophy as elsewhere. Women’s experiences and values consequently have been regarded as deficient or deviant, rather than simply different.

If male and female experience are very different, this would seem to

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have great epistemological significance. ’ Four conclusions appear possible:

(1) Male experience is epistemically superior, gives more reliable knowledge

(2) Female experience is epistemically superior; (3) Male and female experience are different but equal. On this view each is

partial, and an adequate outlook must incorporate both. They can be regarded as complementing each other in a ‘truly human’ epistemology. (Gilligan takes this position in respect of ethics (Gilligan 1982).)

(4) Male experience is true for males and female experience true for fcmales: gender-relativism, None of the writers I will discuss hold this, although some French feminists do.

Thesis 2 clearly entails a more radical critique of existing knowledge- claims than 3: I shall call them the strong and weak critiques respectively. For the weak critique, there is nothing defective about male experiences and values in themselves; what is objectionable is that they have been made the standard for all human experience and values. Affording equal validity to women’s experiences and values will require additions and modification to male-derived knowledge which may well be extensive; but not its wholesale replacement. This is however, precisely what the strong critique demands. (I shall say a few things about the weak critique in section below.)

of reality.

The Strong Critique: Male Experience as Perverse (iii) I will now discuss a collaborative group of writers who advance the strong critique. I will concentrate on several papers in the collection Discovering Reality edited by Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, and a work by Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Harding and Hintikka 1983; Jaggar 1984).2 Other feminists who adopt the strong position draw on post-modernist French writers such as Foucault, Lacan and Irigaray. I discuss this group as one of the most influential and important working in an Anglo-American idiom.

(1) Harding and Hintikka write in their introduction:

What counts as knowledge must be based on cxpcrience. . . . Womcn’s experience systematically differs from the male experience upon which

’ Note that experience here can’t mean pre-conceptualised, raw givens: we can’t say anything about these: rather, when male experience is said to be of a world of sharply distinguished objects, I shall take this to mean, that sensory stimulation of males causes them to spontaneously acquire beliefs concerning the presence of sharply distinguished ob.ects. “Seeing-as” is the relevant notion. ’ Harding has recently produced a continuation and criticism of the themes of the Harding and Hintikka Collection: Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1986. I discuss this book in ‘Androcentric Science?’ Inquiry, 30, 1987.


knowledge-claims have been grounded. Thus the experience on which the prevailing claims to social and natural knowledge are founded is, first of all, only partial human experience only partially understood; namely masculine experience as understood by men. However, when this experience is presumed to be gender-free - when the male experiencc is taken to be the human experience - the resulting theories, concepts, methodologies, inquiry goals and knowledge-claims distort human social life and human thought. (P. xi)

This is the weak critique. But they do not stop there. They reject the view that what is needed is to add understandings of women to existing knowledge because ‘there is previous little reliable knowledge to which to add them’. (p. ix) Rather what is needed is ‘to make women’s experience into a foundation for a more adequate and truly human epistemology metaphysics and philosophy of science’ (p. ixi) (My emphasis) This is the strong position.

It’s essential to this project that we can identify which experiences, values and ways of thinking are masculine or feminine, not merely those which are culturally regarded as such, and moreover can do so independently of identifying which ways of thinking and experiencing are embodied in scientific or philosophical thought. If we merely call masculine whatever ways of thinking are typified in science and philosophy it becomes tautologous to claim that these are founded on masculine experience. There are at least three ways of identifying male and female experience:

(A) Empirical observation of men and women in different situations to discover how different men’s and women’s experience actually is. These writers don’t use this method at all.

(B) Reliance on theories of the development of gender in the individual which predict differences of certain sorts; specifically they rely on the psychoanalytic theories of Nancy Chodorow.

(C) Reliance on Marxist materialist theories of the social determination of consciousness which make predictions about women’s experience on the basis of their position in the sexual division of labour. (The psychoanalytic and materialist approaches are claimed to produce similar results).

