What Is in It for Me? The Benefits of Diversity in Scientific Communities

Abstract

Many of the significant contributors to the fast-developing field ofsocial epistemology have been feminist epistemologists, theorists whoinvestigate the role of gender in knowledge production. Motivated bythe political project of eliminating the oppression of women, feministepistemologists are interested in how the norms and practices ofknowledge production affect the lives of women and are implicated insystems of oppression. Feminist epistemologists seek to understand notonly how our social relations of gender have shaped ourknowledge practices, but also whether and how these relationsshould play a role in good knowing. Feminists havedistinguished between the categories of gender and (anatomical) sex,and for decades have focused much of their attention on gender, the analyticalcategory capturing the cultural and social aspects of sexed bodies.[1] As a category of social relations then, gender is a significant areaof investigation for social epistemology. Additionally, feministepistemologists have increasingly attended to the interrelationsbetween gender and other social categories such as race, class, andsexuality, investigating their significance for knowledge., Elizabeth Anderson characterizes feminist epistemology as properlybelonging within social epistemology, describing it as “the branch ofsocial epistemology that investigates the influence of sociallyconstructed conceptions and norms of gender and gender-specificinterests and experiences on the production of knowledge”(1995a,54). It may be too strong a claim to suggest that all projects offeminist epistemology fall within the realm of social epistemology; itcould be argued that some projects of feminist epistemology, such asLouise Antony's defense of epistemological individualism (1995),resist at least certain elements of a social epistemology. Similarly,theorists who argue that there are epistemically valuable feminineways of knowing integral to women, without providing a socialanalysis, could also be viewed as resisting certain elements of asocial epistemology.[2] Nevertheless, by far the majority of work in feminist epistemology isbest understood as a form of social epistemology., Feminist social epistemology represents more than just a small subsetof social epistemology, however. The significant body of work offeminist social epistemologists has provided key theoretical resourcesfor understanding the breadth and depth of the social dimensions ofknowing. The interest of feminist social epistemologists in how genderplays out in knowledge practices is generalizable to an interest inhow power relations play out epistemically, especially systematicrelations of power. Their focus on power relations has led some tocharacterize feminist social epistemologists as falling on the radicalend of the social epistemology spectrum (Goldman 2001; Kitcher1994). Radical or not, few feminist epistemologists reduce knowledgeto power politics, even as they draw attention to them. One of the keyfeatures of feminist epistemologies responsible for some of theirsignificant contributions within social epistemology has been theirserious commitment to developing normative epistemologicalaccounts. , Social epistemology distinguishes itself from sociology of knowledgein its goal of providing a normative analysis of knowledge (Fuller1988; Schmitt 1994a), seeking not only to describe our current socialpractices of knowledge production, but also to understand how we oughtto know and how we can improve our knowledge practices. There islittle agreement among social epistemologists on the scope or form ofsuch normativity. However, feminist social epistemologists have feltthis need to incorporate a normative dimension to their socialanalyses in a particularly pressing way: feminist political demandsfor the elimination of oppression are normative in a moral sense, butthey also depend on epistemically normative claims for theirjustification. Their force depends on the ability to distinguishbetween better and worse claims to knowledge, for example bycriticizing sexist knowledge claims and supporting non-sexistknowledge claims. Feminists can ill afford to simply describe the waysin which social relations such as gender currently shape knowledgepractices if they are to defend their claims for social change. Thus,feminist social epistemologists have a particularly strong motivationto develop rich accounts that tease epistemic normativity out of apower-sensitive social understanding of knowledge production., As is true of social epistemology as a whole, there is a great deal ofvariation in the theories and approaches constituting feministepistemology and few generalizations can be made across the field.Acknowledging such variety, some theorists refer only to “feministepistemologies” in the plural, fearing that characterizing a singlefield of feminist epistemology implies a greater unity than exists.Others have argued that feminist epistemology should best beidentified not by its specific theoretical content, but rather by what“doing epistemology as a feminist” amounts to (Longino 1999). Doingepistemology as a feminist involves bringing one's feminist concernsand sensibilities to the epistemological table. As a result ofbringing such concerns to epistemological work, significant feministcontributions to social epistemology have included extensive critiquesof the individualism of contemporary analytic epistemology, thedevelopment of alternative models of knowers as social beings,defenses of the appropriate role of values and other culturallyrelative factors in knowing, the development of socially informedconceptions of objectivity, analyses of the challenges of knowingunder social conditions of oppression, and analyses of the epistemicbenefits of social justice and democratic institutions.