Philosophy of Science 17 - Feminist Approaches

Or sub dogs. In this video, we're going to look at feminist approaches to the philosophy of science. Now, this is a difficult subject to introduce, partly because feminism isn't one single thing. There are a variety of different feminisms, hence a variety of different feminist philosophies of science. But, you know, I'll do my best to outline the general conceptual landscape.

Now, the primary contribution of feminism, I think, has been in case studies of male bias in science, so ways in which sexist assumptions have distorted scientific research. So, you know, we'll take a look at some of these case studies and then we'll discuss the broader epistemological theories. But I think that, you know, generally, feminist approaches to the philosophy of science usually kind of start with that's the case studies. So let's look at a few examples.

Okay, the article "The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology" discusses the case of fertilization. Fertilization, obviously, the union of the sperm and the egg. How does this work? Well, traditionally, biologists adopted what's sometimes called the Prince Charming Sleeping Beauty model of the sperm and the egg. And this model treats fertilization as a kind of hero narrative, where a single heroic sperm battles through the hostile environment of the uterus, surviving challenges and defeating its rivals, and then it gains the prize of the passive egg, which the sperm then penetrates and breathes life into it. Fertilization is a dangerous race with the fastest sperm winning and claiming the egg.

So here, for example, is a quote from Keaton's 1976 textbook, "Biological Science." And I'm not going to read all of that out, but, you know, you can pause and read it if you want. In this quote, you can see the the Prince Charming Sleeping Beauty model. It's suspiciously similar to stereotypical literary treatments of men and women, where, you know, men are viewed as active, as, as sort of active heroes, and women maybe more passive, often treated as the prize for the man's success. So that this is the sperm here has this active masculine role, and the egg has the passive feminine role.

But this way of looking at fertilization has come under serious criticism. So, in fact, the egg may not be so passive. Instead, it seems that it, the egg, actively selects a particular sperm from a number of options. And the chosen sperm does not burrow through the egg. Rather, once the sperm reaches the egg, the egg produces these small projections from its cell surface, known as microvilli, and the microvilli clasp the sperm and draw it in. Now, the first photographs of microvilli were published in 1895, but their role in reproduction was basically ignored until the 1980s. And in fact, even today, I mean, people still still speak of the sperm penetrating the egg. And I think that language maybe carries a potentially misleading metaphor. Why not say that the egg engulfs the sperm? I mean, that seems to be at least as, as accurate a description of what's going on.

So, so maybe even today, you know, we still tend to think of that the sperm and the egg in terms of a sort of Prince Charming Sleeping Beauty model. But anyway, another problem with this, this is sort of traditional model, is with the notion of the sperm battling against the hostile environment of the uterus. In mammals, sperm are not immediately capable of fertilizing the egg. They must undergo a process known as capacitation, and this is aided by secretions of enzymes in the uterus. So although it's obviously true that millions of sperm die on the path to the egg, they are in fact aided by the uterus. The uterus is not this sort of passive obstacle course; it actively helps to make the sperm capable of fertilization by prompting certain physiological changes.

Now, capacitation was known since at least the 1950s, but as we saw in in the Keaton quote, the introductory accounts of fertilization kind of continued to adopt the the Prince Charming Sleeping Beauty model. So what this example possibly suggests is that gender stereotypes biased people's understanding of fertilization.

Another famous example concerns the study of social behavior among primates. The traditional view of primate sexual behavior was that males attempted to be highly promiscuous, males attempted to mate with many females, while females were coy and choosy. And this was linked to a general theory of the, the sort of evolutionary history of the reproductive strategies of males and females. See, there's a notable asymmetry between males and females with respect to potential reproductive success. A single male can, in principle, impregnate hundreds of females at very little cost. Sperm are cheap. So, yeah, the only thing a male needs to do in order to reproduce is have sex. On the other hand, reproduction is extremely costly for females. Pregnancy is lengthy, it requires a lot of resources, you know, a lot of like nutrition to support this thing growing inside you, and it's often dangerous. I mean, you know, lots of females die during pregnancy or during childbirth. But that me, or the number of children that a female can have is much more limited. A female will only be able to have a few children over her, her lifetime. So the result of this then is that males are selected to be promiscuous, males are selected to try to have sex with as many females as possible, because, you know, there's no real cost to mating with a substandard female. See, whereas females are selected to be choosy, they're selected to have sex only with the best male they can get, because they're not going to have many opportunities to have children. Okay.

So this is all very nice as a general theory, and this is how, you know, primatologists looked at primates for many decades. But as more women entered primatology in the 1970s, more attention was paid to the behavior of female primates, and it became clear that the sexual behavior of female primates was far more diverse than was previously appreciated. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, but she's done her, a lot of, a lot of work on this. So she investigated, for instance, langur monkeys, and it turns out that female langur monkeys are very promiscuous. One reason for this is that langur monkeys live in groups that are headed by a single dominant male. When a new male takes over the group, which happens about once every two years, he kills all of the infants unrelated to him. And this is at least partly because females are not receptive to mating if they're nursing. So by killing all of the infants, the male will be able to mate with more females. Given this kind of social structure, the females are actually under pressure to be promiscuous. You know, they will mate with as many males as possible because then, if one of those males becomes dominant, he won't kill an infant that might be his own. In this case, then, females mate promiscuously in order to confuse information about paternity, which forces the dominant male to invest in, or at least to tolerate, the the children. Females will use sexual behavior to manipulate how males behave towards offspring.

