Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re‐explain Derrida's “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory.     

Argumentum ad Verecundiam: New Gender-based Criteria for Appeals to Authority

In his influential work on critical argumentation, Douglas Walton explains how to judge whether an argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) is fallacious or legitimate. He provides six critical questions and a number of ancillary sub-questions to guide the identification of reasonable appeals to authority. While it is common for informal logicians to acknowledge the role of bias in sampling procedures (which are supposed to select statistically random samples) and hypothesis confirmation (which tends to be self-serving), there is a conspicuous lack of discourse on the effect of identity prejudice on judgments of authority, even though this is a well-documented factor in attributing credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and professional competence to oppressed groups. This could result in faulty judgments of ad verecundiam fallacy. Focusing on gender bias, I review recent works in feminist epistemology—particularly those of Miranda Fricker (2007) and Helen Longino (2002)—to develop three gender-based critical questions to supplement Walton’s original list of six. This addition will help us to identify erroneous dismissals of appeals to authority based on epistemic injustice and epistemic irresponsibility on the part of the speaker or knowledge community. This project promotes the overlapping aims of feminist epistemology and informal logic.     

Habermas,Virtue Epistemology,and Religious Justifications in the Public Sphere

Jürgen Habermas's recent challenge to secular citizens calling for greater inclusivity of religious justifications in the public sphere opens new epistemological debates that could benefit from the rich insights of feminist epistemologists. Despite certain theoretical tensions, there is some common ground between Habermas and recent work in feminist epistemology. Specifically, this article explores the shared interests between Habermas and one feminist theorist in particular, Miranda Fricker. I choose Fricker because her formulation of the epistemological and ethical hybrid virtues of testimonial justice and hermeneutical justice provide efficacious theoretical and practical tools capable of deepening the epistemological basis of Habermas's challenge to secular citizens. After a detailed analysis of Habermas's and Fricker's respective epistemological positions, I argue that Fricker's analysis provides a rich framework for thinking through questions of power, identity, and credibility with respect to religious justifications in the public sphere. In conclusion, this article emphasizes the importance of fostering more robust and just epistemic communities capable of countering the social, political, and ethical injustices of epistemic disauthorization and marginalization.     

Redirecting Feminist Critiques of Science

Applying the insights of Donna Haraway (1989 , 1991 ) and Helen Longino (1989 , 1990 ), this paper reviews Sandra Harding's (1986a) tripartite model of feminist critiques of science—empiricist, standpoint, and postmodern—and argues that it is based on misunderstandings of the relationship between scientific inquiry, objectivity, and values. An alternative view of scientific inquiry makes it possible to see feminist scientists as postmodern and postmodern feminists as having standpoints.     

Responsibility and Rhetoric

In this paper I offer a retrospective rereading of my work on epistemic responsibility in order to see why this inquiry has found only an uneasy location within the discourse of Anglo-American epistemology. I trace the history of the work's production, circulation and reception, and examine the feminist implications of the discussions it has occasioned.     

Feminist Epistemology, Contextualism, and Philosophical Skepticism

Abstract: This essay explores the relation between feminist epistemology and the problem of philosophical skepticism. Even though feminist epistemology has not typically focused on skepticism as a problem, I argue that a feminist contextualist epistemology may solve many of the difficulties facing recent contextualist responses to skepticism. Philosophical skepticism appears to succeed in casting doubt on the very possibility of knowledge by shifting our attention to abnormal contexts. I argue that this shift in context constitutes an attempt to exercise unearned social and epistemic power and that it should be resisted on epistemic and pragmatic grounds. I conclude that skepticism is a problem that feminists can and should take up as they address the social aspects of traditional epistemological problems.     

Is Every Theory of Knowledge False?

Is knowledge consistent with literally any credence in the relevant proposition, including credence 0? Of course not. But is credence 0 the only credence in p that entails that you don't know that p? Knowledge entails belief (most epistemologists think), and it's impossible to believe that p while having credence 0 in p. Is it true that, for every value of ‘x,’ if it's impossible to know that p while having credence x in p, this is simply because it's impossible to believe that p while having credence x in p? If so, is it possible to believe that p while having (say) credence 0.4 in p? These questions aren't standard epistemological fare—at least in part because many epistemologists think their answers are obvious—but they have unanticipated consequences for epistemology. Let ‘improbabilism’ name the thesis that it's possible to know that p while having a credence in p below 0.5. Improbabilism will strike many epistemologists as absurd, but careful reflection on these questions reveals that, if improbabilism is false, then all of the most plausible theories of knowledge are also false. Or so I shall argue in this paper. Since improbabilism is widely rejected by epistemologists (at least implicitly), this paper reveals a tension between all of the most plausible theories of knowledge and a widespread assumption in epistemology.     

