I remember reading SEP on Feminist Epistemology where I got the impression that it models the world in somewhat different way. Of course, this is probably one of those cases where epistemology is tailored to suit political ideas (and they themselves most likely wouldn’t disagree) but much less vice versa.
When I (or, I suppose, most LWers) think about how knowledge about the world is obtained the central example is an empirical testing of hypotheses, i.e. situation when I have more than one map of a territory and I have to choose one of them. An archetypal example of this is a scientist testing hypotheses in a laboratory.
On the other hand, feminist epistemology seems to be largely based on Feminist Standpoint Theory which basically models the world as being full of different people who are adversarial to each other and try to promote different maps. It seems to me that it has an assumption that you cannot easily compare accuracies of maps, either because they are hard to check or because they depict different (or even incommensurable) things. The central question in this framework seems to be “Whose map should I choose?”, i.e. choice is not between maps, but between mapmakers. Well, there are situations where I would do something that fits this description very well, e.g. if I was trying to decide whether to buy a product which I was not able to put my hands on and all information I had was two reviews, one from the seller and one from an independent reviewer, I would be more likely to trust the latter’s judgement.
It seems to me that the first archetypal example is much more generalizable than the second one, and strange claims that were cited in a Pfft’s comment is what one gets when one stretches the second example to extreme lengths.
There also exists Feminist Empiricism which seems to be based on idea that since one cannot interpret empirical evidence without a framework, something must be added to an inquiry, and since biases that favour a desirable interpretations is something, it is valid to add them (since this is not a Bayesian inference, this is different from the problem of choice of priors). Since the whole process is deemed to be adversarial (scientists in this model look like prosecutors or defense attorneys), different people inject different biases and then argue that others should stop injecting theirs.
(disclaimer: I have read SEP article some time ago and wrote about these ideas from my memory, it wouldn’t be a big surprise if I misrepresented them in some way. In addition to that, there are other obvious sources of potential misrepresentations)
Seems like the essential difference is whether you believe that as the maps improve, they will converge.
A “LW-charitable” reading of the feminist version would be that although the maps should converge in theory, they will not converge in practice because humans are imperfect—the mapmaker is not able to reduce the biases in their map below certain level. In other words, that there is some level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today, and the specific direction of this irrationality depends on their “tribe”. So different tribes will forever have different maps, regardless of how much they try.
Then again, to avoid “motte and bailey”, even if there is the level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today even if they try, the question is whether the differences between maps are at this level, or whether people use this as a fully general excuse to put anything they like on their maps.
Yet another question would be who exactly are the “tribes” (the clusters of people that create maps with similar biases). Feminism (at least the version I see online) seems to define the clusters by gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. But maybe the important axes are different; maybe e.g. having high IQ, or studying STEM, or being a conservative, or something completely different and unexpected actually has greater influence on map-making. Which is difficult to talk about, because there is always the fully general excuse that if someone doesn’t have the map they should have, well, they have “internalized” something (a map of the group they don’t belong to was forced on them, but naturally they should have a different map).
I remember reading SEP on Feminist Epistemology where I got the impression that it models the world in somewhat different way. Of course, this is probably one of those cases where epistemology is tailored to suit political ideas (and they themselves most likely wouldn’t disagree) but much less vice versa.
When I (or, I suppose, most LWers) think about how knowledge about the world is obtained the central example is an empirical testing of hypotheses, i.e. situation when I have more than one map of a territory and I have to choose one of them. An archetypal example of this is a scientist testing hypotheses in a laboratory.
On the other hand, feminist epistemology seems to be largely based on Feminist Standpoint Theory which basically models the world as being full of different people who are adversarial to each other and try to promote different maps. It seems to me that it has an assumption that you cannot easily compare accuracies of maps, either because they are hard to check or because they depict different (or even incommensurable) things. The central question in this framework seems to be “Whose map should I choose?”, i.e. choice is not between maps, but between mapmakers. Well, there are situations where I would do something that fits this description very well, e.g. if I was trying to decide whether to buy a product which I was not able to put my hands on and all information I had was two reviews, one from the seller and one from an independent reviewer, I would be more likely to trust the latter’s judgement.
It seems to me that the first archetypal example is much more generalizable than the second one, and strange claims that were cited in a Pfft’s comment is what one gets when one stretches the second example to extreme lengths.
There also exists Feminist Empiricism which seems to be based on idea that since one cannot interpret empirical evidence without a framework, something must be added to an inquiry, and since biases that favour a desirable interpretations is something, it is valid to add them (since this is not a Bayesian inference, this is different from the problem of choice of priors). Since the whole process is deemed to be adversarial (scientists in this model look like prosecutors or defense attorneys), different people inject different biases and then argue that others should stop injecting theirs.
(disclaimer: I have read SEP article some time ago and wrote about these ideas from my memory, it wouldn’t be a big surprise if I misrepresented them in some way. In addition to that, there are other obvious sources of potential misrepresentations)
Seems like the essential difference is whether you believe that as the maps improve, they will converge.
A “LW-charitable” reading of the feminist version would be that although the maps should converge in theory, they will not converge in practice because humans are imperfect—the mapmaker is not able to reduce the biases in their map below certain level. In other words, that there is some level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today, and the specific direction of this irrationality depends on their “tribe”. So different tribes will forever have different maps, regardless of how much they try.
Then again, to avoid “motte and bailey”, even if there is the level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today even if they try, the question is whether the differences between maps are at this level, or whether people use this as a fully general excuse to put anything they like on their maps.
Yet another question would be who exactly are the “tribes” (the clusters of people that create maps with similar biases). Feminism (at least the version I see online) seems to define the clusters by gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. But maybe the important axes are different; maybe e.g. having high IQ, or studying STEM, or being a conservative, or something completely different and unexpected actually has greater influence on map-making. Which is difficult to talk about, because there is always the fully general excuse that if someone doesn’t have the map they should have, well, they have “internalized” something (a map of the group they don’t belong to was forced on them, but naturally they should have a different map).