#20 Rachel Fraser: How your social world shapes what you know

In this episode we speak with Dr. Rachel Fraser, Associate Professor of Philosophy at MIT, about whether experiences of oppression can yield special insights, whether these insights can be shared with members of dominant groups, and what implications this has for policymaking.

(00:00) Our introduction

(03:39) Interview begins

(03:43) Historical roots of standpoint epistemology

(27:38) Situated knowledge: What kind of knowledge depends on social position?

(41:03) What kind of knowledge depends on social position?

(46:04) Does standpoint theory stereotype or essentialize people?

(53:19) Epistemic advantage: Does oppression give you special insight?

(1:01:20) Is standpoint theory objectionably self-fulfilling?

(1:10:51) Can members of dominant groups access the same insights?

(1:16:12) Does standpoint theory apply to moral knowledge?

(1:27:25) Implications: Should we defer to oppressed people about the social world?

(1:31:33) The value of diversity within epistemic communities

(1:37:58) Methods for democratizing decisions in bioethics

(1:41:20) The role of qualitative knowledge in policy making

Used or referenced:

• Bio(un)ethical, “Emily Largent and Govind Persad: Is bioethics ok?”
• Bio(un)ethical, “Danielle Allen: Should laypeople make health policy decisions?”
• Bio(un)ethical, “Sarah McGrath: Are there moral experts?”
• Kristen Intemann, “25 Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory”
• Emily Tilton and Briana Toole, “Standpoint Epistemology and the Epistemology of Deference”
• Kristina Rolin, “The Bias Paradox in Feminist Standpoint Epistemology”
• The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, “You Just Won’t Understand!”

Bio(un)ethical is a bioethics podcast written and edited by Leah Pierson and Sophie Gibert, with production support by Audiolift.co. Our music is written by Nina Khoury and performed by Social Skills. We are supported by a grant from Amplify Creative Grants.

Chapters

• 0:00 Our introduction
• 3:39 Interview begins
• 3:43 Historical roots of standpoint epistemology
• 27:38 Situated knowledge: Does knowledge depend on social position?
• 41:03 What kind of knowledge depends on social position?
• 46:04 Does standpoint theory stereotype or essentialize people?
• 53:19 Epistemic advantage: Does oppression give you special insight?
• 1:01:20 Is standpoint theory objectionably self-fulfilling?
• 1:10:52 Can members of dominant groups ever occupy standpoints?
• 1:16:12 Does standpoint theory apply to moral knowledge?
• 1:27:25 Implications: Should we defer to oppressed people about the social world?
• 1:31:33 The value of diversity within epistemic communities
• 1:37:58 Methods for democratizing decisions in bioethics
• 1:41:20 The role of qualitative knowledge in policy making

Transcript

Note: All transcripts are automatically generated using Descript and edited with Claude. They likely contain some errors.

Introduction:

Leah: Hi, and welcome to Bio(un)ethical, the podcast where we question existing norms in medicine, science, and public health. I'm Leah Pearson, a final year MD-PhD candidate at Harvard Medical School.

Sophie: And I'm Sophie Gibert, a Bersoff Fellow in the philosophy department at NYU, soon to be an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Leah: Last season, we talked to Danielle Allen about involving lay people in decisions about health and science policy through democratic participatory processes. Earlier this season, we talked to Sarah McGrath about deference and expertise in the moral domain, about when and whether we should defer to other people because they're more likely than we are to get things right.

In our last episode, we spoke with Emily Largent and Govind Persad about the lack of demographic and viewpoint diversity in the field of bioethics and the challenges this poses. In each of these conversations, a set of questions loomed in the background: How do people's experiences and identities affect what they know? Does having first-hand experience of something, like sexism or racism, give you special access to moral knowledge in virtue of which others should defer to you? And exactly what kind of diversity makes an epistemic community better? Today we are tackling those questions by taking a closer look at a philosophical theory called standpoint epistemology. 

Sophie: Standpoint epistemology is characterized by two central claims. The Situated Knowledge claim says that a person's social position systematically affects what they can know. Not only does a person's position within social hierarchies shape the experiences they're likely to have, but it can also shape their whole way of seeing and thinking about the world.

Meanwhile, the Epistemic Advantage claim says that some social positions, especially positions of oppression or marginalization within social hierarchies, come with epistemic advantages like being more reliable, more accurate, or more impartial in certain domains. Together, these claims imply that members of marginalized groups may have unique insights into social structures and hierarchies that those in dominant positions cannot fully access or understand—insights that may or may not be communicable to members of the dominant group.

Leah: Within bioethics, these ideas play an important role in debates about decision making, deference, and inclusion. Who should sit on IRBs and hospital ethics committees? Who should have a say in setting research priorities, designing clinical trials, and making health policy decisions? When people disagree about, say, the quality of life with a certain medical condition, should we defer to those who have actually experienced the condition themselves? Is that knowledge even something that can be communicated? And if so, how?

Sophie: To help us understand standpoint epistemology and its implications, we spoke with Dr. Rachel Frazier, associate professor of philosophy at MIT. Rachel works in epistemology, social and political philosophy, and feminist theory.

Leah: As always, you can access anything we reference in the episode notes or on our website, biounethical.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, submitting a rating or review, or sharing it with a friend.

Interview:

Leah: Hi, Rachel. Welcome to the podcast.

Rachel: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Leah: Today we want to discuss a cluster of views associated with standpoint epistemology, the study of how our social identities affect our understanding of the world. In previous interviews, you've said that the best way to understand standpoint epistemology is to look at its genealogy, to understand how it came about or what problem it emerged to solve. How and why did standpoint epistemology emerge?

Rachel: So here's how I'm thinking about the genealogy of standpoint epistemology right now. I actually think that historically you really see the roots of standpoint epistemology emerging with the philosopher Hegel. So this is probably a kind of surprising claim to a lot of people, so I'll explain why I think this is true.

One of Hegel's most famous pieces of work is a dialectic that is sometimes known as the master-slave dialectic. It's a very tricky piece of philosophy. I certainly don't understand everything that is going on in the master-slave dialectic. But here's some of what's happening in the master-slave dialectic.

You have a single consciousness, and this single consciousness encounters another single consciousness. So you have one person who encounters another person. And Hegel is thinking that when this happens, there is a complicated relationship between these two self-consciousnesses because on the one hand, the first self-consciousness feels threatened by the other because the first self-consciousness thinks "I am truly real." But there's this other thing over there, which is just as real as me, and that's a kind of threat to my supremacy. But on the other hand, Hegel also thinks that self-consciousness in some sense yearns to be recognized and affirmed by another self-consciousness. So self-consciousness is such that it only becomes truly real when it is affirmed or recognized. So there's this kind of doubleness. On the one hand, there's this relation of threat between the two self-consciousnesses, and on the other, there's this relation of yearning when self-consciousness wants to be affirmed by the other self-consciousness.

So what happens? Well, Hegel tells this story on which one of the self-consciousnesses, one of the people, enslaves or becomes master over the other self-consciousness and sort of in some sense reduces the other self-consciousness to an object. And this assuages the feeling of threat.

But all is not well, the situation of the master is not actually good, because of course what the master really wants is affirmation by another self-consciousness. But he can't receive affirmation from the person he has enslaved, because he's numbed himself to the subjectivity, to the personhood of the slave, and so the slave is incapable of conferring on the master the recognition that, deep down, he longs for. But we can consider, by contrast, the situation of the slave or the bondsman. The bondsman, in some sense, has been reduced to the status of an object. That is the kind of social role he has been placed into. But the situation of the slave is in some sense epistemically superior to that of the master, because while the master has sort of numbed himself or cut himself off from the reality of the slave as a person, cut himself off from the subjectivity of the slave, the slave is nonetheless still aware of his own subjectivity.

So there's this kind of sense in which the slave has a better grip on the reality of the situation than the master does, because the slave is aware of the subjectivity and personhood of the master. He has to be because he has to, you know, respond to the wants of the master and the needs of the master and so on. So he is aware of the subjectivity, the self-consciousness of the master, but he's also aware of his own self-consciousness. He hasn't been able to numb himself to his own status as subject. And so you have this situation in which the master actually has less of a good grip on the situation than the slave does.

That's one thing that's going on in Hegel's master-slave dialectic. That's really the bit that tends to get the most attention from analytic philosophers.

But there's this other, I think, very interesting bit where Hegel says, well, one of the things the master does is he forces the slave to make objects for his use. So the slave ends up creating this world, making objects that the master can then use. And there are two important points here.

The first is that Hegel thinks the slave understands how things work. The slave has made the objects. So the slave understands how the objects come about. He has the capacity to create objects. Whereas the master is dependent on these objects, but has no idea really how they work or how they are made.

So the master paradoxically has produced a relation of dependency, right? He thinks he has power over the slave, but really he's dependent. So we have this second way in which the slave has a better grip on things, is in an epistemically superior position. The slave, but not the master, understands how the world they both inhabit has been produced.

The final thing Hegel says is he says, whilst the master remains dependent on the slave, because the only person that the master can get recognition from is still the slave. But he's put himself in this terrible situation where on the one hand, he desires the recognition of another self-consciousness, but on the other, he's numbed himself to the slave's status as a self-conscious being. So there's nothing in the world that can give him the recognition he really wants.

But things are different for the slave. Because the slave, Hegel suggests, by making things, by creating artifacts using his practical intelligence, is able to concretize his subjectivity. So his status as self-conscious is sort of rendered concrete in the artifacts he creates.

And so Hegel thinks that these concrete artifacts can affirm the slave's status as subject. And so in fact, whilst the master is dependent on the slave for recognition, which he cannot get, the slave is not dependent on the master for affirmation of his status as self-conscious, because he has created objects which are reflections of his status which can then affirm him.

