Just what is feminist epistemology, anyway?! I’ve read a few accounts and it seems to boil down to, “Well, we’re women, so we know. Hmmph!” That can’t be it, can it? Can anyone give a lucid and clear accound of what it really is?
It might be the new name for “woman’s intuition”.
It’s just the idea that women have a different way of knowing then men. It isn’t stating that everything men have deduced is wrong, just that there is a completely different way to think about things.
I’ve never heard the phrase until this thread. I know what the two words mean individually, but not entirely what it stands for put together. Any links?
For a skeptical view of FE, see Gross and Levit’s Higher Supersitions. I think Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsensehas some commentary as well, but I don’t have it handy.
It is sexist garbage, and a tired relic from over thirty years ago. And yes, it does add up to little more then “woman’s intuition”. There is only Rationality and logic, or mystical insight. There are no other ways to think, about, and in this world.
Or any other.
I don’t think it is sexist garbage at all. It is a way of looking at how we perceive things from a specific viewpoint. It is not an abandonment of rationality.
You should check that link. Of course, it might be that Stanford is to wishy-washy for ya
It can be, (in a positive sense,) if you like to play esoteric word games.
The idea of a “masculine consciousness” and a “feminine consciousness” is very old indeed. (The philosophy of the hermetics in the 14th century was largely concerned with reconciling or integreting these two modes of perception within the individual.)
When I was a callow youth, I was quite convinced that the only differences between the sexes were physical, that consciousness was asexual, and that the perceived differences were all a result of enculturation. Not so at all. It has been demonstrated to me repeatedly that there are profound differences in even the most basic perceptual processes between men & women. One brief example: When one object, which has previously been in plain sight, is removed from a room, it seems to be quite obviously missing to female perception immediately. Men tend not to notice it until they have some need of the missing object, at which point they are surprised to find it gone. It’s as though men build a model of their environment in their heads, and navigate through that, while women are more aware of their immediate surroundings. Possibly this is related to men’s tendency to do better at map-reading, and also their stereotypical sloppiness.
This is not to say that both modes of consciousness are not accessible to both men and women, only that there seems to be a “default mode” associated with sex.
Even people who are intimately aware of the differences between masculine & feminine consciousness have difficulty seeing the world without one gloss or the other-- I’m sure “Karla Jung” would have formulated quite a different interpretation of the struggle between anima and animus.
Perceptual psychology is, of course, comfortably apolitical. Things get a bit stickier when you bring the influence of privilege into the argument.
PATRIARCAL CAPITALIST OPPRESOR PIG!!!
This is a far cry from demonizing men.
Of course, if you atutomatically equate feminism with male-bashing then this expostion from Stanford’s site won’t help you either.
I’ve only seen it dealt with in The Flight From Science and Reason ed. Gross, Levitt, & Lewis. Never thought to search Google…
Non-rhetorical question: how does the statistical distribution for these differences look? Is there only a slight difference in averages, or a large one? Is there a lot of individual variation between these modes among each gender, or only a little?
More to the point, what does “consciousness”, feminine or masculine, have to do with epistemology? I thought epistemology was the question of “how do we know what we know?” Hence, science would say that we submit our feminine/masculine consciousness to empirical study, check for logical consistency, etc. Astrology would have that we check the stars. Etc.
Not an attack, just curious.
Feminist epistemology has been an excuse for a lot of truly sloppy social science.
Take Carol Gilligan.
First she delved into the voices of girls, and found that their “voices” were being uniquely surpressed (though she didn’t study or contrast them to boys, and her concept of “voice” is not only vague, but lacking in any justification of the instrumental validity of the tools she used to measure it): so of course it must be patriarchy ruining women.
Then, recently, she turned to boys and found that they were even WORSE off in many respects. Since it was proven to be patriarchy in the case of the girls, instead of contradicting her previous assertions, she instead concluded that this effect must be patriarchy at work again, even more sinister and devious!
Never occured to her that maybe what was surpressing the true “voices” of her subjects was her own overbearing and demanding probing for her preconcieved conclusions. Or maybe that feeling unsure of oneself is just a natural part of adolescence. Or maybe non-randomly selected (and CERTAINLY non-representative) samples tell us very little about adolescents as a whole. Bah.
We’d know more, except she refuses to fully publish her research, aside from anecdotes. You see, it’s a very special way of looking at things. It’s personal and intuitive. You wouldn’t understand.
It is (with rare and silly exceptions) NOT an assertion that women have a “different way of knowing” things than men do.
It is a critique of epistemological theories posed by feminist theorists whose sociological and political theories were first trashed by academic men on epistemological grounds. Prior to that, feminists had no particular reason to give a shit about epistemology.
Please read my paper on the subject, which originated from that very argument between me and the Sociology Department at SUNY / Stony Brook in 1989.
And give Carol Gilligan at least half a break. Her first paper on the “In a Different Voice” topic was a very incisive and dead-on critique of Kahlberg. With ten zillion essentialist-feminists applauding her and egging her on, she expanded it into the book of the same name (different subtitle) which does come a lot closer to saying that “women have a different but equally authentic way of evaluating moral priorities”, but if you read carefully she doesn’t say that, she simply (foolishly) left a lot more room for the essentialists to say it on her behalf.
Stupid missing commas. Make that:
Muad’Dib, you are not to post further in this thread. For any reason.
In addition, you will clean up your act or you will find yourself a former member of this message board.
Somehow I just knew you were going to say that…
are the things women know different from that which men know
i always thought women made observations which equally a man could make but in a different way of expression and so we had the tension between the sexes, the argument and the inevitable reconciliation of agreement.
mrcrow, are you saying that you think that it is a matter of word choice?
AHunter3, I have read a portion of your paper and find it very stimulating. I have bookmarked it for further reading. Thanks!
Have you read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess?