Standpoint Epistemology Research Articles

Hermeneutics of science and multi-gendered science education

In this paper, I consider the relevance of the view of cognitive existentialism to a multi-gendered picture of science education. I am opposing both the search for a particular feminist standpoint epistemology and the reduction of philosophy of science to cultural studies of scientific practices as championed by supporters of postmodern political feminism. In drawing on the theory of gender plurality and the conception of dynamic objectivity, the paper suggests a way of treating the nexus between the construction of gender within the interrelatedness of scientific practices and the constitution of particular objects of inquiry. At stake is the notion of characteristic hermeneutic situation which proves to be helpful in designing a multi-gendered pedagogy as well.

The Way We Ran

This piece is a performative homage to Norman Denzin’s recent work on performance ethnography. Housed within the framing devices characterizing the author’s collegiate track and field teammates, this piece explores writing, running, standpoint epistemologies, and the ongoing performance of self. Finally, the piece examines the tensions of lived lives and the potential for reflexivity and transformation within autoethnographic texts.

Venus envy 2

PurposeUsing an alternative lens to challenge assumptions of solidarity behaviour and the queen bee label, the paper aims to analyse empirical data to explore negative relations between women in management and surface processes of female misogyny.Design/methodology/approachFeminist standpoint epistemology; qualitative semi‐structured interviews; subjective narrative data from senior women and women academics of management in two UK organisations.FindingsAssumptions of solidarity behaviour are largely absent in the research and the queen bee label impacts pejoratively on women in management, perpetuating a “blame the woman” perspective. Senior women do recognise barriers facing women in management but they do not want to lead on the “women in management mantle.” This does not make them queen bees; the women recognise becoming “male” in order to “fit” senior management and acknowledge the impact of their gendered context. From this context, processes of female misogyny between women in management fragment notions of solidarity; highlight contradictory places women take in relation to other women and challenge women as “natural allies.”Research limitations/implicationsFuture research should engage women at all levels in management in consciousness‐raising to the impact women have on other women. Organizational interventions are required to explicitly surface how the gender order exacerbates differences between them to maintain the gendered status quo.Originality/valueEmpirical paper using an alternative lens to problematize solidarity behaviour and queen bee, surfaces female misogyny between women in management and highlights how the gendered social order encourages and exacerbate differences between women.

The Bias Paradox in Feminist Standpoint Epistemology

ABSTRACTSandra Harding's feminist standpoint epistemology makes two claims. The thesis of epistemic privilege claims that unprivileged social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are “less partial and less distorted” than perspectives generated by other social positions. The situated knowledge thesis claims that all scientific knowledge is socially situated. The bias paradox is the tension between these two claims. Whereas the thesis of epistemic privilege relies on the assumption that a standard of impartiality enables one to judge some perspectives as better than others, the situated knowledge thesis seems to undermine this assumption by suggesting that all knowledge is partial. I argue that a contextualist theory of epistemic justification provides a solution to the bias paradox. Moreover, contextualism enables me to give empirical content to the thesis of epistemic privilege, thereby making it into a testable hypothesis.

Philosophical methodology and the mathematization of pedagogy freeing children’s imagination through philosophy

This paper traces the genealogy of a long-enduring controversy in Western philosophy viz, whether philosophic and mathematical methodologies are equal but separate and distinct approaches to rational inquiry, or whether one is superior to the other from the standpoint of epistemology, and, ultimately, a pedagogy which supports and promotes conceptual and critical thinking. With the Socratic teacher in mind, philosophic methodology, viewed by Plato as a dialectical process of free-ranging inquiry, compelled him to distinguish the work of philosophy from that of mathematics, since philosophic methodology could not function unless freed from the constraints contained in a system built on axioms, propositions, and images. In his dialogue Meno, Socrates’ pedagogic demonstration, supported by the unique capacity of mathematics to provide epistemic closure, foreshadowed a slow-growing rift between philosophy and mathematics, one which came to a head in the 17th century rationalism of Descartes. In Descartes’ work on methodology, mathematics, by overriding the seemingly inconclusive meanderings of philosophy, became the supreme pathway to knowledge. Philosophy, thereafter, had to fight for its life, while pedagogy, questing more and more for “completeness” through formalization, ironically moved toward a fragmentation and reductionism which a mathematized Cartesian methodology supported. The curriculum divisions which resulted were presaged in Descartes’ writing on methodology; the isolation of the individual learner from the larger community of discourse was supported by Descartes’ “cogito.” Suggested here is that a pedagogic approach to the teaching of mathematics, which extends beyond the limitations of the “single solution” methodology utilized in Meno, is possible—an approach which allows pedagogy to spread the Socratic use of dialectical thinking even into that sphere of apodicticity. This suggests that an alternative to the monistic rationalism of Descartes’ mathematized methodology is possible for pedagogy in general, now bringing back into play what Descartes found expendable—viz. dialectical philosophy itself, dialogical inquiry, history, literature, and the arts. Had Socrates, who came to philosophy primarily as a teacher fascinated with intellectual paradoxes, explored, in Meno, the pedagogic possibility of a dialectical approach to mathematics, his larger work in dialectical pedagogy might have been less teacher-centered—notwithstanding his ironic “ignorance”; and given his historic significance as the most celebrated teacher in Western culture, modern pedagogy might have been less overwhelmed by the Cartesian drive toward mechanized and reductionist “single-solution,” non-communal teaching and thinking.

