feminist epistemology epistemology from a feminist perspective. It investigates the relevance that the gender of the inquirer/knower has to epistemic practices, including the theoretical practice of epistemology. It is typified both by themes that are exclusively feminist in that they could arise only from a critical attention to gender, and by themes that are non-exclusively feminist in that they might arise from other politicizing theoretical perspectives besides feminism.
A central, exclusively feminist theme is the relation between philosophical conceptions of reason and cultural conceptions of masculinity. Here a historicist stance must be adopted, so that philosophy is conceived as the product of historically and culturally situated (hence gendered) authors. This stance brings certain patterns of intellectual association into view – patterns, perhaps, of alignment between philosophical conceptions of reason as contrasted with emotion or intuition, and cultural conceptions of masculinity as contrasted with femininity.
A central, non-exclusively feminist theme might be called ‘social-ism’ in epistemology. It has two main tributaries: political philosophy, in the form of Marx’s historical materialism; and philosophy of science, in the form of either Quinean naturalism or Kuhnian historicism. The first has resulted in feminist standpoint theory, which adapts and develops the Marxian idea that different social groups have different epistemic standpoints, where the material positioning of one of the groups is said to bestow an epistemic privilege. The second has resulted in feminist work in philosophy of science which tries to show that not only epistemic values but also non-epistemic (e.g. gendered) values are of necessity sometimes an influence in the generation of scientific theories. If this can be shown, then an important feminist project suggests itself: to work out a rationale for regulating the influence of these values so that science may be more self-transparent and more responsible. By attempting to reveal the epistemological implications of the fact that knowers are diversely situated in social relations of identity and power, feminist epistemology represents a radicalizing innovation in the analytic tradition, which has typically assumed an asocial conception of the epistemic subject, and of the philosopher. See also EPISTEMOLOGY, FEMINIST PHILOS- OPHY, KUHN , MARXISM , QUIN. M.F.