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@ The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA MET APHILOSOPHY Vol. 26, No. 3, July 1995 0026-1 068 “FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY”: REPLY TO ANTONY NAOMI SCHEMAN 1 want to thank Louise for the thoughtfulness of her reply, and for the many other occasions on which she has been a philosopher’s dream of a critic: as deeply challenging as she is sympathetic. Such criticism bolsters the faith I share with her in the firmness of the feminist ground under our feet. In this reply I will focus on the question of the interchangeability of knowing subjects, that is, whether we can and should think in terms of generic cognitive capacities and the role such capacities might play in knowledge acquisition. My argument was not that there are no substantive commonalities among knowers: I am inclined to believe that there probably are. Rather, I argued for adopting an agnostic stance toward the question, withholding judgment in favor of programs of eliciting and learning how to listen to accounts of the world (including experiences of believing, doubting, trusting and being trusted, relating to and exercising authority) from the perspectives of those who have been silenced or marginalized within privileged institutional settings, including universities. We (those of us who occupy positions of authority in such settings) are in no position reliably to recognize whatever commonalities there might be: we have good reason to suspect that we would, rather, be identifying as common what in fact characterizes our own experiences. It follows that it is an empirical matter what will emerge as the hallmarks of reliable cognitive practice. One suggestion I made is that one thing we already have good reason to recognize as such a hallmark is a greater role for emotionally informed judgment and a distrust of judgments made from a position of studied disinterest. The idea is that bias is better dealt with collectively than individually: rather than attempting to rid myself of bias (thereby losing the critical perspective gained from my particular, often emotionally laden, engagement with the world), I need to subject the reasoning I do to the critical scrutiny of diverse others. Norms of objectivity typically value disinterestedness - the bracketing rather than the full engagement of diverse people’s distinctive perspect- ives, values, and interests. Though it is, I think, distinctive of feminist epistemology to reject objectivity so defined, some feminist epistemo- logists (notably Helen Longino) choose not to reject objectivity but to

Symposium: Feminist Epistemology: “FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY”: REPLY TO ANTONY

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@ The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA MET APHILOSOPHY Vol. 26, No. 3, July 1995 0026-1 068

“FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY”: REPLY TO ANTONY

NAOMI SCHEMAN

1 want to thank Louise for the thoughtfulness of her reply, and for the many other occasions on which she has been a philosopher’s dream of a critic: as deeply challenging as she is sympathetic. Such criticism bolsters the faith I share with her in the firmness of the feminist ground under our feet.

In this reply I will focus on the question of the interchangeability of knowing subjects, that is, whether we can and should think in terms of generic cognitive capacities and the role such capacities might play in knowledge acquisition. My argument was not that there are no substantive commonalities among knowers: I am inclined to believe that there probably are. Rather, I argued for adopting an agnostic stance toward the question, withholding judgment in favor of programs of eliciting and learning how to listen to accounts of the world (including experiences of believing, doubting, trusting and being trusted, relating to and exercising authority) from the perspectives of those who have been silenced or marginalized within privileged institutional settings, including universities. We (those of us who occupy positions of authority in such settings) are in no position reliably to recognize whatever commonalities there might be: we have good reason to suspect that we would, rather, be identifying as common what in fact characterizes our own experiences.

It follows that it is an empirical matter what will emerge as the hallmarks of reliable cognitive practice. One suggestion I made is that one thing we already have good reason to recognize as such a hallmark is a greater role for emotionally informed judgment and a distrust of judgments made from a position of studied disinterest. The idea is that bias is better dealt with collectively than individually: rather than attempting to rid myself of bias (thereby losing the critical perspective gained from my particular, often emotionally laden, engagement with the world), I need to subject the reasoning I do to the critical scrutiny of diverse others.

Norms of objectivity typically value disinterestedness - the bracketing rather than the full engagement of diverse people’s distinctive perspect- ives, values, and interests. Though it is, I think, distinctive of feminist epistemology to reject objectivity so defined, some feminist epistemo- logists (notably Helen Longino) choose not to reject objectivity but to

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radically redefine it. The deepest problem we find with objectivity-as- disinterest is that there is no disinterested way of defining disinterest. One has to have some aims and some values to get inquiry off the ground or to judge when it has gone successfully, and there is no way we can know that we are not importing into the supposedly universally acceptable structuring norms some that are in fact expressive of the privilege that allows us, and not various others, to be setting those norms.

1 agree with Louise that disinterest, however defined, hardly characterizes the epistemic practices of the powerful. But 1 have less confidence than she does that “we” are likely to do all that much better. My claim is that such disinterestedness is “normatively demanded” of those with privilege. Granted, powerful people are often given the epistemic authority that ought to flow from conformity with that norm when they have blatantly violated it, but the workings of privilege are such as to make that sort of abuse all but inevitable - and to make challenging it all but impossible, since the biases of the privileged will pass muster because they are effectively rendered invisible, while those of the challengers stick out like sore thumbs.

In summary, I agree with Louise that the question of whether or not there are “human cognitive universals” is an empirical one, but we differ on how best to discover them if they exist, and how to proceed epistemically in the meantime, including in the search for them. I’ve argued that we need to proceed out of a robust realism that extends not only to the objects of knowledge but equally to its subjects. Realism about epistemic subjects requires that we take them to have properties beyond those attributed to them by our idealizations, properties they acquire in and from the social worlds they inhabit. Among those properties are epistemic liabilities that seriously compromise our perception of ourselves, others, and the rest of the world. Such liabilities are not irremediable, but overcoming them is hindered rather than helped by the discipline of disinterested objectivity. We need more, rather than less, diversity, distinctiveness, and emotional engage- ment if we are ever to learn just what we all do have in common.