Recent Work in Standpoint Epistemology

Extract

Within the last decade, burgeoning interest in the intersection of epistemology and social issues has generated a new set of research questions. These questions range from the relevance of social identity, to peer disagreement, to debates on the significance of moral considerations to epistemic evaluations, to discussions of our epistemic practices and how those practices exclude certain agents and certain bodies of knowledge. Central in this new and emerging body of work is the realization that epistemology has more to do than simply answer questions about what knowledge consists in; it must also acknowledge that our answers to these questions might be influenced by features we have previously failed to make space for. It is in this respect that we are witnessing a renewed interest in a theoretical approach long consigned to the margins of epistemology – that of standpoint epistemology.

Standpoint epistemology can be understood as a family of theses that have been interpreted in various ways, but all of which have in common the claim that features of an epistemic agent’s identity – features that have been ignored or occluded in traditional discussions of epistemology – may be epistemically significant. As I understand it, the principal claim of standpoint epistemology is that what we are positioned to know is sensitive to a number of features traditionally thought to be non-epistemic, and therefore epistemically irrelevant, by those working in mainstream epistemology. There is no canonically precise distinction between those features that are epistemically relevant, but paradigm examples provide some indication: evidence, justification, reliability and other factors that feature in post-Gettier characterizations of knowledge. In short, we might think of epistemic features as those factors that make it more likely that a belief is true.¹