As I have said, despite occasional suggestions that male experience is merely partial, (as is female experience), all these writers adopt the strong position: female experience is (at least potentially) epistemically superior to male. This imposes an additional requirement: to show that male experience is epistemically inferior to female, that it is distorted and perverse. I can see two ways of showing this:

(A) The direct way of demonstrating the inadequacy of the cognitive approaches characteristic of males. For example, dualism allegedly

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characterises male experience; it would have to be shown that dualistic thinking is distorting. As we will see, no attempt is made to do this.

(B) The indirect way involves showing that the male way of seeing the world is invariably the result of causal processes whose products tend to have reduced cognitive adequacy. This is the path they choose. Two types of causal process are alleged to be responsible for the male way of knowing, a psychoanalytic developmental one, and men’s position in the gender division of labour. But the direct proof of inferiority is indispensable: unless we can independently establish which cognitive styles and outlooks are inferior, we cannot identify those causal processes which tend to produce cognitive inferiority. It would commit the genetic fallacy to argue that beliefs caused in a certain way are false because of their causal origins. But where we find that certain causal processes usually result in beliefs which are independently known to be false or ways of thinking which are distorting, there is inductive reason to suspect other products of the same processes. I shall outline Chodorow’s psycho-analytic theory of the construction of gender first, then Flax’s case for feminine superiority and finally the Hartsock-Jaggar division of labour case for the superiority of the Feminist Standpoint.

(iv) Nancy Chodorow’s account of the construction of individual gender is important to all the ‘difference theorists’, as we may call those feminists who see large differences between masculine and feminine experience, hence a brief exposition is necessary (Chodorow 1978). Chodorow begins from the fact that early child-rearing is nearly always in the hands of women. The infant begins with a sense of undifferentiated unity with the mother, and only slowly becomes aware of its separateness as an individual. Ideally, the conflict between the desire for primal unity with the mother and the desire for separate identity would be resolved in the establishment of reciprocal relations between the child and others.

But under patriarchy, it is not possible to achieve true reciprocity. For a boy, the relationship with the mother is coloured by a sense of his difference from her. Children by the age of two have a sense of gender and are aware that males are more highly valued than females. In becoming an individual, the boy must define himself as not only separate from the mother, but as different from her. He must achieve an identity which is based on difference and separation. Hence male gender identity is problematic and fragile in a way female identity is not. The male must define himself as not-female, and exaggerate the differences, in order to avert threats to this definition. This requires repressing all memory of his former dependence on his mother, a denial of the relationship through which he became an individual. He can master his fears, not only by denial but by dominating and devaluing women, other people in general, and nature. The masculine self is achieved, then, only at the cost of perpetual repression of infantile


experience which remains active in the unconscious throughout life, and leads to systematic distortions in both social life and thought.3

Girls by contrast achieve a sense of self which is less sharply differentiated from the mother, since they are of the same gender. As a result, girls define themselves more in terms of relationships with others, rather than seeing themselves as sharply separate.

If this theory is correct, male and female experience ought to differ in specific ways. Males should naturally think in terms of a world of sharply separated objects, and the self as autonomous from other selves and should erect rigid boundaries and inflexible dualism^.^ Women’s experience will not be like this. To quote Hartsock’s summary: ‘The female construction of self in relation to others leads in an opposite direction - toward opposition to dualisms of any sort, valuation of concrete, everyday life, sense of a variety of connectednesses and continuities both with other persons and with the natural world. This must be expected to result in a world view to which dichotomies are foreign’ (Harding and Hintikka, p. 298).

