SUSAN HAACK
559
style. But even if there were such a thing, the case for feminist episte–
mology would require further argument to show that female "ways of
knowing" (scare quotes because the term is tendentious, since "knows" is
a success-word) represent better procedures of inquiry or su btler standards
of justification than the male. And, sure enough, we are told that in–
sights into the theory of knowledge are available to women which are
not available, or not easily available, to men. In all honesty, I cannot see
how the evidence to date could be thought to speak in favor of this
bold claim; what my experience suggests is rather that the questions of
epistemological tradition are hard, very hard, for anyone, of either sex,
to answer or even significantly to clarifY.
Sometimes it is claimed that oppressed, disadvantaged and marginal–
ized people are epistemically privileged in virtue of their oppression and
disadvantage. If this were true, it would suggest that the truly epistemi–
cally privileged are not the affluent, well-educated, white, Western
women who (mostly) rest their claim to special insight upon it, but the
most oppressed, the most disadvantaged - some of whom are men. But,
aside from appeals to the authority of Karl Marx on epistemological
matters, is there any reason to think it is true? Kuhn observed that revo–
lutionary scientific innovations are often made by persons who are at the
margin of a discipline; but women, as a class, are not "marginal" in this
sense. And one of the ways in which oppressed people are oppressed is,
surely, that their oppressors control the information that reaches them.
This argues, if anything, a cognitive disadvantage for "oppressed, disad–
vantaged, marginalized" people. So no such connection between femi–
nism and epistemology as the rubric "feminist epistemology" requires is
to be found under the first interpretation of "the woman's point of
view," as "the way women see things."
Under the second interpretation of "the woman's point of view," as
"serving the interests of women," the connection is supposed to be made
by
way of feminist criticisms of sexism in scientific theorizing. This would
merge with the first connecting route on the assumption - which, of
course, I do not accept - that sexism in scientific theorizing is the result
of the exclusion of women, and hence of "women's ways of knowing,"
from the sciences. It is true, I think, that in the social sciences and biol–
ogy theories which are not well-supported by the evidence have some–
times come to be accepted by scientists, most often male scientists, who
have taken stereotypical ideas of masculine and feminine behavior uncriti–
cally for granted. (Perhaps I need
to
add that, by my lights, a theory is
sexist - or rather, sexist against women - only if it is false as well as dis–
advantageous to women; that some women find it disturbing or offen–
sive is neither sufficient nor necessary. Perhaps I also need to add that I
am skeptical of claims that sexism has somehow infected theorizing in the