And we find, you know, notice, similarly diverse behaviors in other primates. In saddleback tamarins, females mate with numerous males, and all the males then help care for her twin offspring. In chimpanzees, females alternate between extended mating with just one male and then communal mating with almost all males in the vicinity, where they'll make successively with, with, with basically every male in the group. And, you know, if you look up primate sexual behavior, you can find many other examples. There are many other species of primates where actually there's, there's sort of much more diversity and promiscuity among females than was, than was once appreciated.

Now, the basic point that sperm are cheap and pregnancy is costly, so that males will be selected to be promiscuous while females will be selected to be choosy, that's still true. But we've now developed models of sexual behavior that posit other selective pressures. In the case of the langur monkeys, the over social structure, where, where one male becomes dominant and then kills the infants, right, that creates a different selective pressure. So, so similarly, we have other models that posit other selective pressures. The inferior cuckold hypothesis suggests that female primates might pair up with an inferior male who is nevertheless good enough to provide resources for raising the child, and then the female will then surreptitiously solicit a genetically superior male for mating. There's obviously a benefit to behaving in this way for the female. The diverse paternity hypothesis points out that environments often fluctuate unpredictably. Greater genetic variation in one's offspring increases the probability that at least some will survive. And, and so in this case, females are selected to mate with numerous males so as to get genetic variation among their offspring. And, you know, there are lots of other models that have been developed as well. The point here is female, female primates, that they're more active, more complex, you know, in terms of their role in reproduction than we once thought. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's article, "Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female," goes into into this.

Okay, so a major source of male bias, according to many feminists, is that scientists often implicitly assume that the male is the norm of all humanity. So the male is, is treated as, as more fully human. Male is treated as the exemplar human. And insofar as females differ from males, they are treated as a kind of deviation from the norm. So you often find, you know, that researchers might only study men and then make a hasty generalization from this data to humans overall.

A famous example of this is Lawrence Kohlberg's model of the stages of moral development. Kohlberg argues that moral reasoning develops through six different stages. So, for example, stage one is, I think, called the, the punishment and obedience orientation, where an action is perceived as morally bad just in case the perpetrator is punished. Like, likely if a child believes that, you know, stealing food is wrong because people who steal food are punished, something like that. So it posits this, these six stages of moral development. The point for us is that Kohlberg develops his model on the basis of interviews with, with males. So in fact, what he really had was a model of moral development in males, but he took it as the norm, the standard for all humans. He just took it as being a model of human moral development. So when finding that girls and women tended to give different responses and tended not to go through the same stages as males, he assumed that girls simply matured more slowly than boys with respect to moral development. Girls are more likely to get stuck at the lower stages of moral development.

Kohlberg's model was famously criticized by Carol Gilligan, who argued that it's, it's simply that women have different moral values. So while men tend to focus more on justice, duties, and rights, women are more focused on caring and maintaining social relationships. While men tend to reason from universal abstract principles, women will be more responsive to sort of contextual and narrative features of specific situations, like specific social situations. So men, men have an ethics of justice, women have more like, like an ethics of care. And it's not that one of these is, you know, better than another; they're just, they're just different ways of approaching morality. So women's moral development is not deviant; it's just different.

A particularly egregious example of this kind of thing is given by Elizabeth Lloyd in her book on the female orgasm. So various evolutionary psychologists theorizing about the origin of the female orgasm have supported their theories with statistics about characteristics of the orgasm. So it's, it's, you know, length, its frequency, its repeatability, and so on. But when examining the original research that was used to generate such statistics, Lloyd found that in many cases, these, these statistics were based on data gathered from male subjects, which means that data about male orgasms was being used to support theories of the evolutionary history of female orgasms. So this is, this is a particularly egregious example of kind of implicitly assuming that the male is the norm of humanity.

Okay, well, these are just a few examples of, you know, supposed male bias in science. Of course, there is debate about whether the feminist interpretation of these cases is correct. But, you know, I mean, it's not really controversial that we can find examples of male bias in the sciences.

Well, the question is, what are we to make of this? If feminist epistemology is simply a matter of identifying cases of male bias and then correcting them, or at least suggesting alternative interpretations, then it's not really controversial. Like, like, yeah, obviously we should, we should try to remove male bias in these sorts of cases. But in fact, feminist epistemology goes a bit further than this. So that the broad idea of feminist epistemology is that science should incorporate feminist values. And there are three basic approaches to bringing feminist values into science: there's feminist empiricism, standpoint epistemology, and feminist postmodernism. And that these terms are used in different ways by different people, so they're not exactly perfectly well-defined positions. But, you know, I'll try to introduce the general conceptual landscape.