(v) Flax applies these results to philosophy (Flax 1983). She sets out to show that “The denial and repression of early infantile experience has had a deep and largely unexplored impact on philosophy” (p. 245). “Analysis reveals an arrested stage of human development behind most forms of knowledge and reason” (p. 269). Plato for example erects numerous dualities, between mind and body, and reason and passion. Reason must dominate the passions, both in the individual soul and in the state. He fears the passions. Flax comments: “Women are clearly identified by Plato with the most dangerous and disruptive forms of passion, especially sexuality. Thus, there is a deep, covert link between the verypurpose of Plato’s ideal state and his fear and dislike of women” (p. 255). Again, take the famous metaphor of the cave in the Republic, where people mistake shadows for reality. Cave is a symbol for womb; the image “reveals the fear of regression to that preverbal state where feelings, the needs of the body and women (mothers) rule” (p. 257).

“Descartes’ philosophy can also be read as a desperate attempt to escape from the body, sexuality, and the wiles of the unconscious” (p. 258). Descartes’ answer to the problem of scepticism is to retreat to the pure ego. The only thing I can be certain of is that I am a thinking thing, entirely distinct from my body and the world. Flax interprets this desire for certainty as a desire for control or domination, and traces it

This cannot be an explanation of the origins of patriarchy. It presupposes its existence in order to explain why males are impelled to define themselves in opposition to their mothers. I t supposes that the social meaning of gender is already established in order to explain the development of gender in individuals.

It should be notcd that these characteristics, here taken as masculine, were earlier identified by Marx as bourgeois. Marx moreover thought they were historically specific and class-based rather than eternal, ahistorical attributes of men as such.

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back to the infantile discovery that its mother is a separate person, which induces a sense of vulnerability. One neurotic defense against these fears is narcissism, where the outside world is seen as a creation of the self. Denial of the separateness of the mother leads to narcissism, to “precisely the type of solipsistic isolated self with delusions of omnipotence which Descartes’ cogito displays” (p. 260). These frozen male postures are the real cause of the apparently insoluble dilemmas of dualism within philosophy, and these therefore cannot be solved by philosophy alone (p. 261). (Must there be psychoanalysis for dualists then?) Feminist philosophy represents the ‘return of the repressed’ and will prepare the ground for more adequate social theory (p. 249). Flax does not claim that existing philosophy can be seen as nothing but the product of the masculine unconscious: though clearly she sees it as deeply influenced by it. She concludes by giving a sketchy outline of a feminist theory of knowledge, which would be dialectical, contextual, holistic and self-reflexive (pp. 269-271), and which bears a striking resemblance to Hegelian and Frankfurt School approaches.

Evelyn Fox Keller makes similar, though more modest claims about natural science in ‘Gender and Science’ (Keller 1983). She points out that science and the scientific attitude are culturally identified as masculine, and nature as feminine. There are many sexual metaphors for science, which see the scientist as penetrating, exposing, unveiling the secrets of nature, conquering it, etc. The scientific concept of objectivity itself is masculine, in connoting distance and separation between knower and known. She traces this association back to the psychoanalytic account of the emergence of male and female gender, and the fact that most scientists are male. She suggests that science as a career appeals to those males who retain particular anxiety about the loss of autonomy. Keller claims only to explain why culturally science is seen as masculine; this does not necessarily show there is anything defective about science, since these stereotypes may not affect how science is actually done. But she thinks in fact they do. They generate what she calls “rigidities” in scientific thinking itself, and impose “inappropriate constraints” on the very conception of objectivity

(vi) Because Nancy Hartsock (Hartsock 1983) and Alison Jaggar (Jaggar 1983, ch. 11) draw on Marxism in addition to psycho-analysis, their argument is somewhat different, though their conclusions are identical. For them, women’s epistemological superiority derives from their status as an oppressed group, as well as from individual psycho- dynamics.

Marx thought that a correct understanding of society is possible only from the standpoint of the oppressed class,5 which in capitalist society is

The direct ancestor of standpoint epistemologies is Georg Lukacs’s notion of ‘ascribed’ class consciousness (Lukacs 1971).

