The 1AC’s traditional epistemology is incomplete and embodies masculine epistemology– rather than inducing mass conversion, introduction of feminist concerns is key to shape substantive issues.

When Sandra Harding called for an epistemology of science whose systematic attention to the gendered status of epistemic agents renders it ‘less partial and distorted’ than ‘traditional’ epistemologies, some commentators recoiled in horror.1 Propelled by ‘a mad form of the genetic fallacy’2 they said, she descends ‘the slide to an a rational account of science.’3 On a less melodramatic reading, feminist epistemologies such as Harding’s advocate not irrationalism, but senses of rationality more expanded than those which they associate with ‘traditional’ epistemology. Our goal in this paper is to try to make coherent the possibility of these less horrifying feminist epistemologies. We begin by working to isolate and articulate that strand of ‘traditional’ epistemology which Harding and other feminist epistemologists have considered too constricted. We then enlist a set of unlikely allies — in particular, Aristotle, Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell — with the end of finding alternatives to the model of rationality that accompanies traditional epistemology. We consider how these untraditional rationalities may or may not be deployable in feminist epistemological projects. Finally, we consider the widespread worry that making room for genuinely ‘gendered’ epistemology would be tantamount to giving up objectivity as a regulative ideal governing epistemic practices, and we argue that this ideal need not and should not be sacrificed by those adhering to the model of rationality that we develop in the most detail. Our aim is not to induce mass conversion to feminist epistemology, but to indicate the substantive issues upon which the viability of a particular species of feminist epistemology depends.

Rarefied Rationality

The traditionalist who forms the paradigmatic target for feminist epistemologists distinguishes the contexts of discovery and justification, locates the epistemic achievements worth tracking in the latter, and devises for their capture a net taking the form of an inductive logic or confirmation theory — a codification of the extent to which evidence (wherever it comes from) supports hypotheses (wherever they come from). The targeted traditionalist moreover attributes to a net of this general weave the capacity to capture all exercises of rationality in the sciences. According to the ‘traditionalist,’ epistemic warrant is governed by ‘valid rules of scientific inference’ that take weighted propositions (such as hypotheses or evidence statements) as arguments. These rules are perfectly general in the sense that every inference conforming to them is warranted, and perfectly comprehensive in the sense that every warranted scientific inference conforms to those rules. Articulation of these rules constitutes the full task of ‘traditional’ epistemology (which, it may be clear by now, is epistemology rather narrowly construed). Consider a recent expression of such traditionalism: We will give the name rarefied rationality to the type of rationality captured by the traditionalist’s rules. Rarefied warrant, the evidential support codified by the traditionalist, is invariant under changes in social (or historical or natural) context. Offering this invariance as at least the mark if not the essence of objectivity, the traditionalist contrasts rarefied with worldly warrant — the support a hypothesis derives from its ‘fit’ with political agendas and other such pragmatic considerations. For example, the hypothesis, ‘Women are not constitutionally capable of the rigors of higher education,’ enjoys worldly warrant from the perspective of those favoring social structures assigning women domestic roles. Wishing to proceed with the business of social life as though the hypothesis were true, those with such a perspective are motivated to treat it as such. Depending for its purchase on the makeup of the social terrain, worldly warrant is not invariant under changes in social context, and fails the traditionalist’s test for objectivity. Harding breaks with traditionalism when she asserts that ‘moral and political loyalties ... have counted as part of the evidence for the best as well as the worst hypotheses in the natural sciences.... Nature causes scientific hypotheses to gain good empirical confirmation, but so too does the ‘fit’ of problematics, concepts, and interpretations with prevailing cultural interests and values’ (Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 100, 101). Unsympathetic traditionalists5 complain that she’s confused rarefied and worldly warrant, and abdicated the noble normative task of epistemology for the lowly anthropological one of describing social practices of assertion and denial. Such traditionalists will remind us that it is the task of epistemology to articulate canons of pure warrant in spite of the subjective vagaries of acceptance and confidence. To allow the dispute to be more complex than this, we need only take Harding’s words literally. Saying that a theory’s worldly ‘fit’ can be part of the evidence providing it with good empirical confirmation implies that social freight has, not just explanatory bearing on the decisions of certain socially situated agents to accept the hypothesis, but epistemic bearing on the hypothesis itself. This is to say that there are reasons that lack the invariance feature the traditionalist celebrates — reasons outside the contours of rarefied rationality. If there are such reasons, then “traditional” epistemology of science is at best partial, in the sense of incomplete. It is also distorted to the extent that it appends to its analysis of rarefied warrant the claim that such warrant is comprehensive. Thus to brand Harding confused for allowing social contingencies to enter the constitution of evidential relations is to beg the question against her fundamental epistemological thesis. Lest we rush Harding to judgment, we must ask directly: is there (or could there be) warrant that falls outside of the contours of rarefied rationality?