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Miranda Fricker - Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
Miranda Fricker - Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
To cite this article: MIRANDA FRICKER (1999) Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic
Privilege, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29:sup1, 191-210
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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Supplementary Volume 25
MIRANDA FRICKER
[T)he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes - pur-
poses that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees
inimical to our development and even existence. 1
We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of op-
pression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there
is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the
world is "structured" by the powerful to the detriment of the power-
less, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not
been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The
word 'structured' may be read materially, so as to imply that social
institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as
to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for
present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading,
which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage
in "structuring" our understandings of the social world. I will try to
present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope
thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a
kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically
oppressed.
If the possibility of epistemic oppression does not register much in
mainstream theory of knowledge, it registers loud and clear in femi-
1 N. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO:
'Westview Press, 1998), 241.
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Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
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groups is in a position to see social reality for what it is. The correct view
of social reality' is made peculiarly available only from the proletarian
standpoint: "The self-understanding of the proletariat is ... simultane-
ously the objective understanding of the nature of society."5
What, then, is a standpoint? First, it is not itself a social positioning,
such as the position of the proletariat under capitalism, or the position
of women under patriarchy. Rather, a standpoint is something that is
made available from the relevant social positioning. Second, it is not
itself a view of the world, nor any property of a view, such as the per-
spective it is in, or the bias or interest which it displays. Rather it is a
point of view - an epistemic orientation, as it were - which procures
a view (with a particular perspective, etc.) of the social world. A stand-
point is the epistemic counterpart of a particular form of "engagement"
with the world. The standpoint of the proletariat is the epistemic coun-
terpart of proletarian wage labour, and the feminist standpoint is the
counterpart of women's (waged or unwaged) labour. Hartsock char-
acterizes women's labour in the following way:
Women's labor, like that of the male worker, is contact with material necessity.
Their contribution to subsistence, like that of the male worker, involves them
in a world in which the relation to nature and to concrete human requirements
is central, both in the form of interaction with natural substances whose qual-
ity, rather than quantity, is important to the production of meals, clothing, etc.,
and in the form of close attention to the natural changes in these substances. 6
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Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
Next she highlights certain features of women's labour that are seen
to distinguish it from male proletarian labour: the "double shift" of
paid work followed by unpaid domestic labour; the larger proportion
of time devoted to producing "use-values" rather than commodities;
and the particular nature of the repetitiousness of women's work where
not only does she repeatedly make the meals, as if on a production
line, but she also repeatedly dears up after their production (and con-
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Since the husband is the productive worker, he is the one who goes beyond
family interest to that of society, opening up a future for himself through co-
operation in the building of the collective future; he incarnates transcendence.
Woman is doomed to the continuation of the species and the care of the home
-that is to say, to immanence?
7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Picador,
1953),449.
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from that social positioning. That view has rather to be struggled for
against the current of a corrupting ideology. Just as proletarians' ac-
tual views may be distorted by capitalist ideology, so may women's
actual views be distorted by patriarchal ideology - or by gender ide-
ology, which notion is perhaps the more relevant these days. 8 The mis-
match between the ideal and the actual views held by members of
oppressed groups is explained in each case by the notion of false con-
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[T)he standpoint of women is not discovered by surveying the beliefs and atti-
tudes of women under conditions of male dominance, just as the standpoint of
the proletariat is not discovered by surveying the beliefs and attitudes of work-
ers under capitalism. The standpoint of women is that perspective which re-
veals women's true interests and this standpoint is reached only through
scientific and political struggle.9
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Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
10 For an argument questioning the degree of the fidelity, see Bat-Ami Bar On,
'Marginality and Epistemic Privilege,' in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. L. Alcoff
and E. Potter (New York/London: Routledge, 1993).
11 Hartsock, 'The Feminist Standpoint,' 290.
12 In the original paper Hartsock does sound a cautionary note about the issue:
"In addressing the institutionalized division of labour, I propose to lay aside
the important differences among women across race and class boundaries and
instead search for central commonalities ... Still, I adopt this strategy with some
reluctance, since it contains the danger of making invisible the experience of
lesbians or women of color" ('The Feminist Standpoint,' 290). But a cautionary
note cannot dispel the difficulty.
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The place of women ... is where the work is done to facilitate man's occupation
of the conceptual mode of action. Women keep house, bear and care for chil-
dren, look after him when he is sick, and in general provide for the logistics of
his bodily existence.... Women work in and around the professional manage-
rial scene in analogous ways ... They do the clerical work, giving material form
to the words or thoughts of the boss. They do the routine computer work, the
interviewing for the survey, the nursing, the secretarial work. At almost every
point women mediate for men the relation between the conceptual mode of
action and the actual concrete forms on which it depends. 15
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Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
Admittedly, this picture of women's lives may still be all too familiar.
But shared domestic labour between men and women has increased,
even if the bulk still falls to women in the notorious "double shift."
Future progress will involve a continued movement away from a uni-
formity of activities among women, paid and unpaid. Consequently,
even if there were currently enough uniformity in women's labour so
as to make available a distinctive feminist standpoint, no feminist
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Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
20 See, for instance, C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers
2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); P. Winch, The Idea of a Social
Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1990); and J. Searle,
The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995). Searle's account
is perhaps more properly categorized as a species of conventionalism than a
hermeneutical view, but I use 'hermeneutical' in the broadest possible sense to
capture the basic idea that social facts are dependent upon some human practice
of meaning. The differences between approaches within this broad category
are not of present concern. For a discussion of the different approaches, see F.
Collin, Social Reality (London/New York: Routledge, 1997).
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Our extant practice- the meanings we actually make use of- is also
a site of potential meanings, any of which we may come to actualize
in practice as we are prompted to by the facts. 22
The possibility of this sort of conceptual innovation raises a politi-
cal question: whose outlooks, and whose interests, are served by the
set of existing concepts? With the possibility of such a question, we
confront the disunity of the "we" who agree in form of life. If the dif-
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22 There is, of course, more to be said on this subject, but this is not the place to
try to say it.
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V Conclusion
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The hallmark of reality ... is that it looks different to those differently placed in
it; consequently realism requires an epistemology of largesse: the problem for
knowledge is the problem of partiality not in the sense of bias but in the sense
of incompleteness. 24
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