Situated Knowledge, Purity, and Moral Panic

Rebecca Kukla
In this chapter I will argue that great deal of contemporary epistemology is driven by a kind
of a moral panic1 over the worry that there are no ‘pure’ epistemic practices, perspectives, or
standards detachable from the social situation of knowers. Epistemology is currently caught
in a dialectic: From various quarters, different strands of social epistemology aim to show in
different ways that various traditional epistemological notions – including objectivity,
justification, warrant, and knowledge – are in fact ineliminably situated. Meanwhile, a host of
purists attempt to fend off each encroachment of situatedness, and to mark off a space of
epistemic purity. They do so by, on the one hand, carving out an ever-smaller and ever-
more-elaborately-defined space, within which values, identities, contexts, and social
dependencies purportedly do not tread; and, on the other hand, warning of the dire threats
to the possibility of knowledge and rationality that we face if we don’t fend off these
incursions.

I believe that epistemic practices are ineliminably situated in multiple ways, and that this is
not to be feared. We cannot do epistemology without fundamental, central attention to
social identities, power relations, and the social institutions and structures within which
epistemic practices happen. But I also think that this result is of no threat to our usable
notions of objectivity, justification, and the like. Indeed I will argue that most of the claims
made by defenders of situated knowledge are not only true but commonsensically and obviously
true, although they have often been presented as more radical and counterintuitive than they
actually are. The dialectic I described above is driven by fear, not intellectual tension. The
quest for purity is pointless, and our goal should not be to counter each tactical attempt to
protect it with elaborate counterarguments, but rather to recognize the fear as a product of
ideology, and to become comfortable with situatedness as an everyday phenomenon.

My primary goal here is not to hash out the details of various positions, but rather to explore
the rhetorical metanarrative I just described. I will end the paper by arguing that a proper
naturalized, non-ideal epistemology – one more continuous with the empirical sciences – will treat
situatedness not as something spooky or epistemologically threatening but just as an
empirical fact about our epistemic practices. For epistemic practices are, after all, natural
practices performed by finite beings; they are part of the material world just like everything
else.

The Quest for Certainty: A Cautionary Tale

I begin with a historical analogy. For centuries, philosophers obsessed over certainty. It
seemed obvious that unless they could find a domain of absolutely unshakeable knowledge,
all our epistemic practices would be hopelessly insecure and unmoored. Hence the central

                                                        
1The term ‘moral panic’ is generally attributed to Stanley Cohen, from his classic 1973 work, Folk
Devils and Moral Panics (Routledge). A moral panic is a broadly distributed social phenomenon,
wherein a specific source of purported risk comes to be seen as a severe threat to our basic social
order and security. Moral panics are characterized by simplistic causal stories, risk distortion, and a
moralistic, characterological condemnations of groups.

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project was to find risk-free, error-proof standards of knowledge. Kant’s response to these
assaults on certainty was to focus on discovering the boundaries within which knowledge
could be secure, and to carefully remain within those boundaries. Beyond them lay chaos
and within them lay purity and safety. Kant argues that we should use no methods or
principles that cross those boundaries, as tempting as it will always be to venture beyond
them:

We have now not only traveled through the land of pure understanding, and
carefully inspected each part of it, but we have also surveyed it, and determined the
place for each thing in it. This land, however, is an island, and enclosed in unalterable
boundaries by nature itself. It is the land of truth (a charming name) surrounded by a
broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly
melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and, ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes
the voyager looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from
which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end. … [We must
remember] by what title we occupy even this land, and can hold it securely against all
hostile claims. (Critique of Pure Reason B294-5)

Kant here describes the project of critical epistemology as a project rooted in anxiety and the
need for homeland security. Hegel makes this fear of error the centerpiece of his critique of
Kant. He argues that Kant presents his critical project as a neutral exercise in maximal rigor
– one that assumes nothing about which methods are epistemologically safe – whereas in
fact it is driven by pathological risk aversion.

It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper
subject matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to
an understanding about cognition … A certain uneasiness seems justified, partly
because there are different types of cognition, and one of them might be more
appropriate than another for the attainment of this goal, so that we make a bad
choice of means; and partly because cognition is a faculty of definite kind and scope,
and thus, without a more precise definition of its nature and limits, we might grasp
clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth. (Phenomenology of Spirit Par. 73)

Hegel argues that the Kantian fear of error and insecurity reduces epistemological practice to
boundary policing and method-checking, with no space left for building positive knowledge.
He claims that the critical method is not only unproductive and grounded in neurosis; it is
also question-begging. In its claim to neutrally and rigorously trust no methods without
critical examination, it presupposes that the fear-based, boundary policing method itself
needs no examination. In Hegel’s view, this is just one more method that is fallible and open
to critique like any other, and furthermore it is one that prevents us obtaining knowledge,
since doing so requires that we accept epistemic risk:

If fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such
scruples gets on with the work itself and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see
why we should not turn around and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be
concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? Indeed this fear
takes something - a great deal in fact - for granted as truth, supporting its scruples
and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it is true... [This is]

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 an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of
the truth. (Phenomenology of Spirit Par. 74)

Eventually Hegel argues that is in fact mistakes that are the engine of epistemic progress, so
a risk-free approach will lead us to a dead end. Thus Kantian risk aversion is self-defeating.

Hegel did not end the obsession with infallibility and fear of error in epistemology;
Nietzsche and others continued the critique. But this dialectic was not won by way of
definitive arguments. Eventually, we just kind of got over the fear. There are still infalliblists,
of course, but they are a somewhat peculiar minority. Most of the major debates in
epistemology now just take it for granted that knowledge is generally fallible. Epistemology
stopped worrying about certainty and moved on, taking risky epistemic practices as its
assumed topic. Currently vibrant debates in epistemology over the status of epistemic
intuitions, over lottery problems, the metaphysics of probabilistic knowledge, defeaters, and
so forth, all take falliblism for granted without exhibiting undue stress.

I claim that our fear of situatedness is closely analogous to our former fear of error, albeit more
politically charged. Our obsession with carving out a safe domain of aperspectival, value-fee
knowledge is a different kind of critical epistemology focused on boundary policing, and it is
similarly a neurosis that we need to just overcome rather than continuing to try to beat it
down with arguments. Situatedness does not undermine the point of our epistemic practices
any more than did fallibility. And our reasons for insisting on carving out a safe domain of
this sort are analogously question-begging. We need to just get on with the project of doing
epistemology, under the assumption that it will matter who is doing the knowing, with what
interests and investments, and from what social position.

Three Types of Situatedness

There is a dizzying array of strands of contemporary epistemology that push against the
possibility of pure, unsituated knowledge. These can be divided into three categories, which I
will consider in turn. One set of arguments aims to establish the social dependence of
knowledge; these arguments purport to show that knowledge is not merely a product of
disciplined individual rationality, but of good-quality social organization and social epistemic
luck. A second set of arguments is designed to reveal the ineliminable value-laden character of
our epistemic standards and practices; according to such arguments, there are no objective
epistemic standards and methods that don’t embed personal and social values and interests.
A third set of arguments is directed at showing the essentially perspectival nature of our
epistemic notions such as justification and warrant; these aim to show that who an epistemic
agent is and how she is socially positioned irreducibly help constitute her access to evidence,
justifications, and knowledge.

