Cognitive Impenetrability and Modest Empiricism

Abstract

Feminists have been engaging with epistemology and science in novel ways to identify patterns of institutional bias in knowledge production. These consistent biases have emerged from androcentrism, sexism and gender ideology that has permeated much of scientific inquiry. Feminists have adopted two approaches towards addressing this: on the one hand, they have rejected science as a discourse which inherently perpetuates power asymmetries, whereas on the other, they have adopted scientific methods as providing genuinely objective ways of knowing the world, which are nevertheless vitiated in classical empiricism by apriori commitments (such as the unconditioned subject, and the primacy of correspondence theory of truth). In the latter case, modest empiricism has been proposed as an alternate theory which eliminates the effects of these apriori commitments, by redefining empiricism as providing the least defeasible evidence that can be obtained from the physical world. The strategy of modest empiricism requires a strong theory of perception which is independent, and encapsulated from cognitive influence. In this paper, I propose such a theory of perception as articulated by Raftopoulos, and argue that to ensure objectivity in scientific inquiry, it is necessary to eliminate any structural cognitive influences at the level of perceptual processes.