So you have these three different ways in Hegel's master-slave dialectic in which the master ends up in a worse situation, cognitively speaking, than the slave. First of all, the master is unaware of the slave's status as subject and thus cannot receive recognition from him. Secondly, the slave creates the world that they both inhabit, so understands the world that they both inhabit, whereas the master is merely dependent on the objects that the slave creates. He cannot create them for himself. And lastly, the slave, by being forced to produce, is actually able to produce objects which affirm his own status as self-conscious. And so he sort of frees himself from the needs of the Master's recognition.

Okay, all of these three aspects pop up in different places in the standpoint theoretic tradition. So let's take them in turn. First of all, we have this psychic dimension, right? The slave has what is sometimes talked about as double consciousness or a bifurcated consciousness. He's aware of the world from his own position, but he's also aware of the world from the master's position. So there's this kind of split or tension and that can produce a particular kind of insight that oppressed people have access to and that non-oppressed people do not have access to.

So that's one strand. That's the kind of psychic strand of standpoint epistemology. Second, you have the materialist strand. So you have this idea that the slave has been forced to make things, so the slave is, in some sense, in touch with or competent with some level of reality that is more basic or fundamental than the level of reality that the master is acquainted with. So we'll call that the materialist strand. And those, I think, are the two most important strands in standpoint epistemology.

And I think one way of thinking about the standpoint tradition is you can think of these two ideas as being emphasized more or less within different thinkers. So for some thinkers, the materialist side of things almost drops out of the picture altogether. And the thing that's really doing all the work is this idea of double consciousness or bifurcated consciousness. So the idea is that if you are a servant, it is incredibly important for you to understand the desires and wishes of your boss, of your master, whereas your master doesn't need to have any understanding of the world you inhabit. And so you have this kind of dual view on things, whereas the master only has one. This is a very important idea for someone like Patricia Hill Collins. She talks about the phenomenon of the "insider within," the servant having this kind of double view on the world in virtue of their simultaneous status as insider and outsider.

And in other strands of standpoint epistemology, typically the ones that are a bit closer to the Marxian tradition, you have much more of an emphasis on the kind of materialist idea. So for someone like Nancy Hartsock, for example, a very influential standpoint epistemologist, she wants to emphasize the idea that women as a class are acquainted with reproductive labor, things like cleaning and childcare, and she thinks there's a sense in which this is a more fundamental level of reality than the world of commodity exchange. And that women have a special insight into the nature of reality in virtue of the kind of labor they perform. And then in some thinkers, both strands kind of come together and sort of interact in more or less complicated ways.

But I think that you can think of all these people as, you know, in some sense, more or less subconsciously, picking up on these different themes that you find articulated in Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic.

Sophie: Okay, that's extremely helpful. Thank you. So it does seem like the materialist strand is really important for solidifying the asymmetry though, because presumably the master is using their freed up time that they now have to engage in other pursuits, which are maybe more abstract. Maybe they're nation building or they're reading and writing and creating works of literature or something like this.

And so without the materialist strand, it seems like you could say exactly the same thing about them, that they have more familiarity with these things that they're producing just like the bondsman has more familiarity with the things they're producing. So to create the asymmetry, it seems like the materialist part is important.

Rachel: I think it's going to depend on how you answer a lot of other questions. So in particular, I think one question that's going to be really important is how much of a role ideology plays in your overall picture as a standpoint epistemologist. So here's one thing that a lot of standpoint epistemologists are going to like some version of this.

They're going to think something like, "Well, the whole conceptual framework that the master is using to try and make sense of things is flawed. They are using a conceptual framework that is incapable of truly grasping the nature of things."

You might think that the situation of the master conceptually is a bit like the situation of the people who were trying to do science with the concept of phlogiston, right? It's like, you know, you could have all the time and resources in the world. But if you're operating with a phlogiston theoretic way of thinking about the world, you're never going to acquire genuine knowledge of how things work because your concepts are flawed.

So there's a certain kind of standpoint epistemologist that's going to think, look, the conceptual scheme of the master is just so distorted and riddled with contradictions and infelicities, that even though they have this time and these resources, they're not actually able to create genuine knowledge.

The reason the bifurcation is important is because the contradictions of the dominant conceptual scheme in a sense are reflected in the bifurcated consciousness of the oppressed.

So this sounds kind of confusing. It's helpful to give an example. A really important figure in the history of standpoint epistemology is Lukács. He wrote this very influential essay in the early 20th century about the standpoint of the proletariat. And there's this very important idea in Marxism that the ideology of capitalism is not in any sense merely a distortion. It's not just a false belief. Because when we consider the social world, there is a particular phenomenon that can occur that we might call social looping. Right? So here's a very simple example. Suppose that I have a servant and I believe that my servant is meek. My servant might well become meek because I believe it.

Because her incentive structure might be such that when she confirms my beliefs, she's rewarded, and when she disconfirms my beliefs, she's punished. And so eventually, this incentive structure is going to result in her acquiring the characteristics that I attribute to her. So the beliefs of the powerful are very seldom like straightforward delusions because they have this tendency to shape the social world in accordance with them.

So take the situation of labor. Lukács thinks one of the pathologies of capitalism is that labor is treated as a commodity. And he thinks this is kind of contradictory because to treat labor as a commodity is to treat it as this kind of abstract thing that can be traded and exchanged. But he thinks labor is in fact this sensuous qualitative thing that resists quantification. But he doesn't think the idea that labor is a commodity is just a delusion, like thinking things release phlogiston when they burn.

He thinks that it is true that labor is a commodity under capitalism. But it's also the case that labor is not a commodity. And so the problem with capitalist society is that it's contradictory in this way, that labor both is and is not a commodity. And it's that tension, that contradiction that the proletariat is acquainted with.

They are laboring. So they are aware through their personal experience of the sensuous qualitative nature of labor. And so they're in this kind of contradictory state. They can't make sense of it, but that spurs them to develop a theory because they want to overcome this kind of cognitive dissonance situation that they're in.

So what I'm trying to get at here is that if you have this background picture on which the concepts that the dominant people are going to try and make sense of the world with, if you think those concepts are just distorted and sort of give rise to contradictions, however many resources they have, that's never going to produce genuine knowledge because to produce genuine knowledge, you're going to have to come up with a whole new conceptual scheme and the people who are going to come up with a whole new conceptual scheme are the people who are acquainted with the contradictions, with the tensions that are inherent within the current scheme.

So, anyway, that's just one sketch of a kind of view you might take. Bifurcation is really, really important. 

Sophie: Okay, I see. So the bifurcated consciousness claim can generate an asymmetry because it might be that the dominant group's ideology is defective and members of the oppressed group have the capacity to appreciate its defects. You've said that one way in which an ideology can be defective is by being self-contradictory. Is that the only way?

Rachel: So this is a great question. And I think there are broadly speaking two different ways of answering this question and how you answer this question is going to depend on what kind of political theoretic tradition that you work in. So here's one way you might go, you might think, well, some ideologies are morally objectionable.

So, an ideology which says that women are not equal to men is a bad ideology because it's morally objectionable to think that women are not equal to men. So that's one way you might go. You might appeal to moral criteria when you're assessing ideologies. A different way you might go is you might say, I am merely interested in assessing whether ideologies are contradictory or not, whether they're coherent in some sense. And that way I don't need to appeal to any, you know, contentious substantive moral principles. Rather, I just need to appeal to these more minimal notions of coherence.

And that's certainly what someone like Lukács is interested in. Lukács is working in this tradition of Marxist theorizing where appealing to moral standards or standards like justice marks you out as some kind of sentimental bourgeois, worthless thinker.

Whereas most feminist standpoint epistemologists are much happier with appealing to broadly speaking, moral criteria. And certainly, you know, the more standpoint epistemology has been taken up within analytic philosophy within the Anglosphere where the tradition of political theorizing has generally been much, much more comfortable, just sort of straightforwardly appealing to broadly moral normative ideals, the kind of version of standpoint epistemology that you encounter in analytic philosophy, for example, written in the last 10 years. Those people, I think, broadly speaking, are going to be perfectly happy appealing to standards like "ideology should not be oppressive," or "ideology should not be inegalitarian."

That's very, very different from the kind of appeal to standpoint epistemology you're going to get in kind of post-Hegelian political philosophy in Germany, say, where people are much more wedded to this ideal of imminent critique, where the ideal of imminent critique is you don't appeal to moral standards, you just diagnose contradictions that are implicit within the dominant ideology.

So you're going to get very, very different ways of assessing or ranking ideologies or conceptual schemes, depending on, you know, what kind of philosophy department you're in.

Leah: Yeah, that's super helpful. I want to ask, I think, kind of like a meta question, which is, we started from this very abstract place of "imagine there are two consciousnesses in the world and then one becomes the master and the other becomes the slave" and then this has all these implications, you know, the slave has this bifurcated knowledge and they can see themselves as both subject and object and that is not accessible to the master. But I'm trying to understand how literally this is meant to apply to our world. Because I think a lot of listeners might be like, "Well, that makes sense in this world of two, but in reality, most people exist in power relations with respect to other people, and very rarely maybe never, is someone, like, at the pinnacle with respect to all of those power relations," such that it then might start to seem like this bifurcated consciousness is accessible to literally everyone.

So I'm just kind of wondering, like, how is this meant to sort of apply in this much more complicated world we live in?

Rachel: Great. So, this question, I take it, correct me if I've sort of picked up on the wrong aspect of the question, is something like, well, there are multiple different axes of power, like gender is one axis of power, class is another axis of power, racialization is another axis of power. What happens when you sort of drop the idealizing assumption that there's only one axis of power and start trying to build a model where you're sensitive to just how many axes of power there are. Is that, have I got the worry right?

Leah: Yeah, I mean, I think even just there being multiple people in the world also gets this off the ground because even if you now have two masters and let's say they're white men and the same age, whatever, there still can be sort of relationships of power between them just by virtue of us having complicated social dynamics with other people and so then it starts to seem like you're gonna just have access to, I don't know, maybe I'm over complicating this.