(p. 202).


the proletariat. The ruling class has an interest in concealing the realities of class domination. The oppressed class’s standpoint is both more impartial and more comprehensive, since it represents the interests of the great majority and does not need to conceal the truth. But women are an oppressed group in every society, and males the oppressors, consequently there are two main gender standpoints. In every society there is a sexual division of labour, and the differences between the kinds of work done by men and women determine the way men and women spontaneously experience themselves and the world. Women’s distinctive work - domestic subsistence labour and child rearing - keeps them in contact with a world of qualities and change. The experience of reproduction creates a deeper unity with nature than even proletarian males possess. Experience produced in these ways is inherently likely to be less distorted than experience influenced by the sorts of labour men typically perform, dominated as it is by the commodity form.

Why do they call it the feminist rather than the female standpoint? Because it is not expressed directly in women’s unreflective consciousness. A standpoint is a theoretically articulated and politically engaged perspective. Actual women are mostly not feminists. Feminism stands to the class of women, rather as Marxism stands to the Proletariat. Like Marxism, which is the standpoint of the proletariat, even though most workers are not Marxists, the feminist standpoint “represents an achievement both of science (analysis) and of political struggle” (Harding and Hintikka, p. 288). The notion of a standpoint is not entirely clear, and several different senses seem to be employed by Hartsock. In one sense it seems to be a world-view which is implicitly present in the thinking of a group. The role of the theorist is to render it explicit, to clarify and systematise it. A different sense occurs in Lukacs, the main progenitor of the notion. For Lukacs proletarian class consciousness is the outlook that is rational and appropriate to that particular objective class position (Lukacs, p. 51). For Jaggar, following Lukacs, the feminist standpoint is defined as that standpoint which reveals women’s true interest (Jaggar, p. 384). It has yet to be fully developed. A standpoint in this sense need not be present even implicitly in the thinking of the group.

Hartsock’s case for the superiority of the feminist standpoint also emphasises the psychoanalytic account of gender outlined earlier. Women experience and define themselves and the world concretely, relationally and qualitatively. The construction of the male self however, ensures that male experience is “fundamentally perverse” and consequently a “hostile and combative dualism’’ is at the heart of the masculinist world-view. (Harding & Hintikka, pp. 29C7). The construction of the male self in opposition to the mother results in a series of hierarchical dualisms, including abstract-concrete, mind-body , culture- nature, stasis-change in which the first member of each dual is

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associated with the male and treated as superior. The “fragility and fundamental falseness of the masculinist ideology” (Harding and Hintikka, p. 297) is plain. Its perversity is most dramatically exhibited in the male ‘substitution of death for life’ (p. 229). ‘As a consequence of this experience of discontinuity and aloneness . . . penetration of ego- boundaries or fusion with another is experienced as violent. Thus, the desire for fusion with another can take the form of domination of the other’ (p. 300). Or worse, to the death of the other. For the normal male, sexuality is bound up with domination, brutality and death. Freud sought explanations for human destructiveness and irrationality in the unconscious. The feminist appropriation of Freud finds its explanations primarily in the male unconscious and the remedy in women’s experience and values.

1s the Strong Critique Sound? (vii) It is time to assess these claims. There are two stages to the argument for the strong thesis. First it must be shown that women’s experience is in fact different from men’s; then male experience must be shown to have arisen from processes known to produce cognitive deficiency. Even the first stage is doubtful. It is not clear that men’s and women’s experience differ.