Okay, let's start with feminist empiricism. Now, here, empiricism means the idea that empirical evidence is the primary constraint on scientific theorizing, and that the scientific method is basically reliable, and that the scientific method is rational and objective. Obviously, exactly what rational objective means depends on your specific views of scientific methodology. A feminist empiricist might accept the hypothetical deductive method, or falsificationism, or Bayesianism, or whatever. Basically, feminist empiricism is a form of feminist epistemology that tries to work within the empiricist tradition, broadly speaking. It tries to work within the tradition of philosophy of science that goes back to the logical positivists, and that, you know, we have covered in this series so far. It tries to stay true to, to the, the empiricist roots while incorporating feminist values into scientific work.

Now, there's a general challenge to the very possibility of feminist empiricism. And I think this is, this is discussed quite nicely by Ron Gearey in his article, "The Feminist Question in the Philosophy of Science." The feminist empiricist claims that science should incorporate feminist values. At the same time, the feminist empiricist wants to accept traditional views about rationality and scientific method. So here's the problem: we saw earlier a number of cases of male bias in science. Now, in order to count as a critique of science that illustrates the need for a new feminist epistemology, the cases discussed by feminists must meet two criteria. First, they must be cases where the theories have in fact been influenced by a male bias, masculine bias. And second, they must be cases of standard scientific practice. They must be cases where scientists followed what was considered to be proper scientific methodology. After all, the feminist empiricist holds that scientific methodology needs to be reformed. What distinguishes feminist empiricism from empiricism more generally is precisely the claim that science would improve if it included feminist values.

Now, the trouble here, as Gearey points out, is that traditional philosophers of science hold that bias is a bad thing. And one of the virtues of the scientific method, whether it's, you know, hypothetical deductive-ism, or falsificationism, or whatever, one of the virtues of it is supposed to be that it removes bias. Provided a researcher follows this method properly, their conclusions will be free of their initial biases. So the point is then that insofar as these examples are cases of male bias, they are also cases, so the traditional epistemologists would say, where scientists failed to follow proper scientific method. Basically, the traditional epistemologists can use the existence of gender bias in any particular case as grounds for arguing that it's a case where scientists did not follow proper scientific practice. So condition one undercuts condition two. And the stronger the argument from a sexist bias, the stronger the argument the proper scientific method was not followed. Hence, the very idea of feminist empiricism is, is ruled out in principle. So, you know, we all agree that the examples of male bias are, are bad. But the traditional epistemologists will say that the solution to this is just to follow proper scientific method more closely. There's no need to reform science along feminist lines.

There's another slightly different spin on this kind of objection. We've seen that feminist critiques proceed by exposing sexist biases in research. Probably the main reason why these, these examples uncovered by feminists are so disturbing is that, you know, the reason why philosophers find these examples disturbing is that philosophers tend to share the standard empiricist attitude that bias is a bad thing. So by showing that scientific research has been infected by male bias, you've shown that science is not really being done properly, at least in these cases. And yet, for the feminist empiricist, the remedy is supposed to be that feminist values should play a greater role in scientific research. And isn't that just introducing more bias into science? How can bias improve science? Why would I, why would a feminist bias, or a female bias, be any, any less misleading, any less destructive than male bias?

I think there's many worth making a broader point here about the, the development of empiricism over the 20th century. We've discussed before in this series, I think we've discussed it before, anyway, well, hopefully we've discussed before, the, the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. And, and the point, this is that it's just that how a theory was generated, how a theory was discovered, is irrelevant to whether or not that theory is acceptable. A classic example here is August Kekulé's. Am I pronouncing that correctly? I have no idea, but that's the pronunciation we'll go with. August Kekulé's, he supposedly saw the structure of the benzene molecule in a dream. Dreams, obviously, are not reliable guides to reality. But this was no matter because he then acquired good evidence for his hypothesis. It would completely miss the point to argue that his hypothesis was wrong because he came up with it in a dream. It doesn't matter how he came up with it; the point is he had good evidence for it.

Now, if you accept the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, then the social positions of the, the people who proposed a hypothesis should not be relevant to the evaluation of the hypothesis. And it's worth noting that many of these basic ideas in philosophy of science were developed around the 1930s and 1940s, contemporary with the rise of Nazism. The Nazis persecuted Jewish scientists and they enacted racial laws against so-called Jewish science, which just meant, you know, science practiced by Jews. So Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, was vilified in the Nazi press simply because Einstein was a Jew. Hypotheses were dismissed not due to the lack of evidence, but due to the social position of those who proposed them. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, Mendelian genetics was suppressed because it was viewed as being bourgeois science. Now, for thought that philosophers of science around this time, this kind of reasoning wasn't just racist and bigoted; it was, you know, bad epistemology. The discovery-justification distinction rules out the very notion, the very concept of Jewish science, or bourgeois science, or whatever. All that should matter when it comes to the evaluation of a scientific hypothesis, all that should matter are the logical relations between evidence and hypothesis.

