Feminist Epistemologies of Situated Knowledges: Implications for Rhetorical Argumentation

Abstract

In the process of challenging epistemological assumptions that preclude relationships between knowers and the objects of knowing, feminist epistemologists Lorraine Code and Donna Haraway also can be interpreted as troubling forms of argumentation predicated on positivist-derived logic. Against the latter, Christopher Tindale promotes a rhetorical model of argument that appears able to better engage epistemologies of situated knowledges. I detail key features of the latter from Code, especially, and compare and contrast them with relevant parts of Tindale’s discussion of context on the rhetorical model, and I suggest ways that his work could be expanded to accommodate rhetorical implications of situated knowledges.