What Knowledge Is and What It Ought to Be: Feminist Values and Normative Epistemology

Abstract

Much of contemporary analytic epistemology has been concerned with the semantics of claims to know: What are the truth conditions of claims of the form S knows that p? With some notable exceptions, feminist epistemologists have not taken up this project at least not in this form so for those who are engaged in mainstream epistemology it may seem tempting to think that what feminists are doing is not relevant to their concerns, and to ignore feminist work as addressing a different set of issues.2 Although I think it is right that a lot of feminist epistemology is addressing different issues, this response does not take into account that a significant amount of feminist writing explicitly undertakes to critique the mainstream epistemological questions; it is not simply that feminists are interested in something else, but that they have principled reasons for not engaging the issues as standardly framed. My interest in this paper, however, is not in evaluating the feminist challenges to the search for the truth conditions for knowledge claims. Although I am sympathetic with the complaint that there are many other epistemological topics that mainstream epistemology could and should consider, I am not convinced that this project itself is misconceived or irretrievably sexist or androcentric. I do think, however, that there are problems with the ways that philosophers have undertaken to provide an analysis of knowledge, and the problems suggest that an alternative approach informed by feminist concerns is desirable. My goal in this paper is to suggest a way of approaching the task of specifying the truth conditions for knowledge, that (hopefully) will make clear how a broad range of feminist work that is often deemed irrelevant to the philosophical inquiry into knowledge is in fact highly relevant.