Safety,Explanation, Iteration

This paper argues for several related theses. First, the epistemological position that knowledge requires safe belief can be motivated by views in the philosophy of science, according to which good explanations show that their explananda are robust. This motivation goes via the idea—recently defended on both conceptual and empirical grounds—that knowledge attributions play a crucial role in explaining successful action. Second, motivating the safety requirement in this way creates a choice point—depending on how we understand robustness, we'll end up with different conceptions of safety in epistemology. Lastly, and most controversially, there's an attractive choice at this point that will not vindicate some of the most influential applications of the safety‐theoretic framework in epistemology, e.g., Williamson's (2000) arguments against the KK principle, and luminosity.     

Managing Salience: The Importance of Intellectual Virtue in Analyses of Biased Scientific Reasoning

Feminist critiques of science show that systematic biases strongly influence what scientific communities find salient. Features of reality relevant to women, for instance, may be under‐appreciated or disregarded because of bias. Many feminist analyses of values in science identify problems with salience and suggest better epistemologies. But overlooked in such analyses are important discussions about intellectual virtues and the role they play in determining salience. Intellectual virtues influence what we should find salient. They do this in part by managing the emotions, which are cognitively involved in what we actually do find salient. One reason intellectual virtues do not factor more strongly in feminist epistemology is the mistaken assumption that they could not serve as explicit epistemic community standards for scientific inquiry. There are good reasons, however, to think in terms of community intellectual virtue and consequently, to advance explicit public standards of intellectual virtue for scientific research. To show how explicit public standards for intellectual virtue might improve reasoning in biased conditions, I analyze a striking oversight in several evolutionary immunological hypotheses concerning women's reproduction and sexuality. I conclude that feminist epistemology would benefit from greater consideration of intellectual virtues, particularly in connection with social epistemological insights.     

Appraisal of Research Depends Upon its Conceptualization

Smedslund and Ross (2014) have offered us an interesting opinion article concerning the usefulness of empirical research for psychological practice. Appraisal of research is obviously contingent upon the way it is conceptualized and although the authors are involved with rather different kinds of practical problems they nevertheless conceptualize research in exactly the same way. This entails a possible mismatch between questions asked and methods used to answer them. I will try to add to the discussion by examining more closely how the authors conceptualize research and discuss the problems of mismatch between questions, methods, methodology, and epistemology. I claim that the authors’ view of research misses some important aspects of scientific reasoning and follows an unjustified epistemological position. Part of the arising controversy is a rather natural consequence of this but could be overcome by reconsidering the aims of science and getting epistemology, methodology and questions in line. Although I focus on the specific article and the authors’ positions, I hold that the issues discussed are common and general.     

Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance

Identity politics is important within feminism. However, it often presupposes an overly subjectivist theory of knowledge that I term an epistemology of provenance. I explore some works of feminist standpoint theory that begin to address the difficulties of such an epistemology. I then bring Sartre's account of knowledge in the Critique of Dialectical Reason to bear on these difficulties, arguing that his work offers tools for addressing them more adequately.     

TOPICAL EPISTEMOLOGIES

Abstract: What is the point of developing an epistemology for a topic—for example, morality? When is it appropriate to develop the epistemology of a topic? For many topics—for example, the topic of socks—we see no need to develop a special epistemology. Under what conditions, then, does a topic deserve its own epistemology? I seek to answer these questions in this article. I provide a criterion for deciding when we are warranted in developing an epistemological theory for a topic. I briefly apply this criterion to moral epistemology and argue that some approaches to moral epistemology should be abandoned. I also argue that we can develop an epistemology for a topic without committing ourselves to a specific substantive theory of justification, such as reliabilism or coherentism, if we work within a suitably neutral framework.     