Social Dependence and Epistemic Ecology

According to this set of arguments, a great deal of our knowledge is based on our having the
right sorts of connections to others, and being located properly within an effective
organizational system. For instance, much of science is massively co-authored and
multidisciplinary at this point. Individual scientists are not in a position to understand or

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track the contributions of all of their collaborators, who often have very different skillsets
and expertise and between whom contact may be minimal (Huebner, Kukla, and Winsberg
2017, Kukla 2012, Goodchild 2006, Yong 2017). In turn, consumers of scientific results
must trust the organizational and institutional system within which the results were
produced, rather than particular individuals or their own reconstructions of the work. One
strand of philosophy of science and social epistemology focuses on understanding teams or
communities as the loci and agents of knowledge, rather than individuals (Galison 2003,
Tollefsen 2007, Wray 2006, Wray 2007).

At the same time, we consume more and more of our information from online sources
generated by unknown others. We each live in an online ‘filter bubble’, as the results of our
searches and the feeds on our social media pages are algorithmically tailored to show us
information and interpretations to which we will be receptive, and this has epistemic
consequences (Miller and Record 2013, Lynch 2016, Nguyen forthcoming). Sorting out what
to believe is not just a matter of exercising good judgment; to some extent our access to
evidence is out of our control and a matter of epistemic luck.

One might think that these are contingent features of contemporary science and technology,
rather than deep challenges to our epistemic self-sufficiency, and hence that they don’t
undermine the possibility of pure epistemic practices unsullied by social dependencies. But
first, this isn’t a very useful form of purity, given that many of the things we care about
knowing we can know only in these ways. Second, the radical dependencies involved in
scientific knowledge and online knowledge are arguably only vivid intensifications of an
inevitable kind of mundane epistemic dependency on other people and on social
organizations. To repurpose an example from John Haugeland (1997), when I say that I
know how to get from Washington DC to New York, say, I mean that I know how to
marshal the knowledge of the road makers, or the track layers, along with the train engineers,
or the traffic light designers, and so forth. Almost all my abilities to cope with the world and
to interpret information involve my dependence on the epistemic skills and contributions of
others. Two people with equal reasoning and perceptual skills can know very different things
depending on their social luck and positioning.

All these arguments point to the view that having good quality knowledge can’t be reduced
to a matter of individual epistemic self-discipline – it also requires being fortuitously
positioned within what we might think of as an epistemic ecology, in which people have
complementary and situationally appropriate expertise, are trustworthy, are collaborating in
the right way, and are embedded in an infrastructure and organization conducive to accuracy,
in which information flows appropriately. This is true both in the formal epistemic domain
of science and the informal domain of everyday epistemic competence.

Values and Interests in Justification

Lively conversations in epistemology and in philosophy of science have converged on the

idea that standards of justification (or sometimes of knowledge, warrant, or hypothesis
acceptance) are ineliminably shaped by interests and values; accordingly, there are no such
things as ‘pure’ canons of rationality and inference, which are legitimate independently of the
normative situation of the epistemic agent.

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In epistemology, pragmatic encroachment theorists and contextualists have argued that
whether an agent has (fallible) empirical knowledge depends on more than the evidence
available to her; it also depends on her stakes in being right. The two groups locate the
essential role of interests or values in slightly different places, but both agree that there is
generally no answer to whether a maximally rational person with access to a body of
evidence for P knows that P, independent of how much it matters to her that she be right
that P (DeRose 1992, Fantl and McGrath 2009, Hawthorn and Stanley 2008, Jenkins 2017).
The general form of the argument is that higher the stake someone has in a proposition
being true, the higher the justification bar will be for knowledge of that proposition.

So for example, the theory goes, on an average day I may count as knowing that today, as
per usual, there is a 4:00 pm Acela Express train leaving New York for Washington, just
because I have the weekly schedule memorized. But if it suddenly becomes crucial that I
make it to Washington today before 8:00 pm – say, because my son has life-threatening
surgery scheduled in Washington at that time – then I will need better evidence than my
general knowledge of the schedule in order to count as having knowledge. In this
circumstance, I no longer know that this is when the train is going, and I will need to check
online or ask the station manager or take other steps in order to have this knowledge. The
point is that our empirical epistemic standards (of justification, knowledge, etc.) are indelibly
infected by values and interests that vary from knower to knower.2 Another passenger’s
identical memory of the weekly schedule may count as knowledge for her, even while I don’t
count as knowing, because justification is interest-relative. The more it matters to me that I
be right, and correspondingly the worse it would be for me if I were wrong, the higher the
evidence bar for knowledge will be. Thus which beliefs count as knowledge is sensitive to
the practical environment. There are no perspective-free standards of evidence.

A parallel discussion in philosophy of science concerns ‘inductive risk.’ According to the

inductive risk theorist, the puzzle runs this way: Inferences from evidence to hypothesis
acceptance or non-acceptance are always uncertain, and hence any inference comes along
with a specific sort of risk - that is, the risk of a false positive (accepting a hypothesis that is
actually false), which goes up as our evidence bar goes down, and the risk of a false negative
(failing to accept a hypothesis that is actually true), which goes up as our evidence bar goes
up. No evidence bar can ever be the ‘safe’ choice, because the risk of false negatives and
false positives are constitutively inversely correlated.3 Hence the only thing that can settle
where our evidence bar should be is the badness of various kinds of mistakes. This in turn
can only be settled with reference to values and interests. So for instance, if mosquito netting
has the prospect of saving millions from malaria at low cost and with no physical risk, the
risk of a false negative outweighs the risk of a false positive, and our evidence bar for its
effectiveness should be relatively low. If a new drug for an already treatable condition risks
serious or even life-threatening side effects, and promises only modest benefits over the
current treatment, the evidence bar should be very high; our primary concern should be to

                                                        
2 Again, I fully realize that there are technical differences between pragmatic encroachment theorists,
contextualists, etc. For my purposes, these differences don’t matter. Indeed, as will become clear
below, the very fact that there are these subtle differences in formulation is a symptom of the
dialectic that I am arguing we need to overcome.
3 See Rudner 1953 and Hempel 1965 for classic formulations of the puzzle.

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avoid false positives. Inductive risk theorists conclude that the standards for hypothesis
acceptance depend ineliminably on the values and interests of the epistemic agent.

Furthermore, Heather Douglas (2000, 2009) and others (Steel 2010, Wilholt 2009, Wilholt
2013, Winsberg 2012, Biddle and Kukla 2017) have argued that such interest-dependent
judgments occur throughout the research process. How data are classified and coded, which
sorts of screening tests are used, which methods are employed in smoothing and correcting
data, and indefinitely many other judgments involve this type of inductive risk balancing. For
example, whether researchers classify slides of rat tumors as benign or malignant turns out to
depend, to a very large degree, on the goal of the study and their stake in the outcome;
pathologists in industry-funded studies overwhelmingly set the interpretive bar much higher
for seeing a malignancy in the same slides than do pathologists in government funded studies
(Douglas 2000). In such situations, there is no value-free notion of a correct choice of
distribution of inductive risks, since any choice will involve trade-offs. Likewise there is no
value-free notion of “the correct epistemic standard.” We cannot section off the purely
epistemic from other social and personal values and interests in scientific inference.

