In this lively and accessible book Lorraine Code addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary theory of knowledge, a question of fundamental concern for feminist theory as well: Is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant? Responding in the affirmative, Code offers a radical alterantive to mainstream philosophy's terms for what counts as knowledge and how it is to be evaluated. Code first reviews the literature of established epistemologies and unmasks the prevailing assumption in Anglo-American philosophy that "the (...) knower" is a value-free and ideologically neutral abstraction. Approaching knowledge as a social construct produced and validated through critical dialogue, she defines the knower in light of a conception of subjectivity based on a personal relational model. Code maps out the relevance of the particular people involved in knowing: their historical specificity, the kinds of relationships they have, the effects of social position and power on those relationships, and the ways in which knowledge can change both knower and known. In an exploration of the politics of knowledge that mainstream epistemologies sustain, she examines such issues as the function of knowledge in shaping institutions and the unequal distribution of cognitive resources. What Can She Know? will raise the level of debate concerning epistemological issues among philosophers, political and social scientists, and anyone interested in feminist theory. (shrink)

Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. By focusing on the idea that knowing is a creative process guided by imperatives of (...) epistemic responsibility, Code provides a fresh perspective on the theory of knowledge. From this new perspective, Code poses questions about knowledge that have a different focus from those traditionally raised in the two leading epistemological theories, foundationalism and coherentism. While not rejecting these approaches, this new position moves away from a primary concentration on determinate products and towards an examination of ever-changing processes. Arguing that knowledge never exists as an ungrounded abstraction but rather emerges through dialogue between variously authoritative "knowers" situated within particular social and historical contexts, she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities. This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code"--Provided by the publisher. (shrink)

Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory (...) and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation. (shrink)

The arguments in this book are informed at once by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally in their lives. In its constructive dimension, ____Rhetorical__ ____Spaces__ focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities (...) create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege. (shrink)

Feminist epistemologists who attempt to refigure epistemology must wrestle with a number of dualisms. This essay examines the ways Lorraine Code, Sandra Harding, and Susan Hekman reconceptualize the relationship between self/other, nature/culture, and subject/object as they struggle to reformulate objectivity and knowledge.

I evaluate post-Quinean naturalized epistemology as a resource for postcolonial and feminist epistemology. I argue that naturalistic inquiry into material conditions and institutions of knowledge production has most to offer epistemologists committed to maintaining continuity with the knowledge production of specifically located knowers. Yet naturalistic denigrations of folk epistemic practices and stereotyped, hence often oppressive, readings of human nature challenge the naturalness of the nature they claim to study. I outline an ecologically modelled epistemology that focuses on questions of epistemic (...) responsibility and community, while refusing the reductivism of totalizing theory, and producing realistic moral-epistemic analyses of specific, local epistemic resources to ground its normative injunctions. (shrink)

Assumptions about what it is to be human are implicit in most philosophical reflections upon ethical and epistemological issues. Although such assumptions are not usually elaborated into a comprehensive theory of human nature, they are nonetheless influential in beliefs about what kinds of problem are worthy of consideration, and in judgments about the adequacy of proposed solutions. Claims to the effect that one should not be swayed by feelings and loyalties in the making of moral decisions, for example, presuppose that (...) human beings are creatures whose nature is amenable to guidance by reason rather than emotion and are creatures capable of living well when they act as impartially as possible. Analogously, claims to the effect that knowledge, to merit that title, should be acquired out of independent cognitive endeavour uncluttered by opinion and hearsay, suggest that human beings are creatures who can come to know their environment through their own unaided efforts. And claims to the effect that knowledge, once acquired, is timelessly and universally true depend upon assumptions about the constancy and uniformity of human nature across historical and cultural boundaries. (shrink)

Who is the autonomous moral agent? The individual? The exemplary/typical knowing, acting, suffering, or thriving human being? Such questions in diverse modalities, originating in multiple circumsta...

Abstract Taking my point of entry from George Eliot's reference to ?the power of Ignorance?, I analyse some manifestations of that power as she portrays it in the life of a young woman of affluence, in her novel Daniel Deronda. Comparing and contrasting this kind of ignorance with James Mill's avowed ignorance of local tradition and custom in his History of British India, I consider how ignorance can foster immoral beliefs which, in turn, contribute to social-political arrangements of dominance and (...) subordination. Yet I ask, too, how judgements of culpability can be sustained when ignorance is culturally induced. (shrink)

Here I discuss some epistemological questions posed by projects of attempting to think globally, in light of the impossibility of affirming universal sameness. I illustrate one strategy for embarking on such a project, ecologically, in a reading of an essay by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. And I conclude by suggesting that the North/South border between Canada and the U.S.A. generates underacknowledged issues of cultural alterity.