The Bias Paradox in Feminist Standpoint Epistemology

The Bias Paradox in Feminist Standpoint Epistemology

Womanist Lessons for Reinventing Teaching

Although teaching is regarded as “women’s work,” few calls for change in the multicultural and social justice literature focus attention on the teaching self as a socially constructed gendered identity. Given Black women’s prominence in this literature as successful educators of students underserved in contemporary schools, the author suggests connections between their pedagogy and an empowered female self that transgresses many historical and contemporary mainstream feminine beliefs and ways of being. Drawing on the work of womanist scholars explicating Black women’s epistemological standpoint, the author analyzes data from a life history interview study with six Black teachers committed to social justice. Findings suggest three womanist stances shaping the teachers’ acknowledgment of social ills, resistance to complicity within educational systems, and belief in the possibility of social change. The author concludes the article by raising gender-related questions to guide the reinvention and unlearning called for by the educational social justice literature.

A realist epistemology of faith

In this paper, I analyse and interpret Thomas Aquinas's account of faith in order to show how Thomistic faith is a veridical cognitive state that directs the mind to God, and consequently constitutes a distinct form of knowledge of God. By assenting to the revealed propositions of faith (which express the truth about God), and thereby forming true beliefs about God under the authority and guidance of God's grace, the possessor of faith comes to know or apprehend truly something about God, even if she fails to ‘see’ or know fully the truth that she believes. A further task of the paper is to show how Thomistic faith qualifies (at least potentially) as knowledge from a contemporary epistemological standpoint, insofar as it consists of true belief that is appropriately justified and warranted, by virtue of being supernaturally informed and generated. By expositing and defending this central claim – focusing specifically on faith as a form of knowledge – I show how Aquinas offers an epistemologically realist account of faith.

Journey to the ‘new normal’ and beyond: reflections on learning in a community of practice

Through poetry and strips of narrative, this paper discusses the embodied experience of chemical sensitivity and the anthropologist author's and other patients' journey through altered perception towards knowledge, community and transformation in the context of a medical clinic. The narratives are situated in several strands of relevant theory, including Merleau‐Ponty's work on the primacy of perception, feminist perspectives on embodied experience and standpoint epistemology, disability studies, identity creation through narrating the self, and Lave and Wenger's situated learning in a community of practice.

Understanding curriculum as normalizing text: disability studies meet curriculum theory

Although post‐structuralists within curriculum studies have examined many contexts of curriculum theory, they have been silent on disability. This silence is worthy of study, especially because of the growing significance of disability studies in the humanities and the social sciences. I question post‐structuralist arguments in curriculum theory from the epistemological standpoint of disability studies. I extend the post‐structuralist project of deconstructing and reinterpreting text to examine the material implications derived from interpretations of normality as a discursive construction. I ask the following questions: What are the historical, social, and economic conditions that produce the distances and inter‐relationships that exist between the ‘disabled’ and the ‘normal’ world? How do these conditions prevent scholars from providing emancipatory representations of Otherness? How can educators construct a curriculum that can produce oppositional knowledges that will contribute to the possibility of not just textual but also material and social transformation for all students?

The Epistemological Evaluation of Oppositional Secrets

Although political values guide people who take advice from standpoint epistemolo-gies in deciding whether to reveal secrets used to resist oppression, these decisions can also be understood and evaluated in purely cognitive or epistemological terms. When political considerations direct us to preserve a secret, the cognitive value progressively diminishes because the view of the world projected by the secret is increasingly vulnerable.

State of the Art: A Decade of Health Sociology in Review

This paper reports on a review of health sociology in Australia from 1990 till present. The authors searched all the major databases for health social sciences including Medline, CINAHL, Sociological s and Australian Medical Index. Methodological difficulties in capturing all such work are outlined first. Examination of the citations revealed a significant increase in research and commentary in the discipline, and a continued (since the last review) movement away from the biomedical world views towards more inductive, qualitative research strategies and epistemological standpoints. This decade saw the emergence of AIDS, the body and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as popular themes in research, and the proliferation of risk as a conceptual tool. An important finding is the proportion of single-authored publications and the possible implications for communication and dialogue amongst those working in the discipline, and the seeming lack of collaboration, at least at the level of publication. It is concluded that although there are parallels with the findings of the previous reviews, there have been distinct methodological and paradigmatic shifts in health sociology over the last decade.