Now, given this general background, I think it's understandable why some philosophers would worry about the very concept of either feminist empiricism or even feminist epistemology more generally. In proposing that current science is masculine or androcentric, and that we need a more feminist science, we seem to be abandoning a very important epistemological and moral principle: the principle the origins, the origins of a theory should be irrelevant to theory evaluation. And on this view, there can be no gendered science, right? That the very idea of feminist empiricism is a nonsensical contradiction in terms. Male bias is a bad thing because bias is a bad thing, and science should eliminate bias. Female bias or feminist bias would be no better than male bias. So, I mean, I, I suppose just to put this background, I want to sort of get it, get this kind of background out here because this is a challenge to the very concept of, of any sort of feminist epistemology. The question is, can we, you know, develop feminist empiricism in such a way as to avoid this problem? Is there a way around this kind of issue?

Well, I think one interesting idea is suggested by Kathleen Okruhlik in her article "Gender and the Biological Sciences." Actually, I should note, Okruhlik doesn't call herself a feminist empiricist, but that's because she uses the phrase slightly differently to us. As I mentioned earlier, you know, that the terms are not, they don't seem to have a clear definition, but per the definition we're using, she is a feminist empiricist, you know, it, so in the sense that we're using it in this video. But yeah, I mean, just, just, you know, but bear in mind that, as I say, the terms seem to be used slightly differently by different people. Anyway, Okruhlik's idea is this: we all accept that there may be biases in, in the context of discovery, right? That's totally uncontroversial. When a scientist comes up with a theory, that theory may well be influenced by the idiosyncratic biases of the scientist. But Okruhlik says, even if justification is simply a matter of the kind of logical relations between theory and evidence and so on, the context of discovery and the context of justification can't be so neatly divided.

So to Okruhlik, she grants for the sake of argument that proper science proceeds according to objective, purely rational rules, maybe hypothetical deductive-ism, falsificationism, or whatever your preferred theory of the scientific method is. The problem is that theory evaluation involves a comparison. Theory evaluation is not a two-place relation where a theory is compared directly with the world. Rather, it's a three-place relation: a theory is compared with the world and with other available theories. We say that the evidence for one hypothesis is greater than the evidence for another hypothesis. And of course, in the cutting edge of science, new hypotheses are constantly being generated and compared with each other. Let's say we're studying Mars and we find evidence of an unexpectedly high concentration of a particular molecule in its atmosphere. One hypothesis might be that this molecule is a waste product of living organisms. Another hypothesis might attribute it to an abiotic geological process. Another hypothesis might, might just be that the, the instruments made the wrong reading or something. So there's been some kind of failure in, in the instruments, and actually the molecule is not present at such a high concentration. What we then do is we derive new predictions from each hypothesis and we search for evidence to discriminate between them, and ultimately we accept the hypothesis that's most plausible, that's that's best supported by the evidence, given these other hypotheses that we've compared it to. And obviously, we can only compare our hypothesis to the rival hypotheses that we have actually generated. We don't have access to all possible hypotheses; we can only come up with a limited number, often a very limited number.

Now, whatever method you use for choosing between theories, no matter how powerful it is, it cannot remove bias entirely because we can only compare the theories that have actually been generated. Which means that if bias influences theory generation, theory discovery, it also influences which theory we ultimately accept. So Okruhlik concludes that even if science is a purely rational enterprise in the context of justification, even if it's purely rational in terms of how we choose between rival theories, there may still be male bias. The content of science may still be sexist. If a given scientific field is entirely dominated by males who work with sexist background assumptions, then every hypothesis they generate might be biased. They might just fail to consider the non-sexist alternatives. So this is one way in which, and a male bias can, can influence science, even if we sort of adopt the, the, the kind of traditional empiricist view that science proceeds according to a purely rational, disinterested, objective method in the domain of theory evaluation, in the context of justification.

Along similar lines, feminists empiricists, such as Helen Longino, often appeal to the underdetermination arguments. Again, I think we've covered this in previous videos. This is the idea that there are always an indefinite number of theories that are compatible with a given set of data. The evidence alone cannot tell you what theory to accept. So in choosing a theory, you always have to operate with a certain set of background assumptions that act as further constraints on theory choice. For example, if two theories make the same predictions, or at least very similar predictions, scientists will often favor the simpler theory because, well, I mean, maybe just practical reasons. Some people think that simplicity is a guide to the truth. Some people might just say that, well, it's for purely practical purposes; simpler theories are easier to work with. But the background constraints here, the background assumption is, prefer the simpler theory, choose the simpler theory. Or scientists might favor a theory that they expect will be more fruitful for further research, or whatever. And so the idea is that since evidence alone cannot determine which theory we should accept, scientists may use their moral and political values as constraints on theorizing. So in the same way that a scientist will favor a simpler theory because simpler theories are easier to work with, so a scientist may favor a theory that is more in line with their moral and political values. And so it's legitimate for feminists to, you know, prefer theories that are congruent with feminism.

Now, it's important not to misinterpret this. Feminist empiricists like Okruhlik and Longino emphasize that there is one standard that is absolutely mandatory for all scientists, and that is empirical adequacy. Scientists should only accept a theory that makes the right predictions. Okay? That is compatible with the evidence. So that's the empiricist part of feminist empiricism. I mean, in the same way, if a scientist says that they prefer a theory on the grounds that it is simpler than its rival, the assumption here is going to be that the, the theory they prefer makes the right predictions. Obviously, if the theory makes the wrong predictions, it doesn't matter how simple it is. Similarly, you know, it doesn't matter how feminist it is; it's got to make the right predictions.