Sophie: Like, one of the masters might have access to a sort of bifurcated consciousness. The only person who wouldn't have access to any bifurcated consciousness would be someone who's at the pinnacle.

Leah: Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah, good. So I think this comes back to something you were asking earlier. A lot is going to depend on how much work you want the bifurcated consciousness to do and how much work you want materialism to do. So you might think, well, everyone has access to a kind of bifurcated consciousness. Yeah. But not everyone is going to have the resources to make sense of, or resolve, the contradictions or tensions that the bifurcated consciousness gives rise to.

So, you might think something like, well, I might be both aware of myself as subject and object, but just kind of end up having to sort of live with that as an unresolved tension. I mean, many of us live with various forms of cognitive dissonance, but never resolve the cognitive dissonance, just kind of remain in a certain sense uncomfortable with a tension that much of the time we don't attend to.

So I think that one of the thoughts is going to be something like, well, there's a kind of bifurcated consciousness where there's this kind of cognitive dissonance or tension, but it's kind of possible for you to just sort of ignore it. And then there's a kind of experience where it's this constant feature of your reality and you're also routinely in contact with people who have a bifurcated consciousness of the same kind, and so you're able collectively to develop some kind of alternative to it, something that kind of synthesizes the two aspects. I think, I think that's the sort of thing that a lot of people are going to want to say.

Sophie: Yeah, Okay, so with all of that background in mind, which I think is going to be really useful going forward, let's talk about one of the central concepts in standpoint epistemology, which is situated knowledge. So the situated knowledge claim says that a person's social position systematically influences what they can know. And there's a very weak interpretation of this claim that it seems like almost anyone should accept, which is that what you can know depends on your evidence, what evidence you have depends on which things you experience, and what experiences you have depends on your social position.

For example, I don't know what the inside of the men's bathroom looks like at my institution because I've never been in there, and I've never been in there largely due to my social position. Of course, there's nothing deep about this. I could know what the inside of the men's bathroom looks like either by going in there myself or by asking someone. We take it the situated knowledge claim is supposed to be getting at something much deeper than this. What is it getting at?

Rachel: Great. So I want to start off with like a super big picture methodological point. So I think sometimes people feel like there's a mismatch between how minimal the claims like the claims that you just mentioned are, and there's a sort of supposed to be like a really important, sort of resounding conclusion that we're supposed to draw from it, and there seems to be like a mismatch between the kind of modesty of the claims and the grandeur of the purported conclusion.

And I think one of the things that I love about philosophy, for example, is that often you can get really surprising sounding claims out of very, very minimal sounding ones. So here's a very classic example. Suppose that I have a clay statue on my desk. It seems like I could destroy the statue by squishing it without destroying the clay. The lump of clay would survive the squishing. But then if you think, well, X and Y can't be numerically identical, X and Y can't be the same object if they don't have the same properties. And here, the statue and the lump seem to not have the same properties, because one of them could survive a squishing and the other one could not survive a squishing.

So it seems like I'm forced to conclude that where I thought there was only one object on my desk, there are in fact two objects on my desk that occupy exactly the same spatial region. So here we have like really boring sounding claims, but you get this incredibly counter-intuitive result via just a few steps.

So I think in general, you know, it is worth bearing in mind that you can sometimes pull very large rabbits out of very unassuming looking hats. And I am inclined to think actually that if you take seriously even these very minimal kinds of claims that you mentioned, that you can get quite large rabbits out of those relatively unassuming hats.

But let's focus on the example a bit more because I actually think the example is very instructive. So what's going on with you and bathrooms, is that you are getting in virtue of your gender, a biased sample that you have of bathrooms, right? You get to see some kinds of bathrooms, the women's bathrooms, but not the men's bathrooms. But here's a really important feature of this example. Presumably you are aware that you are getting a biased sample.

And this is really important. There's a really big difference between a situation in which you're getting a biased sample, but you know you are, and a case in which you're getting a biased sample, but you are not aware of the fact that you are getting a biased sample. And I think that a lot of cases in the social world are cases in which people receive biased samples in virtue of their social position, but they also don't realize that they are getting biased samples. They don't realize the extent to which other people's experience differs from their own. So that's one important thing to keep in mind, I think.

So here's an example. So I am British and I've always had a British passport. And British passports are really great. They're very powerful. They get you into a lot of countries without visas. I married a man who at the time had an Indian passport, and Indian passports are much weaker than British passports.

Traveling on an Indian passport is much, much, much more difficult than traveling on a British passport. If you want to go to a whole bunch of countries, you have to spend a huge amount of time and money applying for visas, and the process of applying for visas is often quite demeaning.

I was completely unaware prior to having, you know, a romantic relationship with someone with an Indian passport. I was completely unaware of the fact that there were serious differences in how powerful different passports are. So I had this incredibly biased sample, but I was completely unaware of how biased my sample was.

And I've talked to a bunch of people about this with, you know, American passports or British passports. And in general, my sense is that unless these people have partners or family members with Indian passports or, you know, similarly weak passports, they are also just completely unaware of the extent to which passport power is a huge determinant of how easy it is for you to travel.

So that's a really significant example, I think. And, you know, this makes a really big difference to how people do things like organize academic conferences. So very often, if you have an Indian passport and you want to go to a conference in America, this will be practically impossible because the timeline from conference announcement to the conference taking place, that span of time will often be too short to acquire a visa.

So you have on the one hand, this kind of epistemic asymmetry, and this has really important implications for things like how academic research takes place, how conferences are organized, how institutions configure themselves, and this can generate like enormous patterns of exclusion. So that's just an example of how you can have this biased sample without awareness of the fact that the sample is biased, and that can ratchet very easily into kind of hyper-exclusionary mechanisms that make it difficult for people with certain passports to participate in important academic opportunities and they'll become marginalized from the field and and so on and so forth. You get this kind of looping self-reinforcing effect.

Sophie: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So you're saying, look, even if we only accept the very weak interpretation of the Situated Knowledge claim, that is the claim that what you know depends on your social position, we can get lots of robust results from it.

I guess we're then wondering, can you give us a sense of what more controversial versions of the claim would even look like? I'm thinking of versions on which knowledge is situated in some stronger sense where it actually can't be readily transmitted to other people in different social positions.

Rachel: Yeah, good. So the version of the view we've been discussing, this very kind of minimal, empiricist standpoint of epistemology, that's going to be much too weak for a lot of people. They think that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter.

So one thing a lot of people think is like very central to standpoint epistemology is they think, well, traditionally, there's been a valorization of impartiality. The idea is that the gold standard for how you acquire knowledge is that you are an impartial observer, researcher. And standpoint epistemology is very invested in pushing back on this. So that's one way you might go, that's one way you might sort of thicken the minimal empiricist commitment.

There's a kind of delicacy here, because you might say something like the following. Suppose that I am friends with Bill, and you are not. You've never met Bill, you don't especially care about him. You might think, well, I'm going to know way more about Bill than you do, in virtue of the fact that I am friends with him, in virtue of the fact that I stand in this intimate relationship.

And thus, we have evidence that intimate social relations can produce a special kind of knowledge. But of course, an empiricist might well push back on this. They might say, sure, but you know loads about Bill because you've spent lots of time with him, and you have lots of evidence about the kind of person Bill is.

But you could, in principle, share that with Sophie, right? That evidence could be shared with Sophie, and even though she's not friends with Bill, she could come to know just as much about Bill as you do. And I think the right way to respond to this is to say something like the following.

There's a way of knowing a person that is different from just knowing loads of stuff about them. When we say something like, "Rachel knows Bill," we mean things like she's met him, and she spent a bunch of time with him, and she cares about him. And that's a special kind of knowing that isn't just like knowing on the basis of evidence. It's a kind of knowing that's like constitutively entangled with certain kinds of caring relations or like merging of interests or something. I'm only friends with someone if in some sense our interests have become one. So that's one sort of thing that the standpoint epistemologist might want to say.

They might want to say, look, there are certain kinds of knowledge that are a matter of standing in a relation of like loving acquaintance with a certain kind of object and giving someone evidence is never going to be enough to produce that relation of knowledge.

There's a different kind of way you might go. So there's a particular kind of knowledge I have of my own actions. Suppose that I raised my arm intentionally. You and I can both know that I've raised my arm, right? You know it by seeing me raise my arm. But I don't know that I've raised my arm by observing it. I have a special way of knowing what I'm intentionally doing that's non-observational. We call that practical knowledge.

I think that for certain strands of standpoint epistemology, this kind of practical knowledge is actually very, very important.

So the thought is that one aspect of my rational intelligence is doing things like raising my arm, but I also make things using my rational intelligence, like create the world around me. When I cook a meal, I'm using my practical intelligence to create something in the world.

Some people have called this maker's knowledge in the history of philosophy. And if you think that maker's knowledge is really important, then you're straying quite far away from this very minimal empiricism that we started with.

Because you could have the best possible version of observational knowledge of what someone else is doing without having this more intimate practical knowledge of what they're doing, which is only, you know, given very standard natural assumptions, only available to the person themselves, only available to the agent who is authoring the action.

I think for certain kinds of materialist standpoint epistemology, this idea is really important.

So, Lukács for example thinks that under capitalism, we can only have observational knowledge of the economy. We can only understand economic activity in the same way that we can understand the motions of the planets, say.

It's this thing out there, disconnected from us. And we can understand it, but we can only, at best, have observational knowledge of it. But he thinks this is really weird, because the economy is something we have made. It's a human creation. So, you know, imagine you could only know whether, for example, you were tapping your foot or raising your arm or clicking your fingers by observation. That would be a really weird situation to be in. You'd be in some sense alienated from your own practical activity.