The pragmatic encroachment theorists focus on individuals and when their beliefs count as
knowledge; they want to know how values infect traditional epistemic concepts like
‘justification.’ The inductive risk literature rarely uses the term ‘knowledge.’ Its focus is not
on the belief states of researchers, but on the act of accepting a hypothesis, which has
psychological components but also behavioral, social, and institutional components. The
inductive risk theorists ask practical coordination questions, such as: How does the infection
of scientific inference with values affect our collective ability to trust and use scientific claims
made by others? How can we regulate science so that role of values is not distorting or
problematic, since we cannot eliminate that role? But the general focus in both literatures is
on the infection or corruption of ‘pure’ standards of rationality by socially variant interests.
As Boaz Miller puts it, “The bottom line [in both literatures] is that when research outcomes
finally reach the context of application, they are already saturated with social value
judgments, and reflect the various trade-offs between values that were made in the process
of inquiry leading to them. Moreover, the indirect influence of social values is not a
necessary evil that must be tolerated. Rather, it is necessary for achieving scientific objectivity
because only it offers a non-arbitrary, principled, and relevant way” (Miller 2014, 261).

The Standpoint Dependence of Evidence and Justification

“Standpoint theory” (or “standpoint epistemology”) began as a sub-discussion within

feminist epistemology in the 70s and 80s (Smith 1974, Hartsock 1983, Harding 1986,
Harding 1992) and has grown to become a major approach within social epistemology. It has
kept its feminist roots, but expanded into a more general set of questions and approaches
concerning the difference that social identity and position make to our epistemic agency – to
what evidence is available to us, to how we can legitimately use that evidence in inference,
and to what we can know. Standpoint theory has no single definition and its contours are
hotly contested. But, roughly following Kristen Intemann (2010), I define it as characterized
by two theses:

i. Social location systematically influences our experiences, and shapes what we

can know; knowledge is always (or often) achieved from a standpoint.

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 ii. Marginalized standpoints provide epistemic advantages in at least some
contexts.

These two theses together lead to a third cornerstone of standpoint theory:

iii. ‘Aperspectival’ knowledge is a mythical ideal, and good-quality reflection on

our epistemic practices and justifications requires critical attention to who is
doing the epistemic work, and from what social location.

This critical attention to the identity of the knower, rather than just to the methods and
standards they use to know, is what Sandra Harding calls “strong objectivity.”4 The search
for strong objectivity requires examination of the structured standpoints from which various
people engage in epistemic practices, including the strengths and the limitations of those
standpoints. But it also requires attention to the organizational features of knowledge
production, which will include or exclude the voices of those with standpoints that are
especially helpful. That is, the standpoint epistemologist worries not just about how well-
positioned individuals are, on their own, to know various things, but also about how to
organize institutions so as to enhance the production of good-quality, objective knowledge
by bringing in the right people in the right ways, in the right relations to one another. This
means that our epistemic practices are doubly ‘sullied’ by ineliminably social factors: No
individual is a ‘pure’ aperspectival knower, and furthermore, we cannot do critical
epistemology except by looking at social formations and organizations larger than individuals
(Longino 1990, Solomon 2001, Biddle 2007).

Why should we believe theses (i) and (ii)? My goal here is not to launch a new or
comprehensive defense of them. Rather, I would like to suggest that they are in fact
commonsensically, mundanely true. There is nothing surprising or spooky about them. This
doesn’t mean that there is no room for philosophers to poke holes in them. Instead, my
claim is that they are commonsensical enough that the philosophical tendency to see them as
radical claims in need of vigorous attack or defense is a product of ideology and moral panic
rather than of rational concern. Let’s consider some examples. Remember that the point of
the examples is to be mundane rather than philosophically quirky or dramatic.

(1) If I want to overhaul a space – a public building, perhaps - to make it as accessible as

possible, trying to think abstractly about possible barriers is going to be dramatically
more difficult than bringing in people with disabilities. Living in a body that is often
misfit with and obstructed by the space around it gives one concrete, objective,
thick-bandwidth knowledge. Asking for input from or collaborating with disabled
people is clearly an epistemically efficient choice in this scenario. Trying to figure out
how to make a space accessible without their input is likely to be clumsy and partial.
People with mobility impairments don’t just have access to more facts about
accessibility (though this may be true as well) – they have access to different, more

                                                        
4Harding’s strong objectivity is structurally analogous to Kant’s critical epistemology, which requires
us to analytically examine the structure of the knower in order to judge the security of the knowledge.
The difference, of course, is that Kant explicitly argues that there are necessary and universal features
of knowers that are not socially variant (the categories and the forms of intuition).

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 flexible, more visceral, more immediate evidence than others can have. They can
directly perceive barriers, openings, spaces, and so forth in different ways.5

(2) Women are more likely to see sexism than men; people of color are more likely to
see racism than white people; trans folks are more likely to see transphobia than cis
folks. Why? Well, first of all, bigoted and discriminatory acts are more likely to
happen around them, precisely because they are there! But also, since in most (but
not all) contexts, bigotry is socially unacceptable, bigots are likely to hide their
discriminatory views and behaviors from their ingroup. It is not accidental, nor a
matter of ‘hypersensitivity’ or ‘paranoia’, that members of stigmatized groups have
more and more detailed evidence concerning the bigotry that’s out there than do
members of dominant groups.6

(3) Living in the midst of a dense, diverse urban area inculcates a distinctive set of
epistemic skills for moving through complex, diverse, sensorily rich spaces. City
dwellers’ embodied patterns and habits have to be flexible, responsive, and
adaptable, as we make our way through crowds, hail cabs, form queues, dart between
people and across busy streets, efficiently hail cabs and negotiate subway stations,
and interact at least in passing with a wide variety of people who move, speak, and
occupy space very differently from one another. We can understand more accents
and tell them apart. We know how to touch others appropriately in busy areas and
how to avoid being touched when needed. None of these skills and perceptual
capacities can simply be imparted by way propositional assertions. The epistemic
advantages that city-dwellers have are quite concrete. One can easily watch how
fluently and efficiently an urban resident moves through their city and among its
people, with minimal stress or hesitation, compared to a flustered tourist who will
move slowly and haltingly and exhibit anxiety.

(4) Standpoint theorists have traditionally emphasized the epistemic advantages that
come from having a culturally and politically marginalized social position. But
sometimes this marginalization comes with epistemic disadvantages. Consider the
epistemic challenges that economically disadvantaged students face if they go to
‘good’ colleges.7 Even controlling for SAT scores and other traditional markers of
academic potential, poor students often struggle to succeed at college in distinctive
ways. They face direct epistemic impediments to navigating their classes and
absorbing knowledge as well as their peers. For instance, if they have not grown up
with the same habituated practices around money, lifestyle, and social relations as
their peers, they are less likely to fit in well and learn from the kind of fluid
socializing that characterizes college at its best. If they do not come from a family or
neighborhood where most people have gone to college, they will know less about
how to pick classes that suit their interests, how to talk to professors, what office
hours are for, and so forth, and hence they will likely get less epistemic benefit out of
being at college. They also face indirect epistemic impediments. For instance, they
                                                        
5 Interestingly, caring intimately for a person with mobility challenges can also give one a different
kind of lived understanding and perception of barriers and spaces (Kukla 2007).
6 See for instance McKinnon 2015, who makes this point with respect to access to transphobia.

7 See for instance Madden 2014.

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 may be less able to take intellectual risks if their ability to afford college depends on
their maintaining a near-perfect record of good grades, and they may be less able to
buy optional books and materials. Implicit and explicit bias on the part of their
professors may kick in if they ‘talk like a poor kid’, regardless of the sophistication of
their comments.8 For all of these reasons, an economically disadvantaged student
may well get less epistemic benefit from college than will a wealthier classmate who
is exactly as smart and academically well-prepared as they are.

Before going on I want to make two points about these examples. First, all of them may
seem like cases of epistemic advantage or disadvantage that are too commonsensical or
mundane to be of philosophical interest. They are just examples of how being a certain kind
of person with certain experiences goes along with knowing some things, and not knowing
others. Surely this is obvious, and not philosophically radical or challenging! But this is
precisely my point. Remember that my goal is less to win arguments against sophisticated
and elaborate defenders of aperspectivalism and epistemic purity, and instead to make the
alternative seem everyday and unthreatening and not worth arguing against. Second, each is a
case where the epistemic advantage or disadvantage cannot be reduced to knowing (or not
knowing) extra facts of the sort that can just be imparted via propositional assertions. There
is no epistemic substitute, in any of these cases, for actually living with a certain kind of
materially and socially situated body. At the same time, they are not examples of mere
physical skill either: In all four cases, embodied experience enables or impedes epistemic
access – it shapes what sort of perceptual evidence is available to the subject, and what sort of
inferences they are positioned to draw.

I defined standpoint theory by two claims:

i. Social location systematically influences our experiences, and shapes what we

can know; knowledge is always (or often) achieved from a standpoint.
ii. Marginalized standpoints provide epistemic advantages in at least some
contexts.

I have argued that the first is not only true but mundanely so. Turning to the second: Why
would marginalization provide a distinctive epistemic advantage (despite the fact that it can
sometimes produce epistemic disadvantages as well)? At least three plausible reasons show
up in the literature.

1. Patricia Hill-Collins (1986), among others, has emphasized the epistemic advantages
of having an ‘insider/outsider’ status. The materially incarnated social world is
generally built for the convenience of the privileged, almost by definition, and the
dominant worldview is generally their worldview. This means they are rarely pushed
to take an outside perspective on their own stance or practices, and how they are
contingent, partial, or excluding. A recent egregious case of this was Michael Tooley,
the septuagenarian white straight man who chaired the University of Colorado
philosophy department in 2014, when it was the site of multiple sexual harassment
                                                        
8Or professors’ bias may actually kick in because she has sophisticated things to say. See for instance
Martínez 2016. This piece focuses on the author’s Latina ethnicity but presenting as working-class
can pose similar risks to one’s epistemic credibility.

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 scandals. Tooley (2014) writes, “I have been in half a dozen philosophy departments
over the course of my career, and it does not seem to me that female members of
those departments were treated differently in any way than male members. I did not,
for example, see any differences between, on the one hand, the way in which male
philosophers interacted with female philosophers and, on the other, the way in
which they interacted with each other. Nor did I see any prejudice against women
faculty when it came to decisions to hire, to tenure, or to promote, or against female
students when it came to admission to graduate school.” He floats the possibility
that “maybe [he is] just an insensitive observer” but dismisses this worry as
implausible or irrelevant. This sort of unjustified universalization of one’s own
perspective and failure to consider one’s own likely epistemic limitations is a
distinctive weakness of those at the center. Those on the margins don’t have the
luxury of remaining in their own ‘world’ and unjustly universalizing and totalizing
their perspective, since their world is not independent but constituted and
subordinated by the dominant culture. Thus the marginalized must in effect become
‘bilingual.’ They can see more clearly the workings and limitations of the dominant
norms and culture from the outside, while also of necessity becoming skilled at
operating within it. Relatedly, they often have what Du Bois (1903) called ‘double
consciousness,’ or the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of
others.” This double vision places the self in social context. It is often socially painful
but it can be epistemically productive.

2. Relatedly, those at the center often get no serious pushback against their views, since
they have the power to present them as absolute. We all know older white men who
have been spouting the same line about politics, metaphysics, or whatever it is for
decades, because their voices have enough social authority that they can just talk
obliviously over dissenters, whether literally or metaphorically. This credibility excess
denies them the epistemic opportunity for their views to evolve when forced to
grapple with other perspectives. Thus privilege can sustain ignorance. More
generally, the ability to move through the social world and engage in social
interactions with minimal risk can sustain ignorance. For example, those with
normative social identities have less need to be able to read other people’s identities
– others’ ethnicity or sexual orientation, perhaps – because their interactions with
those different from them don’t put them at risk in the same way that they do for the
marginalized. This can lead to the privileged being surprisingly unable to pick up on
certain kinds of social communication and signaling.

3. Hill-Collins also explored the epistemic advantages that come from being able to
move relatively invisibly through privileged space. In Hill-Collins’s fictional example,
a housekeeper solves a murder that baffles others by having this kind of access to
facts not meant for ‘people’ to know and see, as she moves effectively invisibly
among the privileged people who employ her. Alison Wylie (2003) picks up on this
example and makes this kind of standpoint advantage central. People will selectively
reveal and conceal things from their ‘peers’ and tailor their self-presentations in
various ways, while the woman in the back cleaning the floor, emptying the trash, or
refilling the coffee may get to see and hear things that ‘people’ were never supposed
to hear. She sees the empty bottle of anti-depressant drugs in the VP’s trashcan, or

  10 
 the sudden look of exhaustion on a junior partner’s face once his superior leaves the
room.

In all of these cases, there is room for philosophers to try to save a role for pure,
aperspectival epistemic practice. A variety of techniques have been proposed to dodge or
guard against the incursion of values and perspectives into the ‘core’ of knowledge. Often
the strategy is to divide up epistemic practices, and to insist that only one part is ‘infected’
with values or standpoints, while the other, pure part is the real epistemic part. For example,
in fending off the threat of pragmatic encroachment, Brian Weatherson writes, “I agree,
evidentialism [that is, the position that only evidence determines justification] is false. And I
agree that there are counterexamples to evidentialism from subjects who are in different
practical situations. What I don't agree is that we learn much about the role of pragmatic
factors in epistemology properly defined from these counterexamples to evidentialism.” He
concedes that if two people have the same degrees of belief, it may count as a belief for one
but not for the other. But this, he claims, is a philosophy of mind thesis, and not an
epistemic matter: pragmatic context, in his view, affects whether you count as believing, and
not whether you have a justification that makes this belief into knowledge (Weatherson
2005, 418). In a different divide-and-protect move made in the same spirit, Richard Jeffrey
responded to inductive risk arguments by insisting that inferring from data and accepting or
rejecting hypotheses is not part of science; scientists are just supposed to collect data and
produce statistical information, which policy makers and others embroiled in value-and
interest-laden projects can then use to make inferences. By his own description “This
account bears no resemblance to our ordinary conception of science” (Jeffrey 1956, 246). In
the style of Kant, Jeffrey and Weatherson thus both shrink and strengthen the boundaries
around what counts as the proper epistemic domain, in order to keep it pure.

But at a certain point, we need to ask why we are philosophically invested in working so hard
to find some sort of pure, aperspectival epistemic cubicle or sanctuary. What do we gain by
so carefully narrowing the domain of the properly epistemic (or the properly scientific) so as
to excise dependency on situation, values, perspective, and interests? Why is there such
philosophical resistance to these many and varied way that epistemic practices and standards
appear to be conditioned by situation?

Purity and Moral Panic

I propose that these various divide-and-protect strategies are driven in substantial part by
ideology and moral panic. This is not intended as a total explanation, or as an invalidation or
refutation of the many sophisticated attempts to parse out exactly how and to what extent
epistemic standards can be situation-independent. But I think it is a key force driving the
dialectic of contemporary philosophical conversations. I will discuss four common
categories of responses to the various arguments for situated knowledge, each of which is, in
my view, primarily driven by moral panic:

1. If we assign epistemic advantages to marginalized knowers, and insist on critical

attention to who produces knowledge, we will devalue the Great Canon of Western
literature, philosophy, and science. We must block these arguments in order to save
the canon.

  11 
 2. If knowledge is situated, it will be relativism and identity politics all the way down!
We won’t have any unsituated, aperspectival stance from which to assess which
standpoints are better than others, and so-called knowledge will turn into a free-for-
all in which the loudest voices win.
3. Standpoint theories and their ilk essentialize and reify social identities, and hence
they cannot accommodate human diversity.
4. We just need to work harder and more rigorously to carve out the boundaries around
a pure space of epistemic practice unmarked by situation, because that’s where the
true core of epistemology lies, and if we lose it everything will be terrible.

The Argument from Devaluing the Canon

This first concern does not seem to me to require a serious philosophical response, and I
take it that its roots in moral panic – and white male fragility – are clear. If attention to the
epistemic work done by marginalized knowers ends up unseating the primacy of privileged
knowers, this doesn’t constitute any kind of epistemic argument against it. Acknowledging
and critically interrogating the fact that our traditional canonical texts were produced from
particular situated perspectives only undermines their legitimacy if we assume that only
aperspectival knowledge is valuable. But that’s exactly what’s being called into question.
Furthermore, even if we end up needing to acknowledge that the standard ‘great thinkers’
had epistemic limitations caused by their social situation and identity, this doesn’t make them
valueless; thoughts and texts don’t have to be perfect to be valuable. And if we decide that
some of these texts, once put in context, really do have much less value than we thought,
this still isn’t a philosophical argument against situated knowledge – it’s at best an irrational
argument from sentimental attachment.

Yet this canon-anxiety is common and familiar, and it spills out of traditional academia. If
the purity of the canon is challenged, and if other voices are valued in part because they are
other voices, the fear is that this will somehow undercut the value or the primacy of a
traditional set of texts – and with it, of course, a specific, privileged perspective marked by
colonialism, race, and gender. By acknowledging that this is one perspective among many,
we remove its automatic epistemic privilege and its claim to purity, and this is threatening to
many. Recently Reed undergraduates protested the Eurocentrism and male-dominance of
their required first year Humanities class. Of course they were not objecting to the inclusion
of white men on the syllabus, but rather calling for a more inclusive set of perspectives. The
protests were covered in Inside Higher Education (Flaherty 2017), and virtually all of the
comments were critical. A couple of typical ones read:

My sense of things is that anything to do with 'Western Culture' is considered white

and patriarchal by definition… I suspect that this conflation ('Western'/'White') is
part of the root of the current conflict within the intellectual Left right now. If
Western Civ. is inherently evil, it's easy to throw out the whole package (free speech,
due process, representative constitutional government) as a relic of old dead racist
men. (Comment by CET, 9/11/2017)

  12 
 This is checkbox diversity: The students just want to have a certain number of
authors who fall into the construct of "people of color." I doubt that they are well-
acquainted with the works they deride (and they might not be acquainted with any
texts at all). (Comment by John Ahearn, 9/10/2017)

The Argument from Fear of Identity Politics.

The essential argument from fear of identity politics proceeds as follows:

(1) If there is no such thing as a pure, unmarked stance unshaped by situation, then there is
no epistemically secure position from which to assess the epistemic quality of any other
stance.
(2) But if this is right, then no stance has any claim on being better than any other.
(3) And if so, then epistemic practices and disagreements are no more than power plays, in
which different groups engage in political jockeying over who gets to say what counts as
true.
(4) Finally, if it becomes this kind of brute power war, women and people of color will win
out over white men and define reality in ways that benefit them.

Not every argument along these lines contains all of these elements, but this basic line of
thinking shows up in various places. Susan Haack (1996) calls feminist epistemology in
general “preposterous” and equates it with the generalized rejection of objectivity and truth
by way of an inference from (1) to (2) to (3), claiming that for standpoint theorists,
“knowledge is nothing but the product of negotiation among members of the scientific
community” (104). As Elizabeth Anderson puts it, Haack is ‘alarmed’ by the possibility that
knowledge is situated, because “behind her alarm lies a particular model of the interaction of
evidential and political considerations in shaping inquiry. The model supposes that these
considerations necessarily compete for control of inquiry … To the extent that moral values
and social influences shape theory choice, they displace attention to evidence and valid
reasoning and hence interfere with the discovery of truth.” (Anderson 1995, 33). Susan
Hekman insists on (1), complaining, “Harding’s talk of ‘less false stories’, ‘less partial and
perverse accounts’, and more ‘objective’ research necessarily presupposes a shared discourse
– a metanarrative even – that establishes standards by which these judgments can be
validated” (Hekman 1997, 355). Meanwhile, Ian Hacking embraces step (1) and the inference
to steps (2) and (3), arguing, “we cannot reason as to whether alternative systems of
reasoning are better or worse than ours, because the propositions to which we reason get
their sense only from the method of reasoning being employed. The propositions have no
existence independent of ways of reasoning toward them” (Hacking 1992, 65). As for the
move from (3) to (4), one can consult anonymous comments on any philosophy blog for a
plethora of instances.

But step (1) of this argument is directly question-begging, and each of the following steps is
an inference driven by moral panic.

Step (1) presumes that the only way to think critically and well about anything is from an
unmarked, pure position, but this is exactly what the standpoint theorist denies. The idea
that we have to leap out of all standpoints in order to compare any standpoints begs the
question in favor of a weirdly disembodied, a-material view of how we reason, which is just

  13 
the view the standpoint theorist is pushing back against. One can’t argue against the idea that
situated epistemic practices could be effectively bound by objective standards by presuming
that only unsituated practices can be effectively bound by objective standards.

Indeed, in most fields other than philosophy, the idea that epistemic practices have to be
pure and unlimited by any perspective is quite foreign. Scientific papers, especially in the
social sciences, routinely include a section on ‘limitations,’ in which the authors explicitly
reflect on how their own methods, access to evidence, and position as researchers limit the
generalizability and transparency of the results. This isn’t taken as undermining all possibility
of objectivity or of critical assessment, but as just an epistemically healthy acknowledgment
of the finitude of their resources and perspective. We can and routinely do use imperfect,
finite, perspectivally bound tools to critique our own and others’ perspectives. The finitude
of the tools is part of the more general finitude of the world.

Furthermore, step (1) does not imply step (2). Even if all epistemic starting points are
imperfect, unstable, and limited (as surely they are), this does not mean that those with
different standpoints cannot use their imperfect tools and standards to critically interrogate,
engage with, and correct and improve one another. Some critics of situated epistemology,
especially standpoint theory, implicitly or explicitly assume that if standpoints are different
from one another then they must be totally incommensurable and immutable, as if people
with different standpoints live in hopelessly discrete, monadic worlds. (Kuhn sometimes
talked this way, notoriously.) But there is no reason why people who have somewhat
different access to evidence, whose interests and values lead them to make somewhat
different inferences, who are positioned to ask somewhat different questions using
somewhat different frames, cannot talk to one another (partially and imperfectly) and
critique one another.

We can return to our analogy with Hegel’s critique of Kant here: Just because our epistemic
tools are finite and ‘impure’ doesn’t mean we can’t use them to engage in critique and
comparison. To refuse to use them because of their impurity is to indulge in a kind of
epistemic risk aversion that lets us avoid doing anything at all. There is no reason to way
around for a purity guarantee before leaping in and using the resources we have. We critique
various sets of epistemic practices as best we can from our imperfect stances, and progress
and hopefully broaden and enrich those stances as we go. Our epistemic tools and capacities
are finite and limited, like all our tools and capacities. Why is this surprising or scary? It
seems to be a special kind of hubris characteristic of philosophers in particular to think that
we have to have perfect shared understanding and identical shared epistemic standards
before we can get about the business of making epistemic progress with one another.

Step (3) is also unjustified fear-mongering. Let’s provisionally acknowledge that we need to
attend to social identities and power relations in assessing epistemic standards and practices.
That in no way implies that this is then the only thing we need to attend to. We lose none of
our grip on epistemic virtues such as coherence, evidence-responsiveness, or compelling
conceptual analysis, and none of our grip on epistemic vices such as framing biases,
overgeneralization, post hoc explanation, and so forth, just by adding in critical attention to
the strengths, limitations, and distinctive features of an epistemic agent’s identity. Saying that
identity plays a role in epistemic evaluation doesn’t imply that it completely determines this

  14 
evaluation. Thus standpoint epistemologies do not realistically risk reducing epistemology to
identity politics or mere power wars.

And even if we make it all the way through step (3), step (4) seems to involve its own kind of
panic-driven unjustified leap, given that all the empirical evidence points in the direction of
white males still having the lion’s share of power when it comes to whose gets to speak,
whose voice gets heard, and who gets taken seriously. There have been some heartening
incursions into syllabi, departments, and science labs, here and there, in more progressive
spaces, but it’s still not as though marginalized knowers generally win at these power games.

The Argument from Essentialism

The argument here is that standpoint epistemology assumes that there is such a thing as ‘a’
or ‘the’ women’s standpoint (or perhaps ‘a’ black women’s standpoint, or whatever it may
be). But this seems to erase important differences between group members and to impute a
stability to these marginalized identities that is both implausible and politically problematic.
This worry has mostly come from inside feminist and other anti-oppressive theory, but it still
strikes me as being a fear-driven response. Furthermore, it has been coopted by those hostile
to any version of situated epistemology.

The risk here is that if we assume that a group shares a standpoint, this purportedly common
standpoint will end up once again treat the most privileged voices from within a group as the
neutral or ‘representative’ voices. ‘Women’s standpoint’ will end up being dominated by the
voices of economically privileged, able-bodied white women, and so forth.9 And indeed,
there is, of course, a long and painful tradition of straight white women taking it upon
themselves to speak for women in general; of black men taking it upon themselves to speak
for black people in general; and of the most audible voices with the most social capital in the
queer community being educated white gay men.10 Somehow Caitlin Jenner has managed to
socially position herself as ‘the voice’ of trans women, while poor trans women of color,
disabled trans women, and so forth, who face horrific safety threats and discrimination, have
little to no cultural voice despite the rise of socially accepted trans superstars.

So these concerns are real. But there is no reason to infer from the fact that groups are
internally epistemically diverse to the odd conclusion that there is no point on looking at the
epistemic differences in standpoint at all. Nor is it good reason to go back to the assumption
that aperspectival purity is a reasonable ideal. This seems like saying that because the
standpoint arguments are too powerful, we should ignore them altogether. Yet it is hard not
to read this line of reasoning into Hekman, when she asks rhetorically, “If we abandon a
single axis of analysis, the stand point of women, and instead try to accommodate the
multiple, potentially infinite standpoints of diverse women, do we not also lose the analytic
force of our argument?” (Hekman 1997, 349).11 But the point of recognizing the situatedness
                                                        
9 See Hekman 1997, Lugones and Spelman 1983; Wylie (2003) discusses this objection and responses
to it.
10 This last point about gay male cultural capital was made vivid in fascinating and powerful ways in

the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012).

11 Haack (1996) also makes such an argument for the purpose of dismissing the helpfulness of any

situated approaches to epistemology.

  15 
of perspective was never to go find the group with the best perspective and then just listen
uncritically to what they say.

Moreover, there is nothing inherent in standpoint theory that requires us to believe that
marginalized groups have distinctive standpoints. We can believe that our epistemic resources
and practices are shaped ineliminably by our gender, race, body size and functioning,
sexuality, or whatever it may be, without believing that it does so in the same way for everyone
in our group, or that it does so by way of our common experiences. The latter simply doesn’t
follow. It can be clear that the way I am gendered has deeply affected my perceptual skills,
epistemic resources and the like, without undergirding this with any claims about my sharing
‘a gender’ with a group of people who must have been epistemically affected the same way.
Nor is there any reason to measure how much of my standpoint is shared with other women
– or with other white women, or other white queer women, or other white queer culturally
Jewish economically secure women, or whatever the case may be. We just don’t need to ask
about such commonalities in order to get on with the business of critically interrogating my
situated position as a knower. Only ideological anxiety would drive one to insist on finding
the boundaries around my proper epistemic group before we can get on with exploring the
potentials and limitations of my standpoint.