The basis of these claims is not empirical research into the characteristics of actual men and women, but predictions from theories concerning how selves constructed in certain ways should experience themselves and the world. How far are these predictions borne out empirically? I shall make just a few remarks. First, there is a huge psychometric literature on sex differences which is never alluded to by these writers. Summaries are found in Maccoby and Jacklin (1974), Wittig and Petersen (1979) and Fausto-Sterling (1985). (No doubt they regard psychology as masculinist too.) It has proved very difficult to isolate the contribution of gender from that of other influences on behaviour and thinking, which itself suggests that gender differences are not very striking. Second, no consistent differences have been found for most traits tested, whether affective or cognitive, such as dependency and social orientation (including co-operation and competition). Only three areas show significant sex differences in most studies: aggression and spatial skills (males scoring higher in both), and verbal skills (where females are ahead). Even these are differences of degree, not of kind, and there is considerable individual difference, so that many females are more ‘male’ than many men, and vice-versa. Do women experience the world more relationally? Males do tend to score more highly than females on tests of field independence, which is consistent with a more atomistic approach; but the difference ‘is quite narrowly confined to visual-spatial tasks’ (Maccoby and Jacklin, p. 105). This is a very narrow


empirical base for feminist difference theory. This is of course not the last word. But it at least is the result of empirical study, not speculation derived from theory.

(vii) Next, what of the psychoanalytic case for the defectiveness of allegedly male thought? Is there good reason to think that dualism in philosophy for example, is the resuit of repressed infantile desires‘? Flax, who puts this claim most strongly, produces no evidence that dualists have different infancies or relations to other people than anti-dualists, and fails to consider alternative explanations for dualist belief. If dualistic outlooks can also be produced by quite distinct causes from those she postulates, causes which are not known to be correlated with cognitive deficiency, there is not even a prima facie case for the falsity. But for all Flax shows to the contrary, conscious reasons may be among the factors which induce some philosophers (both male and female) to embrace dualism.

There is a suspicion that there are unconscious causes when a person’s beliefs are held immune to counter evidence and argument, when they are irrational relative to the agent’s conscious beliefs and goals, etc. Flax does not show that dualistic thinking possesses these features, and there is no reason to think it does. More importantly, she makes no attempt to show directly that dualistic outlooks are false or distorting. It must be conceded that if x is a dualist as a result of unconscious infantile fears, x does not have good reasons for being a dualist. Nonetheless dualism may be a rational position to hold since there may in fact be good reasons for being a dualist. Whether there are or not however has nothing to do with whatever causes particular people to become dualists. Consequently psychoanalysis cannot provide epistemic criteria with which to judge the truth or acceptability of dualism or any other philosophical thesis.

The situation is very different if there is good reason for doubting the adequacy of dualism or of quantitative approaches. Then psychoanalytic or other non-rational causes for the popularity of this aberration can reasonably be suspected. Dualism concerning any domain is false if the world is not as discrete and dichotomous as the dualist asserts; and if women do in fact perceive the world less dualistically than men, this is proof of female superiority. ‘Excessive’ dualism is by definition defective; but is the (alleged) male degree of dualism excessive or is the female degree inadequate? These claims are too vague to test, and Flax makes no attempt to do so. Why suppose the same degree of separateness obtains in every domain? It is trivially true that a ‘too sharp’ or ‘damaging’ dualism is deficient. But which dualisms are too sharp or damaging, and how do we tell? We are not told, and it would require philosophical argument to show which are. It is foolish to speak, as Hartsock does, of feminists opposing ‘dualisms of any sort’ or possessing an outlook to which ‘dichotomies are foreign’ (Hartsock,

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p. 298).6 Thought and language without dichotomies is impossible. In fact, there is a ‘hostile and combative dualism’ at the heart of the feminist standpoint itself. It has erected a sharp hierarchical dualism of feminine/masculine, in which everything feminine is both radically different and superior to everything masculine. Whereas hitherto being human has been identified with being masculine, these writers wish to make their image of feminine nature into the human norm. So that males appear as deficient, rather than merely different.

Finally, Flax’s psycho-analytic interpretation of philosophy is both selective and reductionist. It exhibits a naive methodological indivi- dualism which seeks to derive the character of social phenomena such as schools of philosophy directly from the psychology of individual males. Philosophy is in fact very diverse. Many philosophers have been anti- dualist: these she ignores. She ignores the intellectual context of theories, and the alternatives open to thinkers at any moment in history. She deliberately avoids assessment of the conscious reasons which philosophers advance, then denies that she means to reduce philosophy to the rationalization of unconscious impulses. She assumes an ahistorical, unchanging essence of both philosophy and of male nature.