Fifteen essays examine the work of German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer to provide feminist interpretations of his views on science, language, history, ...

Departing from an epistemological tradition for which knowledge properly achieved must be objective, especially in eschewing affect and/or special interests; and against a backdrop of my thinking about epistemic responsibility, I focus on two situations where care informs and enables good knowing. The implicit purpose of this reclamation of care as epistemically vital is to show emphatically that standard alignments of care with femininity—the female—are simply misguided. Proposing that the efficacy of epistemic practices is often enhanced when would-be knowers care (...) about the outcomes of investigation, I suggest that epistemic responsibility need not be compromised when caring motivates and animates research. Indeed, the background inspiration comes from the thought, integral to feminist and post-colonial theory and practice that, despite often-justified condemnations of research that serves "special interests," particularities do matter, epistemically. Such thoughts, variously articulated, are integral to enacting a shift in epistemology away from formal abstraction and toward engaging with the specificities of real-world, situated knowledge projects. They are not unequivocally benign, for villains too care about the outcomes of their projects. Hence multi-faceted engagements with epistemic practices and processes are urgently required across the social-political world. (shrink)

Naturalized moral epistemology eschews practices of assuming to know a priori the nature of situations and experiences that require moral deliberation. Thus it promises to close a gap between formal ethical theories and circumstances where people need guidelines for action. Yet according experience so central a place in inquiry risks "naturalizing" it, treating it as incontestable, separating its moral and political dimensions. This essay discusses these issues with reference to Margaret Walker's Moral understandings.

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.

A relatively late arrival on the philosophical scene, feminist epistemology has evolved and undergone multiple refinements since, in 1981, I posed the then still outrageous question: “is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant?” At the time, that question was beginning to receive affirmative answers, within philosophy, from the essays in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka's Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, from Nancy Hartsock's Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, and (...) from Alison Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature, with its chapter on feminist epistemology, all published in 1983. These writings were mapping a new epistemic terrain within professional philosophy that was also being opened out in the work of such non‐philosophers as Dorothy Smith, Carol Gilligan, and Nancy Chodorow. Nonetheless, in the philosophical projects of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, even as feminist moral and political philosophy were growing to constitute an impressive body of critical‐constructive literature, the suggestion that analogous interventions were not merely indicated, but urgently required, in epistemology, philosophy of science, and even logic still sounded like a preposterous manifestation of ideological excess. Knowledge, science, and logic seemed, virtually by definition, to stand secure as the repositories and guardians of truth and objectivity, occupants of a space isolated and protected from the vagaries of politics and of gendered specificities. (shrink)

Changing Methods is a collection of original essays by feminist practitioners, scholars, and activists. The authors show why "the method question" has moved to the top of many feminist research and interpretive research strategies, and engage in thinking about how ideas and actions have developed within complex social circumstances. The essays in this book challenge the tradition that has allowed abstracted, formalized versions of the ideas and experiences of privileged white men to set standards for how everyone should conduct themselves. (...) The authors use new-found knowledge to displace the dominant ideology constructed around race, class, gender, and heterosexual privilege, and then propose innovative feminist-informed analyses of subjects as diverse as political change, critical linguistics, child care, religious studies, and violence against women. (shrink)

This paper begins to develop a conception of ecological subjectivity and hence of social-political practice that can promote social justice across diverse populations and situations. It urges a provocative posing of the question “who do we think we are?” to direct attention to often unspoken assumptions about subjectivity and agency that tend silently to inform current philosophical inquiry. Drawing attention to the often-unconscious processes of “we-saying.” it aims to highlight and to prompt contestation of the silent assumptions that tend to (...) inform that “we.” In so doing, it appeals to humility as an epistemic and moral virtue. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Critical Interrogations Feminism and Epistemology Whose Knowledge? Naturalizing, Reconfiguring, Situating Ecological Naturalism Bibliography.