It is clear to me, for example, that my experience in the academic discipline of philosophy is
shaped by my gender – by the fact that others read me as a woman, and that I was trained up
on seeing, arguing, questioning, interacting, and caring about issues in ways that were shaped
from the beginning in gendered ways. I am also gendered differently than many other
women in philosophy. To name just a few points of divergence that reflect our different
positions: I am not especially ‘femme’; I am very assertive; my sense of humor and choice of
hobbies tend to be socially marked as ‘masculine’; I have trouble ‘being ladylike’, which has
both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to interacting with students and
colleagues; and so forth. It would be absurd to claim that my male colleagues’ reactions to
my assertive way of talking were not gendered, on the ground that other women are not so
assertive and hence don’t experience those same reactions! If we were to try to find the
shared kernel that makes up ‘women’s standpoint’ in philosophy, we would be left with
nothing or next to nothing. We would miss the rich and varied and ongoing ways in which
almost every interaction and interest I have in the field is marked by gender. There is no
reason at all why gender has to play the same role in a group of people’s lives in order for it
to play a role, including a rich and epistemically significant one.

It is true that early standpoint theorists emphasized group standpoints, and that their
language tended to be essentializing in the way that critics interested in intersectionality, such
as Lugones and Spelman (1983), rightly problematized. Nancy Hartsock (1983), for instance,
tried to ground standpoint epistemology in women’s shared relationship to domestic and
childrearing work, by analogy with Marx’s grounding of standpoint epistemology in wage
workers’ shared relationship to the means of production. However, in the decades during
which standpoint theory has matured, it has become generally agreed-upon that this sort of
essentializing move is both implausible and theoretically unnecessary (Intemann 2010, Kukla
2006, Wylie 2003). At this point, attachment to this sort of argument against situated
epistemologies seems more driven by a desire to dismiss the entire issue than it is by
meaningful philosophical worries about any currently live version of standpoint theory.
Hence the essentialism charge, while often politically important, seems to be both antiquated

  16 
and philosophically beside the point when it comes to critiquing standpoint theory. It
certainly gives us no reason to retreat to a purist, aperspectivalist picture. Indeed, the
complexities introduced by intersectional identities and by internal diversity within groups
make careful attention to the situated position of an epistemic agent more crucial, not less!

The Argument That We Should Just Try Harder

This argument-schema is not a critique of situated epistemologies so much as a

methodological response to them. Its proponents take it as a given that needs no argument
that conceding the situatedness of epistemic practices and justifications would be a deeply
troublesome last resort. For instance, Jon Kvanig writes nostalgically, “Whether one adopts a
positive or a negative characterization of pragmatic encroachment, there are substantive
grounds for rejecting the idea and endorsing the long-standing tradition of intellectualism in the
theory of knowledge” (2011, 85). Meanwhile, Clayton Littlejohn, reviewing Fantl and
McGrath’s Knowledge in an Uncertain World, which is one of the main book-length defenses of
pragmatic encroachment, is open about his emotional reaction to arguments for situated
epistemology: “It was the best of books. It was the worst of books. Best because it was filled
with interesting and original arguments about the nature and possibility of knowledge. Worst
because the arguments were good, much better than I had hoped given that they were
arguments against an attractive constellation of views” (Littlejohn 2010).

Within the pragmatic encroachment literature, even the defenders of encroachment consider
it the ‘tainted’ option, and acknowledge apologetically that maintaining purity would have
been the preferable option. The very term ‘encroachment’ already invokes the metaphors of
impurity, pollution, and a compromise of boundaries that ought to have been secure. Even
Fantl and McGrath, the twin patriarchs of pragmatic encroachment, refer to their own view
as ‘impurism’ (2009). This type of acceptance of situatedness also gets routinely called the
“anti-intellectualist” position (Kvanig 2011, Neta 2007). This terminology presupposes that
only pure unsituated epistemic practices are ‘intellectual’, whereas it is exactly the
metaphysics and nature of intellectual thought that is at stake in these debates. Since these
are matters of terminological choice rather than argument, all this rhetoric strikes me as a
lovely example of the rhetoric of moral panic.

Critics of the inductive risk literature proceed by acknowledging that values and interests
‘infect’ all sorts of parts of the scientific process, but insist that if we just cleave off these
parts carefully enough, with a fine enough scalpel, and declare them to be outside of the
‘core’ of science – the real stuff, as it were – we will be fine. For instance, Hugh Lacey writes,
“Note that this thesis is consistent with moral and social values playing many roles within
science, e.g., in motivating research interests, in setting the direction and determining the
legitimation of applied research and applications, even in making judgments about the
adequacy of available evidence and assessing the testimony of scientific experts — and in
many other ways. Proponent of science as value free have never denied this. They hold only that
at its core — where theories are accepted and research directions of basic research are set —
moral and social values (unlike cognitive values) have no proper role, and that no viable
value-outlook should be especially favored by the advances of scientific understanding. Too
often, science is value free has been dismissed by pointing to the legitimate play of values at the
periphery rather than at the core of scientific practices”(Lacey 2005, 2 – my emphasis).

  17 
This language of core and periphery sets up the central governing metaphor, for Lacey. But
he gives no argument for why the purportedly value-free domain is what counts as core
rather than as peripheral to science.12 Regardless of whether Lacey manages to identify a part
of the scientific process that is value-free and aperspectival – which I remain agnostic about
here – my interest is in his declaration that this part is the ‘core’ whereas the value-infested
parts are mere peripherals. The argument seems to be that the ‘core’ of science is value-free
and aperspectival because being value-free and aperspectival is the most important thing
about science: “impartiality is a key value of all research practices conducted under any
strategy” (Lacey 2005, 12). But key just seems to me to be another word for core here, and I
don’t see any noncircular argument for accepting this priority claim.

My question for all of these authors is twofold: Why are so many philosophers working so
hard to save an unsituated, aperspectival ‘core’ of epistemology, and why does it seem so
clear, even to those who are pessimists about this project, that this would constitute the
good stuff, the real deal? Or conversely, why does it seem obvious that arguments against
such a pure space are arguments for a kind of tragic loss? In their massive, carefully
documented history of objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison show that
aperspectivality is only one, relatively recent interpretation of objectivity. Over time we have
understood objectivity in terms of fidelity to reality, trained judgment, reproducibility, and
various other notions. “Knowledge that bears no trace of the knower” turns out to be a
rather “young epistemic virtue” according to Daston and Galison (2007, 17). Perhaps it is
time that we recognize that this is not a given and unquestionable epistemic virtue, but a
historically constructed vision of what good epistemic practice looks like – one that was
deeply undergirded by and constitutive of the erasure of the many kinds of epistemic agents
who have been traditionally excluded from spaces for experts and authoritative knowledge-
producers.