So, so how exactly should we incorporate feminist values into science? Well, Longino says that we have to recognize that science is a social process. Scientific theories are not constructed by single individuals; rather, they develop over time. Theory development is a community project. And according to Longino, the objectivity of science arises from critical discussion among a plurality of viewpoints. And we see this very clearly in a process like peer review. Peer review is obviously a central part of modern science; it determines, you know, what gets published, it determines what kinds of questions get research funding, and so on. Now, peer review cannot, even in principle, be performed by a single individual. Peer review isn't simply like a double-checking mechanism, like when a person proofreads, reads the text. There's something more powerful about it. The real power of peer review is that it tests a paper against the different perspectives, the different biases of various other well-trained and critical scientists. When the author of a peer-reviewed paper revises the paper in light of the criticisms, the particular biases of the author and the particular biases of the critics are thereby removed or mitigated. So it's like you've got the, you know, the biases, the author may be biased in one direction, but then the critics are biased in another direction, and so you revise a paper in light of these different biases, and the final product, the biases have sort of been, you know, balanced, as it were. And of course, this process continues even after publication, as other scientists will read the paper and perhaps criticize it. So as the theory is developed, this kind of social structure, the critical debate between different viewpoints, weeds out individual biases and ensures the objectivity of scientific knowledge. It ensures that scientific knowledge is, is in, in a sense, kind of neutral. The biases, lots of different biases balance each other out.

So in the, in the, in the beginning, in this video, we saw various case studies where scientists overlooked male bias. And feminist empiricists like Longino would, would probably view this problem as arising from a lack of diversity. It arises from the exclusion of feminist voices and feminist perspectives from the sciences. If more feminists had been involved in the peer review of the studies we talked about earlier, they probably would have picked up on the male bias and corrected for it. So feminist empiricists accept that the scientific method is the sort of ideal of rationality and objectivity, but by itself, it can't eliminate sexism. No matter how carefully scientists follow it, we have to have some scientists who are consciously and intentionally working with feminist assumptions. We have to consciously try to generate non-sexist theories. We have to bring more feminists into science who will pick up on male biased background assumptions. Of course, we have to encourage different perspectives as well, different perspectives who will be able to pick up on the biases that will mislead feminists. And I think this, you know, this point leads to a question about feminist empiricism, which is, or just, just how is this specifically feminist? What's really feminist about feminist empiricism? Okruhlik and Longino both argue that we need to have more scientists who adopt feminist values, but their view also seems to entail that we need scientists with androcentric, male biased values, with masculinist values, you know, and there's nothing special about feminists on this kind of view. We need more feminists not because feminists are intrinsically more likely to achieve the truth, but just to promote a diversity of perspectives. So, you know, is this really a feminist epistemology? It seems like what's important here isn't so much feminism, but rather diversity, right? A diversity of perspectives, a diversity of biases. So, you know, maybe that's quite, kind of an issue here. But yeah, that's feminist empiricism.

Okay, then let's turn now to a more radical position: feminist standpoint epistemology. The basic idea of standpoint epistemology is that socially marginalized groups who fight against their oppressors are, in certain respects, epistemically privileged. They have better access to the facts in certain domains. But women have historically been a marginalized group, and feminists fight against the oppression of women, and so the feminist standpoint sometimes provides a better basis for scientific inquiry. Science needs feminists not just to promote diversity, but because feminists are epistemically privileged. So, I mean, obvious question here: why are marginalized groups considered epistemically privileged? Standpoint theorists appeal to a kind of asymmetry argument, which goes something like this: the dominant group has the luxury of simply ignoring the lives and experiences of the marginalized group. So men in positions of power have no need to concern themselves with the lives and experiences of the women who perform household labor for them, something like that. What's more, since the marginalized group is, yeah, well, marginalized, they will have few opportunities to make their voices heard. You know, when society was, you know, very patriarchal, it tended to be women didn't have opportunities to, you know, write books, to appear in, in the media, and to make themselves heard. By contrast, if the marginalized group wants to change their conditions, they will be forced to understand the dominant group and to understand how the dominant group maintained power. Those who fight on behalf of the marginalized must understand the sort of social relations, they must understand the dominant group. And since the dominant group has a loud voice and determines the mainstream narratives, it's very easy to see things from the dominant perspective. Powerful people can easily make their voices heard in the major media outlets, in the books they publish, in the public intellectuals who express our ideas favorable to them, and so on. So, I mean, overall, in that, there's this asymmetry: the dominant do not understand the marginalized, but the marginalized do understand the dominant. And that makes the marginalized epistemically privileged, privileged, or at least the people who fight on behalf of the marginalized, epistemically privileged.

So I guess an example of this might be how the dominant tend to treat social inequalities as just being, you know, natural or necessary. It's just being the way the world is. Consider the old arguments that slavery is natural, that some people were designed for slavery by God, or that society can't function without slavery. That was how the dominant groups justified enslaving other groups. Now, the people who fought against slavery were able to see the contingency of slavery. They were able to see ways of overcoming slavery. They were forced to understand the conditions that allowed slavery to arise and persist in order to undermine those conditions. You know, they wanted to end slavery; they have to understand how it was that slavery arose and persisted and was justified. So in that sense, they had a kind of epistemic privilege.