I think that is what Lukács thinks our collective situation under capitalism is. We are creating the world. We are authors of it, but we cannot understand it as authors of it. We can only have observational knowledge of our own creative activity.

And he thinks that's a really bad situation to be in, and part of the reason he wants communist revolution to happen is because he thinks, well, when the communist revolution happens, society will be this collective subject, and the collective subject will be able to understand economic activity as something it has authored.

It will have this genuinely practical knowledge of its own activity, which capitalism makes impossible. And thus they're going to be in like a better cognitive situation. They're going to have genuine maker's knowledge of the society that they create, rather than this kind of alienated, observational knowledge of society, which is all we can have when creation and making is done in this kind of fragmented, individualistic way.

Sophie: Okay. Got it. So you've mentioned two kinds of knowledge that are special in that they might not be easily transmissible from one person to another just by testimony, and so they might support a version of the Situated Knowledge claim that's more robust than the sort of weak empiricist one we started with. And these were knowledge by acquaintance as when you know Bill and I don't, and practical knowledge or maker's knowledge as when the author of an action knows what they're doing non-observationally.

We might add to this list know-how or knowledge of how to do something, like how to ride a bike. And qualitative knowledge or knowledge of what something is like, knowing, for instance, what it's like to see the stars or, more relevant to this conversation, what it's like to be sexually harassed.

All of these types of knowledge—so qualitative knowledge, knowledge-how, practical knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance—contrast with what's known as propositional knowledge, which is sort of standard knowledge that something is the case. For example, knowledge that some apples are red, or knowledge that Paris is in France.

Now, it's plausible to me that things like knowledge by acquaintance, practical knowledge, know-how, qualitative knowledge might all be non-transmissible in that you can't just easily transmit them by testimony, but it's much less plausible, at least initially, that propositional knowledge is non-transmissible in this way.

So when standpoint epistemologists talk about some knowledge being dependent on your social position in the sense that you actually have to be in that social position to have that knowledge, do they always have in mind these other non-propositional types of knowledge, or are they ever making this kind of claim about propositional knowledge? Knowledge that something is the case.

Rachel: This is a really important question. It is hard to answer this question because most standpoint epistemologists historically have not been talking in terms of propositional knowledge or qualitative knowledge or whatever. So I think this whole idea that standpoint epistemologists might be thinking about qualitative knowledge specifically, is sort of an artifact of, you know, in the last 10 years, you've had all these people who are trained in analytic philosophy get interested in standpoint epistemology. And they're reading this stuff and they're like, "Oh, this is interesting, but sort of puzzling. How might I make sense of the claims people are making? Here are some tools I have, these distinctions between different kinds of knowledge that might help me to make sense of what's going on."

So it's kind of a delicate exegetical question. You might think this is the best way of making sense of the non-transmissibility claim. The idea that there are certain kinds of knowledge you can only have if you're in a certain social position and you can't just get these kinds of knowledge testimonially, and naturally to try and make sense of that is to think, "Oh, these people are talking about qualitative knowledge, right?" Because qualitative knowledge is plausibly not testimonially transmissible. Does that mean that's the right reading? Well, questions of exegesis are difficult. You know, you're balancing different virtues, textual fidelity versus coherence, etc.

So, I think a more interesting question is like, is there any way of construing standpoint epistemology, such that you get the non-transmissibility claim and you get the idea that what's at issue is propositional knowledge? I think the answer is yes. So, here's why. It's because propositional knowledge requires conceptual competence. So, you might think that there are certain kinds of concepts that you can only grasp if you've had certain kinds of experiences or have occupied certain kinds of social positions.

You know, you can bring this up by thinking about the connection with qualitative knowledge. So suppose that somebody has never seen color. You might think, well, there's some sense in which they could know a lot about color. They might know that the wavelength of red is such and such. But I can also get into a kind of way of thinking where I think, well, this person doesn't really have the concept of red. They've never seen color, so they don't really have the concept of red. And so they don't really know that the wavelength of red is such and such because they lack competence with the concept that is required to stand in the relation of propositional knowledge to the relevant claim.

So yeah, there's definitely a sort of a package of views you could have about conceptual competence and the conditions required for conceptual competence and the relationship between conceptual competence and propositional knowledge that would allow you to think that there are certain kinds of important propositional knowledge that you can only have if you've had certain experiences, which are tied in some important sense to social position.

Leah: Got it. Okay. So as you've mentioned, it sounds like one way of deviating from the trivial interpretation of the situated knowledge claim involves emphasizing the idea of a perspective or a conceptual scheme or a way of thinking about the world where the thought is that a person's social position gives them a kind of filter on how they view things, and that filter affects what they can glean from a given situation.

It sounds like on this kind of view, people with very different social positions could come to know very different things from having the same experience. One major worry for this kind of view is that it risks essentializing or stereotyping people. So contemporary standpoint epistemologists are very careful to not say things like that there is one distinctive women's view of the world or one distinctive black perspective on the world because they recognize that social identities intersect in unique ways and that people within social identity groups have really different experiences.

Is there an inherent tension between emphasizing the idea of a perspective and avoiding this sort of essentialism?

Rachel: This is a really interesting question. So, I want to flag one thing, which is, I think that the idea of perspective doesn't necessarily get you the idea that two people could glean different things from exactly the same experience, because you might think that what perspective you have, like reaches into experience as it were.

So take the following example. Suppose that I am looking at a sonogram and a doctor is looking at a sonogram. There's a sense in which we might be having the same experience because we're looking at the same picture, but there's another sense in which we are going to have wildly different experiences, right?

It's just going to look like a bunch of blurry blobs or whatever to me. Whereas a trained professional is going to see things differently. It'll have a kind of order and structure and they'll be able to sort of interpret it visually in a way that I can't. So their experience of the sonogram is going to be very different from my experience of the sonogram in virtue of their having this kind of tutored perspective that I lack.

That's a kind of side point. I guess the thing about essentialism, I think it's maybe helpful to say a little bit about exactly what we take essentialism to be because often the idea that a certain view might have essentialist implications is treated as a reason to sort of not look more closely at the view, even prior to an explication of what essentialism might involve and why essentialism might be bad.

So, here's a view that seems wrong to me. All women share certain biological properties, like having a womb and those biological properties explain important facts about women's social position.

That's a view that seems clearly incorrect to me, and also very plausibly essentialist. Are standpoint epistemologists going to be pushed into saying anything like that? I think clearly not. I guess the kind of version of essentialism you're thinking about is more something like the following. There are important experiential commonalities between different members of social groups.

It's not clear to me that that is a thesis that is profoundly objectionable. I think standpoint epistemologists are probably going to have to say something like, there are important and explanatorily significant experiential commonalities between different members of social groups. I don't think that's a reductio on standpoint epistemology.

Of course, if you say something like, there are certain experiences that all and only women have had, then you're going to run into trouble. But the claim that there are certain explanatorily important experiential commonalities between women, for example, I think is a much more defensible claim.

Leah: Yeah, okay, so just to follow up on that, like, what would be an example of a claim in that camp that you think is reasonable?

Rachel: An example would be something like, women experience the threat of sexual violence more routinely than men. Of course, you know, there are going to be like all sorts of caveats, like, you know, men who are incarcerated face a very high level of threat to sexual violence. But I don't think those kinds of nuances undermine the thought that this is a kind of reasonable empirical generalization.

It's an empirical generalization. Of course, there are going to be exceptions, but it can still do important explanatory work. I mean, I want to be clear. I'm not, I'm not saying I'm committed to this claim. I'm just saying, I think there's a kind of a pretty reasonable version of the idea, of the kind of experiential commonality thesis that is compatible with recognition of diversity across groups.

Leah: Got it, got it. So it's basically like an on average or an in general this will be true about this social group kind of claim. It's not meant to apply to every member of the group.

Rachel: Right. Yeah. And, I mean, it's also, I think, you know, comparative claims are useful, right? So, sort of, this group is more likely than this group to experience such and such. Right. I think that that's probably a more useful thing to say than most members of this group will experience such and such.

Sophie: Okay, so circling back for a second to the initial statement of the Situated Knowledge claim. It said that what you know depends on your social position, and we've discussed various different versions of that claim, some stronger, some weaker, but so far, at least on the weaker versions of the claim, there seems to be nothing special about social position. In so far as your social position affects what you know by affecting your experiences or your conceptual scheme.

Other things seem like they can do that too. So to use your example, generally speaking, doctors are more likely than non-doctors to have gotten the training that allows them to see the ultrasound images as meaningful shapes rather than blobs, and that explains why they experience and know things that non-doctors don't.

But being a doctor isn't really a social position in the same way that being sort of a member of an oppressed group is. So on these views, is there anything special about social position?

Rachel: Yeah, I think in that sense, there's probably not much that's special about social position insofar as it seems that various kinds of training will affect your conceptual style, your cognitive style, what's in your conceptual repertoire, like how you look at the world, like in the doctor example.

And you could insist in some sense that being a doctor is a different social position, but you risk draining the notion of social position of any real theoretical significance if you make that kind of move for sure.

Sophie: Okay, got it.

So moving beyond situated knowledge, another idea central to standpoint epistemology is epistemic advantage. The epistemic advantage claim says that occupying certain social positions can make you more epistemically reliable, at least in certain domains. Specifically, it says that occupying subdominant, oppressed or marginalized social positions can make your view of the social world more reliable, or perhaps on some versions more impartial or less biased. Could you just say a bit more about what motivates this idea? I realized we might've already covered some of this in the master-slave dialectic discussion.

Rachel: Yeah, great. So I'll just sort of draw out some themes that we've already covered. One important thought is that when you are oppressed, you have your own picture of the world, but you also need to comprehend and be sort of fluent vis-a-vis the oppressor's worldview, because that's sort of necessary for survival.