(ix) I now turn to the Marxist arguments for the superiority of the feminine outlook. They too suffer from the lack of direct evidence that men and women do see the world differently. They too fail to argue directly for the claim that dualism, or a penchant for quantitative and abstract approaches are cognitively inferior to their opposites, whether features of distinctively masculine thought or not. They produce no argument for the claim that those whose work possesses certain characteristics tend to have a better understanding of reality in general than those who do different work. Thus even if women’s experience is the product of immersion in the concrete, changing ‘world of use’ and a unity of mental and manual labour, nothing has been shown about its epistemic privilege.

The argument from women’s oppression to women’s superiority fares no better. The claim is that the oppressed have no interest in mystification concerning the nature of the social order, while oppressors have an interest in concealing the truth. As outsiders, women philosophers or scientists can be expected to bring the critical insights of

The feminist animus against dualism is puzzling at first sight. Part of the reason for it is that they see hierarchical dualism, where mindheason/ culture rules/body/cmotion/nature, as an ideological justification for the oppression of women. Certainly the first dual has been seen as masculine and the second as feminine by a long line of philosophers. The rejection of dualism is only one response that might be made to this. Hierarchical rulc could be replaced by reciprocity among duals, or the symbolic identification of women with emotion and nature could be - should be - given up. (In fact some contemporary feminists themselves embrace the identification of women and nature, for example, Mary Daly and Susan Griffin, and indeed for the writers discussed here women’s special closeness with nature is the source of some of their epistemic advantages).


the outsider perspective to complacent or routinised disciplines. (Which would ironically be lost once they cease being outsiders). However, while an oppressor group has an interest in concealing social realities, it prima-facie has much less of an interest in concealing the truth about the natural order. There is no good reason to suppose that all inquiry and all theory-construction serves material social interests. This approach therefore is less effective in showing that those studies most removed from social interests, science and philosophy, must be distortions. Moreover, granting that most women have been oppressed in the past in most societies, they are not the only oppressed group and not the most oppressed group. Many women, in fact, are themselves members of oppressing groups (white women and bourgeois women) just as many males are both oppressors and oppressed. In short, women do not form a group in the sense required to have a standpoint. What is required for this is something like Marx’s concept of a ‘class for itself,’ which he believed the proletariat of his day was fast becoming - a group with some awareness of its common interests as against the dominant group, and a degree of class-consciousness and organization. Women are not like this.

Hartsock and Jaggar recognise that most women are not feminists, and they put this down to the hegemony of masculinist ideology. This entails that non-feminist women have only a potential advantage over males, since they reject the feminist standpoint. This suggests a number of questions. Ts this an admission that most women’s experience is in fact no different to that of men? Are feminists to be an elite or vanguard for women as a group, rather as Lukacs saw Communists as the vanguard of the proletariat? Does it follow that non-feminist women philosophers and scientists are likely to produce the same sort of work as males, since (through no fault of theirs) they have come to see the world from the masculinist standpoint?

(x) Those who reject claims to the superiority of either sex are likely to prefer the complementarity thesis: existing knowledge is partial because it is based only on male experience. A more adequate epistemology would require a synthesis of both sexes’ outlooks. Despite its egalitarian appeal, this position has its problems. It still assumes systematic and large differences between how each sex sees the world, and the evidence for this is very thin. The major obstacle to synthesis remains even when the association between these outlooks and gender is bracketed. How are dualism and anti-dualism, atomism and holism to be combined in a consistent story? How can concrete and abstract aproaches be harmonised? The construction of these standpoints incorporates all the exclusions and incompatabilities of gender stereotypes themselves. A viable program of synthesis awaits a reconceptual- isation of each side of these dichotomies.

