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PARTISAN REVIEW
Among self-styled feminist epistemologists one finds quasi-foundationalists,
coherentists, contextualists; those who stress connectedness, community,
the social aspects of knowledge, and those who stress emotion, presum–
ably subjective and personal; those who stress concepts of epistemic
virtue, those who want the "androcentric" norms of the epistemological
tradition to be replaced by "gynocentric" norms, those who advocate a
descriptivist approach, and so on. Even apparent agreement, for example,
that feminist epistemology will stress the social aspects of knowledge,
masks significant disagreement about what this means: that inquirers are
pervasively dependent on one another; that cooperative inquiry is better
than individual inquiry; that epistemic justification is community-relative;
that only a group, not an individual , can properly be said to inquire or
to know; that reality is socially constructed, and so on.
The puzzlement is further aggravated by the reflection that neither
all, nor
only,
females, or feminists, favor all, or indeed any, of the ideas
offered under the rubric "feminist epistemology." Peirce, for example, is
critical of what he calls the "vicious individualism" of Desca rtes' crite–
rion of truth, and has a subtle conception of the social aspects of inquiry;
yet he was neither female nor (to judge by his use of "masculine intel–
lect" equivalently to "tough, powerful mind") feminist. John Stuart Mill
surely qualifies as feminist if any male philosopher does; yet one finds
none of the supposedly feminist themes in his epistemology - any more
than one does in Ayn Rand's.
So: what is feminist about feminist epistemology? There seem to be
two main routes by which feminism and epistemology are supposed to
be connected, corresponding to two interpretations of the phrase , "the
woman 's point of view" : as "the way women see things ," or as "serving
the interests of women." (These correspond also to two kinds of criti–
cism of the epistemological mainstream: that it is androcentric, focusing
exclusively on male ways of knowing, and that it is sexist, hostile to
women's interests.)
Sometimes we are told that feminist epistemology represents wom–
en's "ways of knowing." This reversion to the notion of "thinking like
a woman" is disquietingly reminiscent of old, sexist stereotypes. Still,
there are disquieting truths, so this hardly settles the matter. But I am
not convinced that there are any distinctively female "ways of knowing."
All any human being has to go on, in figuring out how things are, is his
or her sensory and introspective experience, and the explanatory theoriz–
ing he or she devises to accommodate it; and differences in cognitive
style, like differences in handwriting, seem more individual than sex-de–
termined.
The profusion of incompatible themes proposed as "feminist episte–
mology" itself speaks against the idea of a distinctively female cognitive
