Objectivity and the Double Standard for Feminist Epistemologies

The emphasis on the limitations of objectivity, in specific guises and networks, has been a continuing theme of contemporary analytic philosophy for the past few decades. The popular sport of baiting feminist philosophers into pointing to what's left out of objective knowledge, or into describing what methods, exactly, they would offer to replace the powerful "objective" methods grounding scientific knowledge embodies a blatant double standard which has the effect of constantly putting feminist epistemologists on the defensive, on the fringes, on the run. This strategy can only work if 'objectivity' is transparent, simple, stable, and clear in its meaning. It most certainly is not. In fact, taking 'objectivity' as a sort of beautiful primitive, self-evident in its value, and all-powerful in its revelatory power, requires careless philosophy, and the best workers in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science have made reworked definitions of 'objectivity' absolutely central to their own projects. In fact, classic feminist concerns with exploring the impact of sex and gender on knowledge, understanding, and other relations between human beings and the rest of the world fall squarely within the sort of human and social settings that are already considered central in most current analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. I argue that the burden of proof is clearly on those who wish to reject the centrality and relevance of sex and gender to our most fundamental philosophical work on knowledge and reality. On the face of it, feminism, as a political movement or ideology, is irrele vant to truth. Therefore, it is irrelevant to objectivity, which is about truth and how to get at it. I believe that philosophical and scientific views regarding 'objectivity' are the source of the fiercest and most powerful intellectual and rhetorical weapons deployed against feminist critiques of epistemology and of the sciences. This is because philosophy of science and epistemology are, after all, concerned with analyzing cases of good reasoning. The philosophical challenges are to formulate and examine: how good scientific knowledge is produced; how and whether other forms of knowledge (e.g., moral knowl edge) differ from scientific knowledge; and how to explain why science seems to be such a successful way to produce knowledge. The concepts of truth, objectivity, and evidence are at the heart of these investigations, and rightly so, I believe. Many philosophers acknowledge under the pressure of overwhelming evidence that sex and gender issues may play roles in the social sciences, Synthese 104:351-381,1995. ? 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 352 ELISABETH A. LLOYD but never in the mathematical or natural sciences.1 The fact is that detailed arguments from within the scientific community about the influence of sex and gender issues in the natural and mathematical sciences have been around for more than a decade.2 Yet this evidence has been largely ignored. Instead, many philosophers assume that there is no evidence and could not be such evidence to support feminist analyses of the importance of sex and gender in every branch of knowledge. The vast majority of philosophers still believe that 'feminists' are playing 'out-of-bounds', in terms of mainstream understandings of the problems of epistemology and philosophy of science; feminist work can, therefore, be safely ignored, set aside, or characterized as of interest only in marginal cases.3 Given the recent outpouring of feminist writings that challenge, revise, and apply particular notions of objectivity, it is past time to place the burden of proof for the typical philosophical belief that feminism is irrelevant to the study of the objectivity of knowledge where it belongs.4 Specifically, philosophers with views that acknowledge the importance of various human, social, or contextual elements in meaning, concepts, and knowledge-development, are obliged to justify their a priori exclusion of sex and gender as relevant factors. Contemporary social scientists, although they may agree about virtually nothing else, do agree that among the most crucial distinctions in all human societies and cultures are sex and gender.5 As central organizing principles of all human social groups, sex and gender categories and roles provide the structural underpinning of virtually all other social roles, interactions, and complex human activities, such as communication, enforcement of social norms, and standards of behavior. Because sex and gender distinctions serve this foundational role upon which the rest of the social structure is dependent, philosophers who wish to take the interests, values, and goals of the relevant knowledge-communities into account but who nevertheless exhibit an a priori dismissal of the relevance of the central sex and gender distinctions to epistemological and metaphysical problems must be able to provide, on pain of irrationality, reasons supporting that dismissal. The problem is that there is evidence that sex and gender do indeed play central roles in all forms of human knowledge. These groundbreaking and pivotal arguments have been reviewed elsewhere repeatedly I will not do so here. This evidence can be resisted only under assumptions which have explicitly been repudiated by a wide variety of contemporary metaphysicians, epistemologists, and philosophers of science. In this paper, I review the positive views of several influential analytic philosophers, and show that they in fact provide for the relevance and legitimacy of considerations of sex and gender. OBJECTIVITY AND THE DOUBLE STANDARD 353 I must assume that this will come as a shock to them, given the invisi bility of such analyses in their own work. But such intellectual and philo sophical irresponsibility ought not be tolerated or perpetuated. The burden of proof is on these authors and those who agree with the basic assump tions they hold to address and argue against both the specific positive claims made by feminist critics, and the general claim that sex and gender are always philosophically relevant. On my analysis, much of the neglect and negative reaction among philosophers to discussions of the roles of sex and gender in knowledge has its source in a specific philosophical folk story about objectivity and its relation to scientific knowledge which is part of a philosophical tradition. One of my aims here is to argue that the anachronistic view of 'objectivity' embodied in this folk story has, in general, cast a shadow of confusion over philosophical discussions of reality, knowledge, and language; fur thermore, it has been particularly important in obscuring the significance of sex and gender analyses in mainstream epistemology and metaphysics. I shall describe that folk story in a moment, and mention a few crucial prob lems with it. Then I shall review some of the ways that that philosophical folk story has been resisted, focusing on various twentieth century philoso phers who have actively recast the meanings of 'objectivity', through their emphasis on contextual understandings of meaning, truth, and inquiry. But let us start with the basics, and take a look at some of the things that we think of when we consider the terms objective and objectivity. 1. THE MANY FACES OF OBJECTIVITY 1.1. Four Basic Meanings I have identified four distinct meanings of 'objective' and 'objectivity' that are currently in broad use in contemporary philosophy. I focus on these views because they are often mixed and matched into specific hybrid notions of 'objectivity' that play central roles in current analytic episte mology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of mind.