And being able to sort of toggle between these two perspectives or being aware in some sense of the dissonance between these two perspectives is going to confer some kind of advantage. So that's kind of broadly psychic bifurcation, a way of understanding how epistemic advantage arises. A second way of understanding how epistemic advantage arises is to think that, well, the oppressed are acquainted with levels of reality or aspects of social structure that are kind of obscured from the perspective of the dominant.

So here's an example that might help. I can, if I want, go to the supermarket and buy some chicken. This is real, right? The chicken is real. The supermarket is real. There's no sense in which it's an illusion that I'm going to the supermarket and buying chicken. But here's something else that somebody else does. They get up in the morning and they go and they work in a slaughterhouse and they kill chickens and are involved in packaging meat. So, there's some sense in which the slaughterhouse is like a more basic level of reality than the supermarket.

What does this mean? Well, in some sense the fact of the chicken in the supermarket depends on somebody working in the slaughterhouse. If nobody works in the slaughterhouse, then there's no chicken in the supermarket. But I don't need to concern myself with what's going on in the slaughterhouse. Right. I'm never sort of forced to think about it. Whereas the person who works in the slaughterhouse, they can also go to the supermarket and buy the chicken, right? So they occupy what Marxists would call the sphere of exchange, but they also occupy the sphere of production, on which the sphere of exchange depends.

So the person who works in the slaughterhouse in some sense has like a more accurate and more realistic picture of the world than I do because they are daily acquainted with the practices of production that underpin the sphere of exchange that I navigate.

So that's like another way of thinking about epistemic advantage. The kind of feminist version of this might be something like, just as the sphere of exchange depends on this hidden sphere of production, so the sphere of production depends on the hidden sphere of reproduction. The idea is, well, somebody's working in the slaughterhouse, but then, they had to be raised, right? They were a child at one point. They had to be cared for. Now their clothes need to be washed. Their food needs to be cooked.

Someone, often a woman, is the person who will be doing all that reproductive labor. And that, you might think, is a more basic level of reality still. It's the reproductive sphere that underpins the possibility of the productive sphere. But often, you might think, men are just kind of cut off from the reproductive sphere in much the same way that I'm cut off from the slaughterhouse. It just sort of happens in the background. They don't need to concern themselves with the details. So women have a more accurate view of how society works.

It's not just that they see more stuff, right? It's that the extra stuff they see has a kind of causal explanatory role. You know, suppose that we're both looking at a forest and you can see the left hand side of the forest and I can see the right hand side of the forest, then we're kind of on a par. Then there's a version where you can see the left hand side of the forest and I can see the whole forest, right? Then there's a sense in which, like, you know, I'm in a better situation than you. But that's not quite the idea. It's more like, suppose that you can see everything that's happening above ground and I can see everything that's happening above ground, but I can also see everything that's happening below ground.

I can see the root system. Then it's not just that I can see more than you, it's that you can only see the surface of things, whereas I can see both the surface and how it relates to this hidden explanatory layer of reality that you can't see.

Leah: Yeah, okay. That's super helpful. And I think the chicken example makes a lot of sense where you have a farm worker who both understands how the chicken is produced and also can have access to the grocery store. One worry you might have is it seems like there might be cases where the person who is of the disadvantaged status doesn't actually have access to the market of exchange. So for example, like let's say someone builds private jets. They may have intimate understanding of how this private jet is produced, but they may not have ever flown on a private jet. They may not know what cocktails the waiter brings you when—whatever, I don't know what a private jet is like. But you can imagine that they might not actually have access to the sort of knowledge of exchange. And so then this would potentially motivate a worry of, well, if it can be the case that the people in the dominant group can also have access to knowledge that the people in the oppressed group might not have, then like, maybe we're going to have some problematic implications about what roles they should fill or something like that.

Rachel: Yeah, totally. I think that there are going to be a bunch of different ways the standpoint epistemologist is going to try and resist this concern, which I think is a really good concern to have. One thing to retreat to is this kind of conceptual scheme idea that we discussed briefly earlier.

I think a better thing to say would be something like the following: they don't have access to the sphere of private jet exchange, but they do have access to the sphere of exchange. And you might think there's nothing really importantly different about the sphere of private jet exchange from the sphere of exchange generally.

Sophie: Sure. Yeah. Although you might have people who, although they participate in the sphere of exchange, they have like no contact whatsoever with the stock market or more abstract levels of exchange. And you might think that unlike knowledge of the sphere of private jet exchange, knowledge of the stock market or something is really important.

Rachel: Yeah, good. There's a really important difference between financialized capitalism and industrial capitalism. I think the stock exchange example suggests that it's going to be really difficult to translate ideas by standpoint epistemology that were developed in an era of industrial capitalism to contexts of financialized capitalism.

I mean, I will say, I think to some extent, these are meant to merely be illustrative. So maybe the distinction between the sphere of exchange and the sphere of production, the idea that these are the only two spheres that matter, is an abstraction because we're abstracting away from the sphere of financialization. But you might still think there's still something to this idea that there are certain kinds of explanatory, or sort of causally significant realms of sociality, which oppressed or marginalized people typically have a better intuitive grip on than people who are never forced to confront them.

That more sort of generalized or more abstracted insight might stand up even if you have some concerns about the example.

Leah: Okay, got it. So, it seems like many standpoint epistemologists think that the kind of standpoint that comes with epistemic privilege is more than just an identity, like womanhood. They instead think that standpoints are earned or achieved through some kind of collective process of political struggle or through conscious, critical reflection of the power structures that shape our world and so on.

So even if you are a woman, you may not occupy the kind of standpoint that makes someone epistemically privileged with respect to the patriarchy because you might not be alive to the patriarchy. You might not be conscious of the nature of your social position. On the face of it, this idea sounds worryingly self-fulfilling. If in defining the epistemically privileged standpoint, you build in substantive requirements about how people have to see the world, the contents of their beliefs, even their normative commitments, then you're going to automatically reinforce those ways of viewing the world, deeming them more epistemically reliable. How big of a problem is this for the standpoint theorist?

Rachel: I think it might be helpful here to distinguish between two different questions that we might want standpoint epistemology to be an answer to. So here's one situation you might be in. You might be like, "Oh, there's some important truth about the social world that I do not know." So maybe I'm like, I don't know whether sex work should be decriminalized or I don't know whether people should be paid a living wage. I need to consult someone. And one thing you might appeal to standpoint epistemology to do, you might say, "Okay, standpoint epistemology tells me the following: It says, well, look and find who the oppressed people are and ask them and they will give you the correct answer."

So here standpoint epistemology is like telling you who the experts are with respect to your question. So your situation here is a bit like suppose you don't know whether you have cancer and you're like, "I want to know whether I have cancer." And then you think, okay, well, you should ask the relevant experts. You should go see an oncologist and then you go see an oncologist and they tell you whether you have cancer or not. And you find the relevant oppressed people and they tell you whether a living wage is a good idea or whether sex work should be decriminalized.

Here's a different kind of situation you might be in. Suppose that you know whether or not you have cancer, and then you notice that there's this group of people who seem really good at knowing whether you have cancer. So maybe I know I have cancer. And then I'm puzzled because there seems to be this group of people, oncologists, who are really good at knowing whether I have cancer, whereas non-oncologists seem really bad at knowing whether I have cancer. And I'm puzzled. I'm like, what is it about the oncologists that makes them so good at answering this question?

And then I say, oh, I guess they all went to medical school. So that's my explanation of their superior track record. So you might want standpoint epistemology to play something more like this explanatory role. You might say something like, "Oh, it turns out that women on the whole were much more insightful about the workings of patriarchy than men were. What could possibly explain this?" And then you appeal to standpoint epistemology to explain this observed epistemic advantage. So I think, you know, standpoint epistemology is playing very different roles with respect to these two questions.

I think that if what you want from Standpoint Epistemology is expert recommendation, there are going to be a bunch of problems with that. But one of the problems is you are going to run into something like the concern that you have sketched.

Take the oncology case, right? We have some way of determining whether someone went to medical school that isn't just testing whether they know the answer to certain questions about who has cancer. It's like a kind of independently verifiable fact about whether someone went to medical school, whereas if the only way you have of figuring out whether someone is a standpoint theoretic expert is testing whether they give the quote unquote "right answers" to your questions, it's not going to be very helpful. Right? Because in order to figure out who the experts are, you're already going to have to know the answers to the questions that you wanted the oppressed group of people to answer.

If you want standpoint epistemology to play this expert recommending role, you're gonna need some kind of story about the analogue of medical school. What is the process in virtue of which this group acquired expertise? I don't think this is so much of a problem if you think of standpoint epistemology as a retrospective explanatory project.

If you think something like, "Oh, it turns out that this group of people were really insightful about how this thing worked, whereas this other group of people were really uninsightful about how this sort of thing worked. And then standpoint epistemology is one of the kind of broad theoretical frameworks you come up with to try and explain this observed advantage."

And I think sometimes some of the difficulties that occur when it comes to standpoint epistemology come from this switching between different questions. And you're going to get standpoint epistemology is asked to do very different things depending on whether that's like the question under discussion or not.

Sophie: Okay, so is the idea that if we're already on board with the idea that certain women, the ones who have done the conscious critical reflection, they seem like they have a lot of insights into this thing. We start there, and then we ask, well why? And then maybe we can give a good explanation that has to do with bifurcated consciousness or materiality or something like that. But it does seem like you have to already be on board with the idea that they have special insights into it.

So we just have to start from a place where you already take on board the insights that that particular group of people is having about the patriarchy as opposed to other groups like women who have internalized the ideology of their oppressors or other people. So is it right that you just, you are, you just already have to start there?

Rachel: I mean, it might be helpful to think about how this is structurally similar to other puzzles in epistemology. So consider skeptical worries. Somebody comes along and they say, how do you know you're not a brain in a vat? How do you know an evil scientist hasn't just taken your brain and put you in a vat and simulated all your experiences?