Don’t Panic! Toward a Naturalized, Non-Ideal Epistemology

Epistemic activities such as knowing, inquiring, and justifying – like absolutely everything
else we biological creatures do – are ultimately material activities performed in the natural
world, limited by our finitude, imperfection, and vulnerability to error and malfunction. It
seems to me that the need to situate knowers in their contexts in order to critically evaluate
their epistemic practices is no more mysterious or spooky than our need to situate any
material process or phenomenon in its context in order to evaluate it. Nothing in this world
is pure. We wouldn’t consider trying to understand a pandemic independent of the
properties of the region across which it is spreading, or climate change independent of the
material and social conditions in which it will occur, or the Algerian Revolution independent
of the historical, political, and cultural relationship between Algeria and France, and between
Europe and Africa. That we need to understand epistemic phenomena as situated material
and social phenomena should be no more surprising.

                                                        
12 Even Heather Douglas, who almost single-handedly reinvigorated the discussion of inductive risk
and the ineliminability of values in scientific judgment, feels the need to insist that values can play an
‘indirect’ role but may never play a ‘direct’ role (Douglas 2009). Critics have struggled to make out
this distinction and what makes one role more ‘direct’ than the other in her writing. But giving them
an ‘indirect’ role does seem to rhetorically downgrade their ability to penetrate right to the core.

  18 
What would a naturalized, non-ideal epistemology look like? That is, what would it look like to
do epistemology beginning from the assumption that we are all finite natural beings
constituted by our situation, incapable of purifying our stance, and operating with tools and
methods and resources that are riddled with limitations and risks? What does it look like
once we allow epistemology to admit that it is the normative study of a messy material set of
social phenomena?

A naturalized epistemology, I propose, would begin with the presumption that good (albeit
imperfect) epistemic practices are possible, rather than trying to transcendentally ground
their possibility from an idealized, perspectiveless location. It would study epistemic
adequacy by analyzing particular empirical, socially situated practices, teasing out their
potentials and limitations, rather than by developing abstract standards against which
particular epistemic practices are then measured. We can build up a picture of objectivity,
not by beginning from an aperspectival ideal, but by slowly and piecemeal uncovering which
practices and perspectives offer robust knowledge. This would be continuous with what
Daston and Galison describe as “a view of objectivity as constituted from the bottom up,
rather than from the top down… One becomes objective by performing objective acts.
Instead of a pre-existing ideal being applied to the workaday world, it is the other way
around: the ideal and ethos are gradually built up and bodied out by thousands of concrete
actions” (2007, 2).

Furthermore, a naturalized epistemology would acknowledge that most of the time,

knowledge is a social enterprise. Most our epistemic practices – both our everyday informal
practices, and the more formal practices that make up science – are collaborative and
coordinative. Much of our epistemic labor is devoted to figuring out how to share
information, negotiate disagreement, and build hypotheses and knowledge together. We
build up knowledge through laborious social interactions that require crossing language and
disciplinary barriers and cultural gaps, and we do our best despite breakdowns in
communication, financial interests and ideological investments that skew our research, and
so forth. Many of our epistemic norms are coordinative: We have implicit and explicit norms
for when someone or something can be trusted, what different kinds of knowledge products
can be used for, how to cite them, and so forth. We have standards, both loose and formal,
for how different kinds of justifications can be translated into social practices (for instance,
randomized controlled trials have a different place in evidence-based standards of medical
care than do observational studies). None of these norms or practices will show up at all in a
version of epistemology that considers only isolated, context-free, unsituated individual
knowers.

A non-ideal, naturalized epistemology would begin inside this messy reality, rather than
extracting out an idealized individual and asking how he would know, were he a perfect
epistemic agent and not embodied or socially embedded. Yet to the extent that there has
been a push to transform epistemology into a discipline with a serious empirical component,
it has looked starkly different from what I describe. Experimental philosophers who study
epistemology do not study epistemic practices ‘in the wild,’ as I am advocating, nor do they
take epistemic practices to be social practices. Quite to the contrary, most experimental
philosophy is aimed at designing and running experiments that isolate agents from other
epistemic collaborators and from anything resembling the normal contexts of epistemic
practice. Epistemological studies in experimental philosophy typically proceed by asking

  19 
people whether artificial described scenarios count as knowledge, rather than examining how
people know (see for instance Weinberg, Nichols and Stitch 2001, Turri 2013, and Swain,
Alexander, and Weinberg 2008, among others).

This model builds in several presumptions that I am challenging: (1) Being in the midst of a
situation is irrelevant to determining how we can know things within it; imagining a situation
abstractly from the outside is just as effective. (2) We can decide whether something counts
as knowledge by attending to an individual’s cognitive state singly, without attention to their
interactions with other people or to the social organization of knowledge, and impersonally,
without attention to who they are. (3) Epistemic practices are pure intellectual rather than
materially embodied activities, so that our standards for thinking about them are roughly
interchangeable with our standards for engaging in them.

Despite the emphasis on empirical experiment in this literature, it seems to me that all these
assumptions are deeply antinaturalistic. They reinscribe aperspectivalist, anti-materialist
assumptions, and they are disconnected from the messy social and natural reality of how we
actually go about trying to know things.13 A naturalized, non-ideal epistemology of the sort I
am describing will have more in common with the history and anthropology of science than
with experimental philosophy as currently practiced, but unlike those disciplines it will not
shy away from normative claims.

The purists see arguments that purport to demonstrate that some epistemic concept is
ineliminably situated as threats to the security and rational orderliness of out epistemic
practices. The central practical upshot of this paper is my suggestion that we give up trying
to carve out or defend a pure aperspectival core, and get used to the idea that epistemic
practices are socially situated, collaborative, and coordinative, performed by finite natural
beings. This means that attention to the social organization of knowledge, to the distortions
in epistemic practices caused by power relations, to the standpoints of the epistemic agents
involved, and to the values, interests and power relations shaping knowledge practices will
be at the forefront of epistemology. We will not treat these things as complicating factors to
be controlled, screened out, or ignored. Attending to how epistemic practices are performed
by finite, diverse, socially embedded knowers is not a distraction or a contamination – it’s
simply what good critical analysis of a complex natural social phenomenon looks like.
                                                        
13Much experimental philosophy (including Weinberg, Nichols, and Stitch 2001 and Turri 2013)
studies demographic differences in intuitions about knowledge, which may make it seem as if it is
acknowledging situatedness. But first, once we acknowledge that in the natural world, epistemic
practices are complex social patterns involving a great deal of coordination, it becomes odd, to say
the least, to try to study them empirically on a person by person basis. This is so even if we note the
demographics of each person. It’s a bit like trying to do epidemiology by studying individuals
piecemeal; the social patterns and interactions are the phenomena under study, so we can’t just study
individuals and then aggregate them back into groups. Second, noting demographic differences
between individuals’ epistemic intuitions does not help us with the critical or normative interrogation
of what different standpoints have to offer. By asking each participant to do the same small,
contained intellectual task, we shed no light on the actual embodied differences between how
different sorts of people access evidence, make inferences from evidence, develop justifications, and
settle on knowledge. See Kukla 2016 for a detailed discussion of the limitations of traditional
experimental epistemology and the differences between it and naturalized epistemology.

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