Standpoint theory offers an explanation of the case studies that we discussed in the beginning of this video. So in, in these case studies, it tended to be women, and in particular feminists, who noticed the male bias, who subjected it to criticism, and who initiated research programs designed to correct the bias. It seems that research projects guided partially by political aims have produced better research, a more accurate research, than research that was supposedly value-neutral and apolitical. And standpoint theory provides an explanation of this phenomenon. Feminists solved these problems because feminists are epistemically privileged; they are more reliable.

So standpoint theory, like feminist empiricism, is is objectivist. Standpoint theory says there are facts about the world, and particular ways of doing science provides better access to these facts. But standpoint theory proposes a much more radical reform. Now, it's important to note that according to standpoint theory, you need to adopt a feminist standpoint, not simply a woman's standpoint. Now, the feminist standpoint does partially involve taking a woman's perspective, let's say, but you don't occupy the feminist standpoint simply in virtue of being a woman. Indeed, women often support patriarchal power structures that are the source of women's oppression. People in general often act against their own interests, and women are no different. Sometimes, you know, people will support social structures that lead to their own oppression. Furthermore, it's entirely possible for men to adopt the feminist standpoint. So you don't, you don't need to be marginalized yourself in order to take the standpoint of a marginalized person. We were able to put ourselves in the shoes of other people. Now, similarly, Karl Marx was not a member of the working class, but he was able to adopt the standpoint of the working class in his analysis of class structure. So, you know, we occupy the feminist standpoint by thinking critically about broader social structures and institutions, and the, you know, the different roles of men and women, and, you know, different gender roles, and so on. The feminist standpoint then is a kind of political achievement. Occupying a feminist point involves not just looking at things from a woman's perspective, but recognizing women as a political class with a particular place or role in the overall social structure. And this standpoint is achieved by struggling against women's oppression, and it's this that makes the standpoint epistemically privileged. A person who is merely a member of an oppressed group may not think at all critically about their position; they may not fight against it, and, and there may be no, you know, privilege there.

So just to give her a specific example, a woman who accepted standard gender stereotypes would have been no more likely than a man to have seen the bias in the Prince Charming Sleeping Beauty model of fertilization. It's, it's the feminists who object to such gender stereotypes who are more likely to to see this bias. So this is obviously a fairly radical position. I mean, supposed to be fair, the idea that particular perspectives are epistemically privileged, that's not in itself controversial. Indeed, we generally think that science is epistemically privileged about many matters. So astronomers, say, are in a better position to understand the structure of stars than are other people outside of science. We might say that the plumbers are more reliable than lay persons at judging why the pipes keep getting blocked. So, you know, that these groups have epistemic privilege in these fields as a result of their greater education or greater experience in these fields. In the same way, what standpoint epistemology claims is that feminists have greater experience in certain contexts, and that's, you know, that's where their epistemic privilege comes from.

A notice standpoint theory claims that feminists are privileged only in particular contexts. They don't need you to claim that the feminist standpoint is privileged, you know, in all contexts, in all domains. It's privileged in particularly within those sciences that bear on human relations, I mean, especially insofar as these matter to the oppression of women. So the, the privilege of the feminist standpoint is in terms of identifying social problems and rectifying them. And, and it's worth emphasizing this because it's easy to sort of strawman standpoint theory and treat it as the view that the feminist standpoint is always and everywhere more reliable, and that's not what's being said.

So there are, though, a number of objections to standpoint epistemology. First, the asymmetry argument that marginalized groups are privileged because while the dominant, dominant group have the luxury of ignoring the conditions of the marginalized, the marginalized have to understand the dominant group in order to change their conditions. There are serious problems with this, with it, with this argument. For one thing, it might be argued that in order for a dominant group to properly control a subordinate group, they will need to properly understand that subordinate group. So think of things like the divide and rule strategy that was often used by colonialist nations. I mean, that can only be applied properly if the colonizers have a good understanding of the groups they're trying to control. You're only going to be able to, you know, divide a certain, a certain community if you understand like how to divide them, you know, if you understand the best way of setting them against each other. So, you know, it looks like often the dominant group will, in fact, need to understand and know the conditions of the subordinate group.

Furthermore, there are many ways in which marginalized groups are epistemically disadvantaged. People in poorer communities may not have access to such good education. You know, schools may be underfunded. What's more, the dominant group may control the flow of information. Arguably, one way in which men maintained power over women historically is that women were not properly educated, and so just didn't have the abilities and opportunities that were available to men. So, so these points would suggest that actually, very often, the dominant group will be epistemically privileged.

But more seriously, I mean, even if you find the theoretical asymmetry argument about why feminists would be epistemically privileged plausible, when is there any actual evidence for it? So yes, it does seem to be true that male bias has sometimes negatively affected. But similarly, feminist bias could negatively affect science. Like, for example, a feminist researching the wage gap might be primed to view it in terms of gender discrimination and then overlook other relevant factors, you know, factors that might be highlighted by somebody who kind of comes from a different perspective. So the point is that simply providing case studies of male bias, which have been corrected by feminists, that's not enough to establish the claim of standpoint epistemology that feminists are epistemically privileged. To show that feminists are epistemically privileged, we would need to show that feminism doesn't lead to just as many errors as a result of feminist biases.