There are two ways to respond to this question. There's the dogmatic way and there's the, I don't know what to call it, call it the anxious way. So the anxious way of responding to the skeptical challenge, someone comes along and they pose this skeptical challenge to you. And what you try and do is you try and devise a theory of knowledge, which is going to spit out the result that you can know that you're not a brain in a vat where your capacity to get that result doesn't depend on your antecedently knowing that you're not a brain in a vat. That's really hard to do. I don't think it can be done. Some epistemologists might disagree, but I don't think it can be done.

The dogmatic way of responding is to say something like, well, let's just assume that I am not, in fact, a brain in a vat. Might I be able to know that, conditional on me not being a brain in a vat? And then you can come up with answers that give you the result that, yes.

So, lots of people think there's something very unsatisfying about the dogmatic response. Right? They think, well, you're not taking the skeptical challenge seriously. You're just saying like, assuming I'm in the good case, assuming that I'm not a brain in a vat, I can know that. But why should we assume that you're in the good case? That seems really question begging. But if you don't want to do that, it's very difficult to give any satisfying answer or rejoinder to the skeptic. You're kind of in this sort of nasty dialectical situation, where it either seems like you can't give a response to the skeptic, or you just kind of don't take them seriously. And neither of these positions seems great.

And I think that there is an instructive parallel between that situation and the kind of challenge to standpoint epistemology. The thought is either you just say, like, "We've no idea of knowing what the truth about the social world is. Can we develop some theory that is completely neutral vis-a-vis the question of what the social world is like, but that can nonetheless tell us who to listen to, who the experts about the social world are?" I don't think you can do that. I don't think that's possible.

On the other hand, you might say, "We'll just assume that these people are right and those people are wrong. Can we explain how it is that those people came to acquire the knowledge that they have?" That totally is possible. But of course, the worry is that you seem dogmatic. You're not really engaging with the skeptical challenge.

Anyway, so I think the point I want to make here is not that there are new problems for standpoint epistemology, but that it's helpful to see that the problems that there are for standpoint epistemology are really versions of problems for epistemology, per se, and the challenge to the standpoint epistemologist is really a version of a skeptical challenge that almost any non-skeptical epistemology is vulnerable to.

Leah: Yeah, that's super helpful. Okay, so I think this is maybe sort of related, for, for standpoint epistemologists who think the epistemically privileged standpoint is an achievement. Is it something that anyone can occupy? Or is membership in some identity group or social position also thought to be a requirement, and if so, why?

Rachel: Good. So the achievement thesis is kind of puzzling to me. You ask what is standpoint epistemology and people will be like, the really important thing you have to realize about a standpoint is it is something that is struggled for and achieved, not automatically conferred upon you in virtue of your membership of a certain social category.

And this is kind of, you know, people often say it very piously, but very few details are given about like, well, what does the struggle look like? I mean, this is what we were just talking about, right? What exactly is the process that confers this advantage? It's often left very opaque. So sometimes it can feel a little ad hoc, right?

So sometimes you feel like, well, people have come up with their standpoint epistemology. They're like, "Women have insight into patriarchy" and then people come along and say, like, "Well, actually, you know, gender is a really poor predictor of views on abortion. It turns out knowing someone's gender is a very bad predictor of whether they're going to be pro-choice or pro-life.

So it doesn't seem like gender really makes you more likely to be pro-choice. And if you think, well, the correct view is pro-choice, then it doesn't seem like being a woman is helping you get the right view." And so you're like, "Oh, well, I've got a counter-example, this is bad news for standpoint epistemology."

And then people say, "Well, it's not, because you've misunderstood standpoint epistemology because standpoint epistemology incorporates the achievement thesis, which says you have to have struggled to achieve the view. And so these women who are anti-choice, they just haven't, you know, struggled to achieve the view, because standpoint epistemology is not a prediction about what particular women will believe."

Sorry, I feel like I haven't really answered the question so much as just kind of aired my frustration with the achievement thesis.

One reason why you might think anyone can achieve the standpoint—so suppose you think, okay, well, here's the mechanism I'm positing as a standpoint epistemologist. Certain people have a bifurcated consciousness. They're aware of certain contradictions or tensions in reality. They develop a better theory of reality.

They can communicate that better theory of reality to anyone. Maybe the dominant are not going to be particularly inclined to listen because, you know, it tells them they have to, like, give away their stuff or whatever. But there's no in-principle barrier to them acquiring the theoretical knowledge that those with the bifurcated consciousness have produced.

Here's a different kind of story you might tell. You might think knowledge that the oppressed develop is knowledge that is sort of, in some sense, constitutively tied to certain kinds of qualitative experience. And so, you can't share knowledge that the oppressed develop with people who don't have the relevant experiences because they lack the right conceptual repertoire or something.

Both of these are versions of standpoint epistemology and they're going to give very different answers to the shareability question. So, yeah, a huge amount is going to depend on what you think the mechanisms of epistemic advantage are.

Sophie: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if we tie it back to the master-slave dialectic, you might think, in order to share in the new conceptual scheme that the slave and maybe other enslaved people have together come up with, you would have to actually stop oppressing them because you would have to be able to see their subjectivity, which might require actually stopping the thing that was preventing you from seeing that in the first place? Is that one way people go?

Rachel: I think that's definitely an important part of the option space, right? So you could think something like, there are certain kinds of knowledge that only become fully available to you once you've transformed your social position.

Sometimes people sort of set things up as if it's like, well, if you don't have the possibility of testimonial transmission, then some people are just stuck being ignorant. And I think one of the nice things about your question is it sort of brings out ways in which this might work on a flawed assumption. So, you—there are things that can change what kind of social position you occupy, not in the sense of like changing whether you're white or changing whether you're a woman, but things like changing what your interests are.

So here's an example. When I married someone with an Indian passport, this didn't change my social identity at a very coarse-grained level. Like, it remains true that I am a white middle-class woman, right? But it did, in some more subtle way, change my social position because it really did change the relationship quite a bit to institutions like the British Home Office. It meant that my relationship with the British Home Office became genuinely oppositional in a way that it had not been before.

So I think it is possible for people to change their social position intentionally in this more nuanced sense. You can change your social position by doing something like joining a union because that changes what your interests are. It changes who your allies are and who your opponents are in a meaningful material way.

Sophie: Mm hmm. Okay. So a lot of standpoint epistemology concerns broadly scientific or empirical knowledge, but it seems like it's maybe not limited to this. For example, some of the things we've been talking about are moral claims like "Should sex work be decriminalized?" or "Should people be paid a living wage?" or "Should people be able to get abortions?"

Do standpoint theorists typically intend the situated knowledge and the epistemic advantage claims to apply to moral knowledge. For example, you might think that members of oppressed groups, say women, are more epistemically reliable at identifying acts of sexism or misogyny than members of the dominant group. But the judgment that an act is sexist is what's called a thick ethical judgment. It's a judgment that entails some descriptive content and some moral content. To call something sexist is both to describe it and to condemn it. So, yeah, how much is moral knowledge part of the view as well?

Rachel: For someone like Lukács, right? Moral knowledge is not something he's concerned about at all, right? I think he would probably have regarded the whole category of moral knowledge as a kind of bourgeois delusion. For a more contemporary feminist epistemologist, I think for most of them, moral knowledge is going to be like a much more significant category.

Moral knowledge interacts in interesting ways, of course, with the kind of question of testimonial transmission, because in sort of mainstream moral epistemology, there are a bunch of people who think that moral knowledge can't be testimonially transmitted in the same way that ordinary empirical knowledge can.

So, like, lots of people have the intuition that it's completely fine to just defer to someone else if they tell you about the mating habits of penguins, but it would be really odd and kind of bad to just come to the conclusion that eating meat is wrong because your vegetarian friend tells you that eating meat is wrong, even if, you know, your vegetarian friend is someone you would normally defer to about like anything, because you know they're super reliable and very knowledgeable about stuff.

So, moral knowledge might be one way to make sense of the non-transmissibility claim. If you think standpoint epistemology is committed to this claim that there's this, you know, hard-to-transmit knowledge, and you also think that you have these antecedent reasons for thinking that moral knowledge is hard to transmit, you might think, well, maybe these two views can be brought into a kind of productive conversation.

I mean, it's also important to distinguish between what we might call basic moral knowledge and derivative moral knowledge. So, you know, you might think something like, well, maybe women are not any better at knowing something like "social relations should be equal," but they are much better at identifying inegalitarian social interactions.

So there's a sense in which, like, women are superior at generating moral knowledge, but the mechanism that underpins that superiority is not superior knowledge of general moral principles, but better knowledge of what kinds of behavior violate the moral principles that everyone has equal access to.

Another example might be something like the abortion case. You can sometimes change people's minds about whether abortion is permissible or not just by making certain facts about just how burdensome pregnancy is salient. So I think certainly when I was a child, I didn't have any real sense of pregnancy as a genuinely burdensome and grueling experience. And if you just sort of don't appreciate that pregnancy is a burdensome and grueling experience, then you might think that abortions are impermissible because you just are unaware of certain kinds of factual considerations that are normatively relevant.

But you might think, well, people who've been pregnant are going to be aware of those factual but normatively relevant considerations and that might ground their superior insight. But that's not a matter of having any deeper insight into which moral principles are true.

Sophie: One concern I take it people have about moral knowledge as compared to empirical knowledge is that it feels like there's no independent check on whether someone is an expert. Like there's some independent way of checking whether someone is good at diagnosing cancer, but not whether they're good at identifying racist or sexist conduct. The only way you can check whether they're good at it is by comparing it against your judgments about racist or sexist conduct. Does that seem like a worry to you?

Rachel: So I think this notion of the availability of an independent check can sometimes obscure more than it reveals. Here's an example. So suppose I have two books in my office and I want to know whether these books are the same size and right now one of them is on my desk and the other one is on my shelf. So I think, okay, well, this is easy. I just take the two books and place them side by side and look at whether one of them is bigger than the other. Easy.