Sixth-Grade Students' Epistemologies of Science: The Impact of School Science Experiences on Epistemological Development

Previous studies have documented that middle school students have a limited "knowledge unproblematic" epistemology of science (i.e., scientists steadily amass more facts about the world by doing experiments) with no appreciation of the role played by scientists' ideas in guiding inquiry. An important question concerns to what extent students this age and younger are ready to restructure their epistemological views to focus on more "constructivist" issues: the conjectural, explanatory, testable, and revisable nature of theories. This study tests the claim that even elementary school students can make significant progress in developing a more sophisticated, constructivist epistemology of science, given a sustained elementary school science curriculum that is designed to support students' thinking about epistemological issues. To assess the impact of elementary science experiences on students' epistemological views, 2 demographically similar groups of 6th-grade students were individually interviewed using the Nature of Science Interview developed by Carey and colleagues (Carey, 1991; Carey, Evans, Honda, Jay, & Unger, 1989). Both groups had experienced sustained elementary science instruction; 1 taught from a constructivist perspective and 1 taught from a more traditional perspective. We found that students in the more traditional science classroom had developed a knowledge unproblematic epistemology of the type previously reported by Carey et al. (1989). In contrast, students in the constructivist classroom had developed an epistemological stance toward science that focused on the central role of ideas in the knowledge acquisition process and on the kinds of mental, social, and experimental work involved in understanding, developing, testing, and revising these ideas. We conclude that elementary schoolchildren are more ready to formulate sophisticated epistemological views than many have thought. We discuss how these findings relate to the broader epistemological literature, and the features of the constructivist classroom environment that may have supported the development of these sophisticated understandings.     

Reading Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters as Latina Feminist Philosophy

Through an analysis of the interconnections or lack thereof between gender and epistemology, I present Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters as a text of Latina feminist philosophy. First, I use the works of Linda Alcoff and Walter Mignolo to illustrate the political nature of epistemology and how women and people of color in particular are disenfranchised from such a political endeavor. Then I examine the connections among the concepts of origin, absence, inheritance, and knowledge‐construction in García's novel to further a critique of standard epistemology and point to an emphasis on reconnection with feminine and maternal knowledge for this text's female characters. Moreover, a depiction and elaboration of María Lugones's ideas of the “coloniality of gender” and “decolonial feminism” in this novel augments this critical examination of epistemology and places emphasis on women as knowledge‐producers.     

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

In this essay, I show how Thomas Aquinas circumscribes epistemological questions concerning both the possibility and character of our knowledge of God within a larger eschatological framework that acknowledges the beatific vision as the ultimate good that we desire as well as the ultimate end for which we were created. Thus, knowledge of God is possible and actual on Aquinas's view because it is eternally rather than merely temporally indexed—that is, properly attributable to the blessed in heaven and only derivatively attributable to persons of faith. I further argue that interpreting Aquinas's account of faith in the light of his account of the beatific vision allows us to carve out polemical space for the theologically realist claim that there can be and in fact is objectivity in our knowledge of God, whether that knowledge comes through faith (in this life) or the beatific vision (in the next life).     

NEW VOICES, NEW VISIONS

This article proposes an alternative model for psychological inquiry based in the experiences of lesbians and gay men. I propose that there are three elements that cross-situationally define a lesbian and gay reality: biculturalism, marginality, and normative creativity. Each of these elements is explored with examples of how these perspectives might alter the way that certain dominant notions about human relationships are understood. The article closes with questions regarding the application of this lesbian and gay paradigm to methodologies for inquiry. The relationship between a lesbian/gay paradigm for psychology and feminist questions regarding epistemology is also explored.     

Epistemology Without History is Blind

In the spirit of James and Dewey, I ask what one might want from a theory of knowledge. Much Anglophone epistemology is centered on questions that were once highly pertinent, but are no longer central to broader human and scientific concerns. The first sense in which epistemology without history is blind lies in the tendency of philosophers to ignore the history of philosophical problems. A second sense consists in the perennial attraction of approaches to knowledge that divorce knowing subjects from their societies and from the tradition of socially assembling a body of transmitted knowledge. When epistemology fails to use the history of inquiry as a laboratory in which methodological claims can be tested, there is a third way in which it becomes blind. Finally, lack of attention to the growth of knowledge in various domains leaves us with puzzles about the character of the knowledge we have. I illustrate this last theme by showing how reflections on the history of mathematics can expand our options for understanding mathematical knowledge.