Understanding Epistemic Normativity in Feminist Epistemology

Abstract

This chapter offers a rebuttal to a common criticism of feminist epistemology, according to which it either lacks normative content altogether or has the wrong kind of normative content for a proper account of knowledge. It develops a rebuttal by explaining a central theme in feminist approaches to epistemology: namely, that epistemic agents are socially situated. It then elucidates four features of the normative projects in which feminist epistemologists engage: (1) the prioritization of knowledge-seeking practices, (2) the contextualization of epistemic norms, (3) the entanglement of the epistemic and the ethical, and (4) the particular significance of the perspective of epistemic agents. In so doing, it argues that these common critiques of the normative aspect of feminist epistemology are, fundamentally, more general disagreements about the nature of epistemic normativity-on which feminist epistemologists side, in their own unique ways, with naturalized epistemologists, contextualists, and virtue epistemologists.