Faith and feminism: how African American women from a storefront church resist oppression in healthcare.

It is well documented that racism in the US healthcare system, including the objectification and disparagement of women of color, contributes to disparities in health status. However, it is a mistaken notion to characterize women of color as unknowing victims. In this study, black feminist standpoint epistemology is used in methodological approach and analysis to understand how a small group of African American church-going women use religious beliefs to help them cope with and resist the racism and discriminatory objectification they encounter in healthcare encounters.

On the Possibility of Communicating: Feminism and Social Position

This article sorts out some of the theoretical dilemmas related to issues of identity, difference, and location that have arisen on the horizon of critical and cultural communication studies in the past few decades. Tracing the origins of the belief in the epistemological significance of social position to early criticaltheorists, it explores the further development of this concept in feminist scholarship. Using the feminist struggle with standpoint epistemology as an example, this work explores some of the dangers associated with the assumption that membership in a subordinated group affords one privileged knowledge about oppression, and critically examines the practical difficulties of applying a theoretically sophisticated understanding of the role of social position to politically grounded research.

Knowledge management in a project‐oriented organization: three perspectives

Knowledge management is seen as a metaphorical perspective on management where the managerial focus depends on the epistemological standpoint taken. An identification of three epistemological perspectives accommodates the main body of literature on knowledge management: an artifact oriented epistemology that focuses on explicit knowledge, a process oriented epistemology focusing on both tacit and explicit knowledge and the interaction of these types of knowledge and an autopoietic epistemology where knowledge basically always has a tacit dimension. Based on a study of knowledge management in the Danish company Crisplant, the paper shows how the three epistemologies bring different aspects of managerial practice forward. By comparing the characteristics of knowledge, the nature of knowledge management activities, how knowledge is created and shared it is concluded that awareness of the implications of epistemological perspectives could enhance managerial analysis and conduct with respect to the management of knowledge as well as enrich research in the area.

Practicing for Equity from the Standpoint of the Particular: Exploring the Work of One Urban Teacher Network

This article examines the work of one urban teacher network (TLC) and analyzes the ideas about educational equity and inequality that evolve from its professional development practices. Drawing on archival and ethnographic materials that span 24 years, the author explores how TLC's oral inquiry processes—grounded in a phenomenological approach—make visible two different, but interrelated, ethical obligations that undergird practitioners’ work to build equitable educational practices within contexts saturated with inequality. Seeking to build equitable educational practices for all children, TLC's work begins with the particular, often a single child. Beginning its analysis from what feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith has called “the everyday world as problematic”, TLC's work envisions social change that is deeply situated and attends to the multiplicity, complexity, and uncertainty that characterize human learning. Thus, the grounded knowledge that TLC practitioners collectively develop constitutes a kind of critical social theory that can speak back to and inform those universalist policy approaches to equity that stress uniform and standardized education. As educational reform efforts across the country appear to be turning increasingly to top-down initiatives that direct the work of teachers, it is ever more urgent to consider this grounded epistemological standpoint on equity. It was 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon. Eighteen women were gathered around Lucy's dining room table, passing cheese and crackers, fruit and cookies, coffee and water. Bags full of papers and books hung from the chairs and crowded the floor. Before the meeting officially began, the room was filled with the stories of schools and children, family life and work. The women in this room had a lot in common. Most were, or had been, elementary school teachers. Some were administrators, counselors, teacher educators, and researchers. Most of the women were White. The majority worked in the public schools of a large city in the United States. The meeting started with brief introductions and announcements before the group turned its attention to one teacher, one child and one question. For a full 2 hours, the group engaged in a process called The Descriptive Review of the Child. Theresa, a third grade teacher, spent the first 45 minutes giving an uninterrupted description of her observations of a 9-year-old boy, Matthew. As she spoke a rich portrait unfolded of Matthew as a scientist, visual artist, and poet. As she painted this picture, she noted concerns and posed the question to the group: “How can I help Matthew to be more focused and organized in order to benefit more from classroom instruction and to pursue his interests independently ?” After listening carefully to Theresa's description of Matthew, the participants asked Theresa questions to clarify and extend their understandings of this child. Finally the group made a series of recommendations for how Theresa could change her practice to address her questions in a manner that accounted for Matthew's passions, interests, and styles of learning. These recommendations embodied a central tension for practice in their suggestion that Theresa must walk a fine line as she figured out how to help Matthew meet essential requirements of the official curriculum while at the same time supporting his strongly held standards and values.