But of course, the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach pointed out that, well, you know, maybe not, because you take the book from the shelf and you put it on the desk, and for all you know maybe the book expanded or contracted in size as you moved it. So you think, okay, well, maybe that'll happen, but I'll take a ruler and I'll measure the first book and then I'll go and measure the second book and I'll see if one of them is bigger than the other.

And Reichenbach says, sure, but you don't know that the ruler isn't contracting as you move it across the room or expanding as you move the ruler across the room. So you don't really have any way of checking whether these books are the same size or not.

And I mean, what this brings out, of course, is that the whole notion of checking is you're always checking relative to certain background assumptions and the background assumptions in the book case are things like objects do not expand or contract when you move them a couple of meters across an office, at least under normal circumstances. And that's what lets you check whether the books are the same size.

But then once you start thinking about things in terms of like, okay, well, what are the background assumptions that we need? I think in a lot of moral cases, there are enough shared assumptions. Take the sexual harassment case, for example. In some sense, sort of coining the term sexual harassment, developing the term sexual harassment was a moral innovation, but it was a moral innovation within a moral tradition.

You know, people don't just say sexual harassment is wrong and then like, say nothing more. They appeal to ideas like equality. They appeal to ideas like dignity. To the idea that people should not be demeaned in their workplace. These are ideals that are historically specific, right? Lots of people throughout history would not have endorsed or even understood these norms. But many people who lack antecedent, specifically feminist commitments, are committed to norms like people should not be demeaned in the workplace.

And then people come along and say, there's this thing, sexual harassment, it's wrong. And there's a sense in which we can independently check that. Because we can say, Why is it wrong? And, you know, the feminist can say, well, it's wrong because it's demeaning. It's wrong because it affronts the dignity of the worker. You can tell a plausible story about what it is about sexual harassment that affronts the dignity of the worker. And that's a kind of independent check.

You've got this shared background assumption and you're justifying this new claim with reference to this shared background assumption. And that's the kind of structure that all independent checking has, really. So, like, there are clearly differences between the moral and the empirical case. But I think, really, what's different about the moral case is that very often we feel like there are no shared background assumptions to which we can appeal, but that's certainly not always the case.

Like, within many communities, there are these quite robust shared background norms, like commitment to things like dignity, and some kind of independent checking in some sense is available. Oppressed groups tend to make these moral innovations in ways that emerge from them extending moral traditions rather than making these kinds of ex nihilo interventions that are unintelligible to the broader moral community.

Leah: Hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. So just to make sure I understand. So basically the idea is like, we even have this concept of sexual harassment because this group of people who are systematically experiencing this thing helped generate this concept that resonates with a lot of people who don't experience sexual harassment because it sort of builds on these common conceptions that people just accept like "it's bad to be demeaned in the workplace."

Rachel: Exactly. Totally. Totally. So the thought is, you know, imagine a society where people had no commitment to egalitarianism, where people had no conception of dignity or the idea of being demeaned. If somebody came into that society and said sexual harassment is wrong, people would just be so confused.

And, you know, the people in that society, they really would have no independent way of checking whether what this person said is true. They would just either have to blindly defer or ignore them. There would be nothing else.

Leah: Okay, got it. I guess maybe a follow-up on this is it seems like there are cases where the oppressed group will make this kind of claim or they'll develop this kind of concept and then the dominant group will be like "nope, actually we reject that."

Rachel: Hmm. Yeah.

Leah: Maybe one example is, you know, transgender people will say, "It is demeaning and harmful to us for us not to be able to play on the sports teams with the gender we identify with." And then the dominant group will be like, "Nope, actually, we reject this, you guys are confused about, you know, what gender even is and what work it ought to be doing," whatever. In those kinds of cases, is that disanalogous from the sexual harassment in the workplace case because they don't accept sort of this premise that it would be akin to demeaning someone in the workplace is wrong?

Rachel: Yeah. So I think that in that sort of case, there is a genuine breakdown, and there are not enough shared background assumptions between the proponents of the claim and the critics of the claim. It is worth pointing out that you do get cases like this in the purely empirical case.

So, you know, if two communities just have wildly different understandings of mass, for example, it might be very difficult to come up with any kind of testing procedure that both of these communities can agree to, such that they will both accept the authority of the test to tell them whether their theory of mass is correct.

So I think there's a structural feature here, which is a lack of shared background assumptions, which prevents a kind of independent testing. But you can also get that kind of breakdown of shared assumptions in the empirical case. I think it's just less normal to get it in the empirical case.

Leah: Got it. Okay, so we're already talking about implications, but one implication that kind of comes up a lot, when people make these sort of claims about what access people from various standpoints have, is that it can be tempting to draw a direct line from the claim of standpoint epistemology to the idea that members of dominant groups should defer to members of oppressed and marginalized groups on lots of important issues. In other words, that members of the dominant group should accept the views or judgments of members of marginalized groups as their own without necessarily understanding what reasons support these judgments because, at least in many cases, it is in principle impossible for them to ever fully understand what marginalized people know without having walked in their shoes.

It sounds like many standpoint theorists actually resist this move to deference epistemology. What motivates their resistance?

Rachel: So there are a few different ways you might try to resist this move. I think it's just helpful to distinguish between two different projects that you might be interested in. So one thing you might be interested in is who knows stuff. Here's another kind of question you might be interested in. How do I spread knowledge through society?

And you might think, once you've answered the first question, you've answered the second question. You know, you spread knowledge through society by making everybody else shut up and just letting the people who know stuff talk.

But of course, there are a bunch of reasons you might think this is a terrible idea, right? Think about something like climate science. I am not an expert when it comes to climate science, and I don't understand loads of stuff that climate scientists tell me. And of course, there is an obvious sense in which social policy, for example, should not be equally sensitive to the opinions of the climate scientist and the opinions of me.

But I think a lot of people would think it's not a very attractive idea to think that climate scientists should just sort of tell the non-climate scientists what to do, and that it's always inappropriate for the non-climate scientists to kind of do things like ask for reasons, or subject the claims of the climate scientists to a certain kind of critical scrutiny.

If you think that the claims of standpoint epistemology can be readily understood in a kind of expertise model, this is something I'm kind of attracted to. I think that probably one of the best ways of thinking about standpoint epistemology is to say, look, in the same way we recognize that there are climate experts, women, say, have a certain kind of expertise about patriarchy.

But in general we don't think, I don't think, that the correct response to expertise is blind deference. It's very hard to say what the correct response to expertise is. There's a genuine deep question about how to combine the fact of expertise and the incommunicability of various kinds of expertise. It is hard for experts to communicate with non-experts. It's very, very hard.

But on the other hand, democracy is good. And democracy in the robust sense means an avoidance of technocracy. It means you don't just have rule by experts. You have experts who are meaningfully accountable to the general population.

So it's very difficult. And I think that many of the problems around standpoint epistemology and deference are really just instances of this more general puzzle.

So I think that that's not really an answer. I don't know. I do not think deference is a good norm, with respect to expertise in general, and thus I don't think it's a good norm with respect to what we might call standpoint-based expertise.

But I don't have a good answer to how to sort of incorporate expert discourse into democratic discourse. I genuinely think that's one of the most difficult puzzles that contemporary society faces, is how to reconcile sort of cognitive and intellectual fragmentation with genuine democratic accountability.

Sophie: Yeah, yeah. So one thing that standpoint epistemologists would plausibly call for on either the deference model or the sort of democratic deliberation model, is the inclusion of diverse voices within epistemic communities. Now, there's a familiar argument for the epistemic value of diversity that goes something like, if you're gonna have a group of people come to conclusions about things, you should have a diversity of opinions because then people can push back on each other and you'll have more different kinds of questions and views being explored.

On that kind of picture, it doesn't really seem to be important that these people are from different social positions so much as that they just have different viewpoints. But besides that, how does the picture that standpoint epistemologists might advocate differ from that sort of more familiar argument for diversity?

Rachel: I think it's gonna be pretty similar. And I think that's a virtue. I think these kind of epistemic arguments for diversity seem pretty tempting, so if those are arguments that a certain flavor of standpoint epistemologist can naturally help themselves to, that seems like good news for the standpoint epistemologist of that kind of flavor.

I've been trying to think about this because I knew that you were going to ask a question like this, and I've been trying to think of sharp differences, and I can't really think of any. 

Sophie: I mean, one difference that I was kind of thinking of is, you know, suppose you had a group of people who were all members of an oppressed group and they were trying to formulate conclusions or maybe make decisions about some issue that affects the social structure within which they're oppressed.

Then I would think that on the standpoint view, that would just be great. It would just be great to keep the group as is because they have epistemic advantage with respect to this topic. Versus the other model of the epistemic value of diversity, you might want to diversify that group by adding some members of the dominant group, just because more different kinds of viewpoints are better from an epistemic perspective. So that might be one difference. I don't know what you think.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, great. No, this is really helpful. So I think there are a few things. So like, what is—this goes back to something that we talked about briefly earlier, which is the point about there not just being one axis of oppression. So you can't just find the oppressed group and then have them come up with the solution because there is no "the oppressed group," right?

There are these multiple different oppressed constituencies, all with their own, perhaps competing interests. You know, so that that's one thing to think, you're going to need to introduce practices of contestation at some point. Once you recognize that there are sort of multiple different oppressed groups, where there's no clear sort of ranking. It's not like we're like, "Oh yeah, you're both oppressed, but that group is more oppressed than this other group, so we should just pay attention only to the most oppressed group."

I mean, this just seems like an obviously kind of hopeless way of going about things. But then, I think it matters a lot whether you're thinking about theory building or policymaking.

