Standpoint Theory as a Methodology for the Study of Power Relations

Abstract

Sandra Harding's feminist standpoint theory is best known for the controver sial claim that those who are unprivileged with respect to their social positions are likely to be privileged with respect to gaining knowledge of social reality. According to Harding, unprivileged social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are partial and less distorted than perspectives generated by other social positions (Harding 1991, 121; see also pages 138 and 141). I call this claim the thesis of epistemic (see also Wylie 2004). The thesis of epistemic is often subjected to misinterpreta tions. Sometimes it is presented as if it includes the assumption of essentialism and the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege (see, for example, Landau 2008). Whereas the assumption of essentialism is that all women share the same socially grounded perspective in virtue of being women, the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege is that epistemic accrues to the subordinate automatically, just in virtue of their occupying a particular social position. As Alison Wylie argues, it is not clear that anyone who has advocated feminist standpoint theory has ever endorsed either one of these two problematic assumptions (Wylie 2004, 341; see also Crasnow 2008). Without the two assumptions, the thesis of epistemic implies that contin gently, with respect to particular epistemic projects, some social locations and standpoints confer epistemic advantage (Wylie 2004, 346; italics mine). Despite several attempts to clarify the thesis of epistemic advantage, its critics have been persistent in claiming that there is insufficient evidence in its support (see, for example, Pinnick 1994, 2005; Hekman 2000). I have argued elsewhere that the controversy about feminist standpoint theory is not only about the question of whether there is or is not sufficient evidence in support of the thesis of epistemic advantage; it is also about the question of what kind of evidence is relevant for the thesis of epistemic (Rolin 2006, 134). I have suggested that in order to answer the latter question, one needs to specify what a socially grounded perspective is and what the relevant alternatives are in a particular field of scientific inquiry. I have appealed to a case study from the