Practicing for Equity from the Standpoint of the Particular: Exploring the Work of One Urban Teacher Network

This article examines the work of one urban teacher network (TLC) and analyzes the ideas about educational equity and inequality that evolve from its professional development practices. Drawing on archival and ethnographic materials that span 24 years, the author explores how TLC's oral inquiry processes—grounded in a phenomenological approach—make visible two different, but interrelated, ethical obligations that undergird practitioners’ work to build equitable educational practices within contexts saturated with inequality. Seeking to build equitable educational practices for all children, TLC's work begins with the particular, often a single child. Beginning its analysis from what feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith has called “the everyday world as problematic”, TLC's work envisions social change that is deeply situated and attends to the multiplicity, complexity, and uncertainty that characterize human learning. Thus, the grounded knowledge that TLC practitioners collectively develop constitutes a kind of critical social theory that can speak back to and inform those universalist policy approaches to equity that stress uniform and standardized education. As educational reform efforts across the country appear to be turning increasingly to top-down initiatives that direct the work of teachers, it is ever more urgent to consider this grounded epistemological standpoint on equity. It was 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon. Eighteen women were gathered around Lucy's dining room table, passing cheese and crackers, fruit and cookies, coffee and water. Bags full of papers and books hung from the chairs and crowded the floor. Before the meeting officially began, the room was filled with the stories of schools and children, family life and work. The women in this room had a lot in common. Most were, or had been, elementary school teachers. Some were administrators, counselors, teacher educators, and researchers. Most of the women were White. The majority worked in the public schools of a large city in the United States. The meeting started with brief introductions and announcements before the group turned its attention to one teacher, one child and one question. For a full 2 hours, the group engaged in a process called The Descriptive Review of the Child. Theresa, a third grade teacher, spent the first 45 minutes giving an uninterrupted description of her observations of a 9-year-old boy, Matthew. As she spoke a rich portrait unfolded of Matthew as a scientist, visual artist, and poet. As she painted this picture, she noted concerns and posed the question to the group: “How can I help Matthew to be more focused and organized in order to benefit more from classroom instruction and to pursue his interests independently ?” After listening carefully to Theresa's description of Matthew, the participants asked Theresa questions to clarify and extend their understandings of this child. Finally the group made a series of recommendations for how Theresa could change her practice to address her questions in a manner that accounted for Matthew's passions, interests, and styles of learning. These recommendations embodied a central tension for practice in their suggestion that Theresa must walk a fine line as she figured out how to help Matthew meet essential requirements of the official curriculum while at the same time supporting his strongly held standards and values.

La simulation informatique face à la « méthode des modèles ». Le cas de la croissance des plantes

The paper deals with an intellectual and historical approach to the changing meanings of the term “model” in life sciences. The author 1 st tries to understand how modeling has gradually spread over life sciences then he particularly focus on the birth of mathematical modeling in this field. This quite new practice offers new insights on the old debate concerning the mathematization of life sciences. Nowadays, through computers, mathematics not only analyze or quantify but model things: what does it mean? The question turns out to be dramatic as far as digital simulation is concerned. That is the reason why he choosed to study a particular case: the history of the individual plant mathematical modeling. On this case, one may discern various epistemological standpoints that caused various reactions to the emergence of computer simulation, from the 50s to the 90s. The author shows that philosophical views often play a role in the history of sciences, especially in the choice of supposed proper mathematical formalisms. This will indicate that contemporary discourses tend to echo each other. That is the reason why he feels authorized to address the Foucault’s concept— épistémè—to denote these convergences between the scientific and the philosophical discourses. Finally, it is suggested that this épistémè gradually is changing because one can currently observe the emergence of a “graphical” thought through these simulation experiments, which tends to replace a more functionalist thought.

Disparate But Disabled: Fat Embodiment and Disability Studies

At a recent conference on race, a prominent but controversial white male academic presented a paper on buckshot skull studies, noting comparisons between Caucasian and African skulls. Well-known for his race/ist scholarship, this scholar concluded that such studies represent facts that cannot be ignored, implying that racism, at least on some levels, can be biologically and scientifically justified. During the discussion of his paper, I posed a question about feminist standpoint epistemology, his obvious belief in science as purely objective, and his recalcitrance to situate himself, as a white male, within the context of his own study and scientific epistemology. After replying with the tiresome argument that only scientists can criticize science and stating that feminist standpoint epistemologists needed to build a rocket that made it to the moon before he would take their criticisms seriously, he continued to argue for pure objectivity, stating he could show me studies that empirically prove women's hips are wider than men's. Unpacking his choice of example exposes the liability I faced as a woman of size in a culture that values thinness. First, his example reminded me of my body size (while I was standing in the front of a

Knowing communities: An investigation of Harding's standpoint epistemology

(2002). Knowing communities: An investigation of Harding's standpoint epistemology. Social Epistemology: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 283-293.