So it is not a good-making feature of a theory that it is democratically legitimate, right? Theories need to be true, they need to be accurate. They need to be explanatory. And whether people endorse them or like them or not, it just does not have any bearing on their goodness as theories.

So you might think, well, if you're interested in coming up with a theory of the world, maybe the only people who should be involved in theory construction are oppressed people. There's this other thing you might be trying to work out. You might be trying to develop policies, figure out how to arrange your social institutions.

So here's a good-making feature of policies: they're democratically legitimate. Ceteris paribus, all else equal, policies are better when they're democratically legitimate than when they're not democratically legitimate. So you might think, if we want our policies to be democratically legitimate, then the deliberative procedures which produce those policies, you can't just ignore entire sections of the population.

You can't just ignore men, or ignore property owners. Apart from anything else, if you continually implement democratically illegitimate policies, at some point you'll probably provoke a fairly horrible backlash.

So, you know, even if you don't care about democratic legitimacy in and of itself, which I think you should, there are strategic reasons to care about democratic legitimacy. So I think it really matters whether you're talking about norms for theory construction versus norms for policy construction.

And I think slippage between these two different projects is often sort of a problem when people are talking about the norms they have in mind, because norms that might seem okay when it comes to theory development don't seem so good when it comes to, I think, policy prescriptions.

Leah: I feel like maybe part of the reasons that bioethics really struggles with sort of what is the appropriate role of representation is because oftentimes bioethics are sort of operating at the nexus of those two things, right? So if you design a research prioritization process, partly it's like theoretically, what should we be trying to achieve via research?

There are some answers about what objectively the better projects are but then partly it's policy making, right? You're actually setting an agenda that's going to determine how research resources are allocated. And so then you're kind of simultaneously trying to answer these two different questions of like who should we include for epistemic reasons for our theory building and who should we include for democratic reasons for our policy making. But the answer to those questions might be different, but you have one process that needs to answer both of them.

Rachel: Oh, for sure. I think that's really illuminating because it's like, there are certain kinds of contexts in which it's very clear, this is a theory space, you know, and then there are contexts where it's really clear, this is a policy space, but there are, of course, a bunch of contexts where it's kind of much blurrier and considerations from both are mixed together in ways that you might just not be able to unpick, right?

And then it's just going to be really difficult to figure out, like, well, what are the most relevant considerations in this context? Should we be weighting our theoretical goals or our policy goals more heavily? There might be no sort of obvious way to answer that question.

Sophie: So within bioethics there are lots of different methods for democratizing decisions. For instance, researchers interested in consulting patients might look to representatives from patient advocacy groups, they might hold focus groups with different patients, or they might directly survey a broader group of patients. What does standpoint theory imply, if anything, about the methods by which we should gain access to the knowledge that different people have by virtue of their social position?

Rachel: This is a great question. I think in some sense I don't really know enough about the nitty gritty of bioethics to give a particularly informative answer to this, but I'll have a go.

So here is a distinction between different ways you might try to get information from someone. So often when you're, I don't know, gonna see a doctor or something, they'll ask for information and they'll give you a drop-down menu. You'll be asked what your symptoms are, for example. And you'll just be given a list of symptoms and asked to tick yes or no.

Here's a different way you could kind of try and elicit information about symptoms. You could ask someone in an open-ended way, like, "What have your symptoms been?" Ask them to give you a narrative. And these might elicit very different answers. Broadly speaking, the conceptual schemes that people will appeal to when they are delivering a personal narrative will be different from the conceptual schemes that are sort of on display, as it were, in a dropdown menu.

So I think one thing that a lot of standpoint epistemologists would like and sort of broadly be sympathetic to is this idea that you shouldn't have a model where a clinician or someone decides what is the relevant information, what are the relevant categories, and then sort of just asks the patient to fill them in. But rather, the patient's own personal narrative is driving the process of inquiry more. This is a little rough, but broadly speaking, that might be a difference that standpoint epistemologists think is important and they might think that there are reasons, ceteris paribus, to favor the personal narrative informational extraction procedure rather than the sort of drop-down menu informational extraction procedure.

I mean, equally, I think, it's really complicated because there are certain kinds of contexts in which being confronted with a dropdown menu is something that is suppressing your epistemic agency. It's preventing you from being able to sort of get across what's important to you. But there are cases in which being confronted with these structured options hugely increases your epistemic agency.

Maybe a good example is going to see a therapist. Like, a good therapist will ask you open-ended questions, but they will also impose a certain kind of structure. They won't just be like, "So tell me, how have things been?" Right? They'll ask questions that let you know what kinds of information are helpful for them. And that's a way in which they can scaffold your epistemic agency.

So things are really delicate. I think it's more helpful to think about things in terms of what sorts of procedures scaffold epistemic agency and what sorts undermine it. And sometimes an invitation for a kind of unstructured narrative can be the most appropriate way of facilitating epistemic agency. But sometimes that can actually just leave them unable to navigate the situation effectively because they don't know what they should be focusing on in their narrative, that kind of thing.

Sophie: Yeah, that makes sense. So earlier we distinguished between propositional knowledge, knowledge that a fact is true, and a bunch of other kinds of knowledge, including qualitative knowledge, knowledge of what something is like.

In discussions of deference, there often seems to be slippage between these two notions. So people will say, for example, cis men shouldn't express opinions about whether abortion should be legal because they don't know what it's like to be pregnant. The idea there seems to be something like, even if someone has vast propositional knowledge about abortion, about the effects of legalizing it, about the ethical arguments for and against it, it still might be appropriate for them to defer about abortion to those who have relevant qualitative knowledge.

In your view, how big a role does qualitative knowledge need to play in practical decision making or policy making?

Rachel: So, I am very hostile to the idea that qualitative knowledge has any important role to play in policymaking. So I mean, the pregnancy example is kind of instructive. So, you know, lots of cis women don't know what it's like to be pregnant. I don't know what it's like to be pregnant. I've never been pregnant, but I take it that most standpoint epistemologists would regard it as an absurd conclusion that I should not be opinionated within public discourse about whether abortion should be legal, say.

So, yeah, I think appeals to qualitative experience very quickly get you into trouble. There are lots of unpleasant experiences that I thankfully have not had. But, the fact that I can't know what they're like doesn't make me uncertain about whether they were bad or unpleasant. I'm certain that they were very bad and very unpleasant.

I don't need any kind of fine-grained qualitative knowledge to make that call, and I think that from a certain kind of moral perspective, the fact that they were really bad or really unpleasant is enough for the project of policymaking.

Sophie: I do wonder if what's going on is that people are slipping between claims about knowledge and about maybe motivation. So perhaps you don't need to actually experience in order to know things about it, but you do need to experience it in order to actually be motivated to do something about it. So maybe when people say experience is necessary for having relevant knowledge, they're really using claims about knowledge as a way of getting at claims about motivation.

Rachel: I think that's pretty plausible. Here's a different way maybe of thinking about the question. Very often what is really at issue in these contexts is a question of authority, a question of political authority. Like, who should get to talk about this? And this can come apart from knowledge.

So here's an example. Suppose that I go to a colleague's house, and he offers me a glass of wine. He says, "Rachel, would you like a glass of wine?" And my husband says, "No, Rachel wouldn't like a glass of wine." This is clearly monstrously inappropriate and disrespectful. And a natural way for me to respond might be for me to say "What? Tishore, you don't know whether I want a glass of wine or not."

And he might respond, "Of course I do! You hate wine! You never want wine. I know perfectly well what the answer to the question is." And I might be like, "Okay. Well, you still shouldn't have answered on my behalf." Right? So here, what's really at base a claim about authority—I get to answer the question about whether I want wine—this claim about authority is initially made as a claim about knowledge, the idea that I am the one who knows whether I want wine.

And then of course I can say perfectly reasonably, "Actually, we're in exactly the same epistemic situation, we both know perfectly well that I don't want wine." But then I can say, "Well that's actually not relevant. Whether you knew isn't what mattered. The point is, even if you knew, you lack the standing to answer on my behalf."

So we think that very often, what people are really interested in is they're interested in claims about standing. My sense is that that kind of question of standing is actually central to a lot of these debates. But people are articulating claims about standing via claims about knowledge because they're often pretty good proxies for each other. But there are certain kinds of contexts in which they can come apart.

Leah: All right. So we like to close by asking our guests, what is one rule or norm broadly related to what we've been talking about today that you would change if you could and why?

Rachel: This is a great question. I think that in academic contexts, when people are thinking about socio-epistemic systems, when people are thinking about the way knowledge circulates within the social world, they do tend to think about things in quite an individualistic way that often reaches for explanations that have to do with the epistemic virtues of some and the epistemic vices of others.

And I would like it if this default tendency were replaced with more of a default tendency to look at the structure of epistemic networks, rather than the epistemic character of individuals.

So there are definite ways in which standpoint theoretic ideas have been developed in recent years that are very tied to a sort of virtue theoretic epistemology. So, you know, people say dogmatism is an epistemic vice, and being open-minded is an epistemic virtue.

And dominant groups in society are going to develop the vice of dogmatism, closed-mindedness, whereas oppressed groups will develop the virtue of open-mindedness. And that's how we make sense of standpoint theoretical claims, right? Social positions develop epistemic virtues or vices, and then you can explain the greater insight of the oppressed in terms of the virtues that they have developed.

That's obviously a fairly sort of broad-brush, low-resolution picture, but it's a kind of theoretical starting point that what we need to look at is the character traits of the people in the groups, and that's going to be the explanatorily relevant thing. And I'm just very skeptical that this is a sensible theoretical default.

Leah: Yeah, that's great. So that brings us to the end of our time. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Rachel.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me and for asking such great questions.

Sophie: Bio(un)ethical is written and edited by me, Sophie Gibert, and Leah Pearson, with production by audiolift.co. If you want to support the show, please subscribe, rate, and review it wherever you get your podcasts and recommend it to a friend.

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