This article presents a feminist analysis of the concept of self. It discusses the issues of the subjectivity of the self and the instituted social imaginary and suggests that the ideas of positioning of being positioned within power structures have implications for epistemological, moral, and political philosophies. It explains that in order to view real selves, one needs to understand their particular positions and how they are thrown together into the complex, rich, and challenging world.

This essay extends my engagements with questions of epistemic agency and the politics of epistemic location, in Epistemic Responsibility and in Ecological Thinking to consider how questions of understanding and of certainty play diversely into human and other ecological circumstances. In so doing, it opens lines of inquiry not immediately available in standard western-northern approaches to epistemology with their concentration on medium-sized physical objects in their presupposed neutrality and replicability. Working from a tacit assumption that knowing and knowers are always (...) situated, and that they are enabled or restricted in so being, the book engages with specific epistemic situations in order to show how “situatedness” indeed makes knowledge possible, while regarding it as an enabling rather than a constraining modality. (shrink)

“There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.” Thus, in Father and Son, Edmund Gosse characterizes his father’s intellectual crisis of 1857: a crisis which arose out of the elder Gosse’s struggles to reconcile his Christian fundamentalism with the insights he stood to gain, as a marine zoologist, from the work in evolutionary theory of Darwin, Lyell, and others. From this conflict, religion emerged victorious. Philip (...) Gosse, F.R.S., chose to discount the findings of the new biology, at least in so far as they were incompatible with belief in the literal truth of creation set forth in the book of Genesis. In this paper it is my intention to reflect upon the epistemic responsibility of his decision. (shrink)

In characterizing cognitive activity as a creative synthesis of the imagination, Kant places the epistemological subject at the center of the cognitive process. This is wholly revolutionary in the history of epistemology. Yet, for all its revolutionary character, the concept of the creative synthesis falls short of providing an adequate context for an explication of the ways in which individual human knowers, as organic creatures, create the products we call knowledge. Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology, on the other hand, with its (...) acknowledged roots in, and avowed allegiance to, Kantian philosophy, goes much further toward a recognition of the importance of the person as knowing subject. For this reason, I shall argue, it offers a route toward a fuller, and better, understanding of the epistemological significance of the knower as person, while retaining and building upon what is best in Kant’s epistemological insights. (shrink)

I offer an examination of trust relations in scientific inquiry as they seem to contrast with a lack of trust in an example of knowledge imposed from above by an unaccountable institutional power structure. On this basis I argue for a re-reading of John Hardwig's account of the place of trust in knowledge, and suggest that it translates less well than social epistemologists and others have assumed into a model for democratic epistemic practice.

In this essay I explore some implications and effects of taken-for-granted expectations of achieved certainty as the only legitimate outcome of scientific and everyday inquiry. The analysis contrasts ubiquitous if often tacit expectations of certainty with a critique of how these very expectations can truncate productive engagement with matters ecological. The discussion focuses on the limited prospects of success in inquiry when certainty is the only putatively acceptable outcome, and it defends the value of situated quests for knowledge with their (...) reliance on hermeneutic understandings of place and process as these involve real human knowers. (shrink)

The path-breaking Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories is an accessible, multidisciplinary insight into the complex field of feminist thought. The Encyclopedia contains over 500 authoritative entries commissioned from an international team of contributors and includes clear, concise and provocative explanations of key themes and ideas. Each entry contains cross references and a bibliographic guide to further reading; over 50 biographical entries provide readers with a sense of how the theories they encounter have developed out of the lives and situations of their (...) authors. Areas covered: * traditional taxonomies of feminist theory (eg socialist thought) * theoretical subdivisions (eg ecofeminism and feminist spirituality) * discipline-specific issues (eg philosophy and anthropology) * the conceptual apparatus of gender theory (eg biologism) * methodologies (eg deconstruction and narrative theory) * intersections (eg with racial theory, queer theory) * political issues (eg citizenship, reproductive rights). (shrink)

In this essay I take issue with entrenched conceptions of individual autonomy for how they block understandings of the implications of rape in patriarchal cultures both 'at home' and in situations of armed conflict. I focus on human vulnerability as it manifests in sedimented assumptions about violence against women as endemic to male-female relations, thwarting possibilities of knowing the specific harms particular acts of rape enact well enough to render intelligible their far-reaching social-political-moral implications. Taking my point of departure from (...) Debra Bergoffen's call for 'a new epistemology of rape', I consider what such a call can amount to within an instituted social imaginary where male domination and female subordination are taken for granted—naturalized. (shrink)