Okay, so another problem for standpoint theory is, how do we decide who counts as marginalized? I mean, it's a pretty plausible argument that neo-Nazis are a marginalized group. Certainly, you know, academic scientists don't take neo-Nazis seriously. Most of the population considers neo-Nazis to be morally repugnant. If a person is revealed to be a neo-Nazi, that will adversely affect their chances of getting various jobs. Neo-Nazi groups are often banned from popular media, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. In many countries, there are laws against espousing neo-Nazi views. Surely this is a kind of marginalization. So, you know, would we say that Nazi science is more reliable in virtue of this? That that would seem to be a fairly absurd conclusion.

Furthermore, within academia, feminism is the norm. I mean, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, which is exactly the context where male bias would be, would be most problematic. You know, most, most people in these fields identify as feminists of one type or another. Maybe within society as a whole, feminism is taken less seriously, maybe it's not properly understood. But, you know, within, within academia, within universities, which are the primary sites of knowledge production, feminists are no longer marginalized. So, I mean, would they lose their epistemic privilege? You know, are they, uh, is feminism marginalized in the right kind of way so as to generate epistemic privilege? So that's a bit of a problem.

One of the most serious problems for standpoint epistemology is, why assume that there is such a thing as the feminist standpoint? You know, this, this unified feminist standpoint. Standpoint epistemology takes it that women are a marginalized group, and that research should sort of begin from their perspective. But we could distinguish many other groups, you know, young women, old women, professional women, caregiving women, married women, black women, whatever. These different groups will all have different experiences, different perspectives on the world, and they may well be more or less marginalized. Recently, as we've seen the rise of intersectional feminism, which emphasizes the many different kinds of social stratification: race, class, religion, disability, sexual orientation, level of education, and so on. They may all contribute to marginalization. There are different kinds of marginalization, different experiences of marginalization. There's an acronym that psychologists like to use: WEIRD, to mean Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Standpoint theory was developed by WEIRD women, you know, women from this specific social group. But feminists in general will come from many different groups. They don't have a unified standpoint.

Now, in response to this, many standpoint theorists simply accept that there may be a plurality of standpoints. Perhaps we need to speak of the standpoint of black feminists, or the standpoint of black disabled feminists, or whatever. But if we kind of go for this plurality of standpoints, there are now a couple of problems. First of all, even if we distinguish different standpoints like this, there's still a kind of tribalism, right? There's, there's still doesn't solve the assumption that we're sort of assuming that all of the members of a particular group think alike. You know, that there may not be any unified standpoint of black disabled feminists, for instance. You know, that there may not be any particular perspective that people share in virtue of being black disabled feminists, you know, because people are individuals. You know, one black disabled woman may have a very different experience of marginalization than another black disabled woman. And so it would go for any other standpoint you want to, you want to label.

So second, once you allow that there are a plurality of different standpoints, what happens when these standpoints conflict? In the initial statement of standpoint theory, the point was that the feminist standpoint is epistemically privileged; it's more reliable, more objective. So when the feminist standpoint conflicts with the androcentric standpoint, we should prefer the feminist standpoint. But if we've got a plurality of standpoints, and they're all equally legitimate, then, you know, it looks like we're going to be committed to some sort of relativism.

And this brings us to the most radical kind of feminist epistemology, which is feminist postmodernism. So, so for standpoint epistemology, in its initial form, there are objective facts, and the feminist standpoint provides more reliable access to these facts. Feminist postmodernism denies this, and instead, it embraces relativism. No standpoint can provide the sort of true objective account of the world. Rather, there are just a host of different competing standpoints, and, you know, there's no way of stepping outside of all of these standpoints in order to judge which is objectively the most reliable or the most epistemically privileged. All knowledge is is situated in a particular social context, and it's constructed by particular social practices.

Feminist postmodernism accuses standpoint epistemology of essentialism. Essentialism is the view that there are certain sets of properties that are shared between all members of a certain class of entities. All carbon atoms have six protons, and this means that in particular chemical reactions, they will all behave the same way. All instances of the element carbon, therefore, share various properties. Now, it's easy to think of humans in essentialist terms. People sometimes assume that there are certain properties that all men share, but all women share, they're all disabled people share, or whatever. That these properties are necessary to a person's identity. A feminist postmodernist insists that our identities are, you know, constructed in particular social circumstances in which we find ourselves, and there are always numerous different ways of classifying and categorizing the social world. So there is no universal gender identity. There is no unified class of women who share any essential properties. The notion of a feminist standpoint, in which involves treating women as a whole as a marginalized group and then, right, fighting on behalf of them, this essentializes women. It assumes that all women share particular properties in virtue of being women, that all women share a particular perspective. Similarly, the black woman's standpoint, let's say, essentializes black women. The disabled women's standpoint essentializes disabled women. So, so standpoint theory, according to the feminist postmodernist, fails to appreciate the contingency, the diversity of women's roles and characteristics, you having indeed the very category of woman.