(xi) An important assumption has so far gone unchallenged: that we

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can usefully discuss epistemology in terms of an opposition between just two ways of experiencing and two standpoints. In fact the notions of masculine and feminine experience as such are abstractions, if indeed they refer to anything at all. Concrete individuals are not just men or women, but members of racial, ethnic, class, political, cultural and religious, etc., groups, and each membership may influence their thinking about many issues. A woman’s race or class is highly relevant in determining how she perceives her world; in fact feminist theory mainly reflects the thinking of white middle-class American and European women. If we are not to ignore the influence of class, race, etc., we need many more standpoints than two: in fact w e must abandon dualism in favour of epistemological pluralism. Once we do this, however, it will be impossible to privilege gender standpoints as such. Since there is no reason to suppose that the influence of gender on experience is much greater than that of class, race, etc., the feminist standpoint will have to compete with the proletarian, black, etc. standpoints.

(xii) The claims that the dominant forms of Western epistemology express a distinctively male experience, and that this has led to impasse and sterility, have proved insubstantial. The charge was that there has been an unconscious pressure for thinkers to impose dualistic, hierarchical or abstract frameworks in every field, regardless of their usefulness or fidelity to the phenomena. Whether it is related to masculinity or not, any such general proclivity is likely to be harmful, and if feminists induce philosophers with such proclivities to critically assess them, this is all to the good. I do not doubt that some philosophers do have such preconceptions.

But I have argued that philosophy exhibits a variety of cognitive styles or approaches, not a single one, and I would also argue that many philosophers and scientists prove willing in time to modify assumptions and approaches which have proved unfruitful. It would be a great pity moreover if feminists themselves insist on imposing a single (anti- dualist) style everywhere for ideological reasons. The truth is that there is no good reason to reject dualism or an ontology of discrete objects in every field because some dualisms are unsupportable and some fields are best seen as processes. There is no a priori reason to suppose that the same cognitive style or methodology will be equally fruitful in every context. Quantitative techniques have been indispensible in the physical sciences; they have generally been unfruitful in the social sciences. Mechanistic and deterministic approaches were fruitful in classical, Newtonian physics. They have been largely abandoned in quantum physics, as inappropriate.’

’ Sandra Harding, in hcr recent The Science Question in Femit2i.m (Cornell University Press, 1986) is chiefly concerned, not with dualism in the history of thought since Piato, but with mechanistic thinking as it developed within early modern science from the 16th century. Mechanistic thinking also turns out to be a characteristically male way of thinking


We should reject the whole idea of monolithic, global standpoints which predetermine our methodology across the board, whether we identify them with gender, class or anything else.

University of Adelaide Adelaide, South Austradia 5001 Australia

References

Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender (New York, Basic Books, 1985).

Jane Flax, ‘Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: a Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics’, in Harding and Hintikka (1983).

Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice, (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1982).

Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methology and Philosophy of Science, Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1983.

Nancy Hartsock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, in Harding and Hintikka, (1983).

Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Rowman and Allanheld, Totowa, 1984.

Russell Keat, ‘Masculinity in Philosophy’, RadicaJ Philosophy 34, 1983. Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Gender and Science’ in Harding and Hintikka

Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason (London, Methuen, 1984). G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London, Merlin Press,

E. E. Maccoby and C. N. Jacklin (eds), The Psychology of Sex

Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton

Alan Soble, ‘Feminist Epistemology and Women Scientists’, Meta-

M. A. Wittig and A. C . Petersen (eds), Sex-Related Differences in

(1983).

1971).

Differences (Stanford, Stanford U.P., 1974).

U.P. 1979).

philosophy 14, 1983, p. 302.

Cognitive Functioning (Academic Press, New York, 1979).

for Harding, despite its brief reign. Though the targets differ, the same strategy of identifying thc masculine and the defective which typifies women-centred feminism operates in each case.

feminism and epistemology

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