Is something that's sort of socially constructed and and therefore changeable. So for the feminist post modernist, not only are there a host of different competing stand points, we can't specify any particular standpoint as being the feminist standpoint. There are lots of different feminists, alright. We've very briefly reviewed some different approaches to feminist epistemology. But before I end, I want to outline just a couple of general objections to any feminist epistemology, to any attempt to argue that science should incorporate feminist values.

Okay, the first general objection is that feminist epistemology of any kind will lead to political correctness, maybe even forms of censorship. Feminism is at its heart a political ideology, and as such, feminist epistemology claims that science and other knowledge generating activities should be driven, at least partially, by political values. But the facts are sometimes not in line with our political ideologies. So the obvious worry here is feminist epistemologists will tend to prejudge theories. Those that are congenial to feminist political aims will be supported, while those that are seen as in tension with those aims will be suppressed. Conclusions will be assumed prior to inquiry. Sometimes the facts are uncomfortable, but we still need to know them.

For instance, it's a fact in the UK and in many other Western countries that HIV is at much higher levels among the gay community. And for those of us who are, you know, sexually liberal and who support gay rights, there is something a little bit uncomfortable about this. Not least because HIV was once stereotyped as, you know, the gay disease. Right, you worry that the this is going to sort of play into the hands of religious fundamentalists who say that HIV is a punishment from God and all of that nonsense. But, you know, it's it's it's just a fact, right? Gay men are far more likely to have HIV. It is at higher rates in the gay community. And if we were to ignore this fact, if we were to pretend that HIV rates among gay men were very low, we would actually be doing a disservice to that community. We'd be hiding a danger from them. So, you know, so you know, facts are are sometimes uncomfortable, but we have to know them. And the the worry is that by incorporating political values, by making science politically correct, you you would end up suppressing uncomfortable truths.

And I guess it may be a more specific concern about political correctness in science is that it will undermine public trust in science. If the public, if lay people see scientists choosing theories on the basis of political values, that's going to play right into the the kind of science denialist views that are, you know, sort of becoming sadly, it seems, more and more common these days. So think about climate change deniers who say that climate scientists are just a bunch of left wingers creating panic about climate change in order to, you know, bring in more government regulation of of industry. Yeah, that in fact, I mean, there are there are already people who who attack the Social Sciences, particularly fields like gender studies, let's say, because they believe that it's driven by left-wing Marxist feminist ideology or whatever. I mean, that's a pretty common criticism of of many fields of social science. So if scientists were to embrace political values, if they were to say that yes, my research is based on, you know, feminist values or left-wing values or whatever, that would seem to give conservatives a much stronger argument for ignoring and defunding these areas of scientific research. And it would it would lead to the public in general, and you know, it would undermine the general trust in science.

A second general problem for feminist epistemology is that it seems that most female scientists, indeed most feminist scientists, reject feminist epistemology, especially in the more radical standpoint and post modernist forms. So just to give some numbers here, Alison Wiley and her article, feminist philosophy of science standpoint matters, describes interviews that she undertook with the participants of a conference on the archaeology of gender. According to Wiley, and I quote, a majority made it clear that they did not equate an interest in gender with any kind of feminist commitment or affiliation. More than half the women and a larger majority of the men were explicit that they did not identify as feminists. And so she doesn't say how many favored reforming the scientific method along feminist lines, but presumably it would be even fewer. Wylie also describes how in recent years, researchers working in the archaeology of gender have explicitly repudiated feminist activism because they feel that it has compromised the quality of their research. Instead, Wylie says, again, I quote, they aggressively defend ideals of objectivity that equates epistemic credibility with the impartiality of a presumed view from nowhere. I should know that Wylie herself is a defender of standpoint theory. So, you know, she's I mean, this is something that she she regards as being an issue that she responds to. But the point is that it seems that what most feminist scientists want are social changes like more women in science, removal of institutional barriers to women succeeding in science, encouraging science education in Girt for girls, equal pay for women scientists, policies to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, and so on. There isn't really much of a push for reforming scientific methodology itself. So the the sort of theory of feminist epistemology fails to connect with the concerns of actual practicing scientists.

Is this a problem? Well, I mean, in general, scientists don't tend to care very much for philosophy of science. And, you know, why should they? Science and philosophy of science are different fields. So maybe this kind of thing is really an issue for for every philosopher of science. But I think that that there's a bigger problem here for feminist epistemology in particular, with which is because feminist epistemology is presented as a program of reform. I mean, most philosophers of science are sort of content to to sort of sit back and analyze science from a distance. They're content to kind of just think about, okay, logical relations between theory and evidence and and, you know, just just sort of, you know, that they're not they're not trying to change how scientists themselves work. But feminist epistemology aims to change science, to improve science along feminist lines. So the fact that most female scientists, most feminist scientists reject this, maybe that's maybe that's an issue. You know, in fact, feminist epistemology is failing to connect with the people that it claims it wants to help. So, yeah, okay. Well, that was that was feminist epistemology, and that's all for now. Thanks for watching.