If we view the aim of feminist science as truthlikeness, instead of either absolute or relative truth, then we can explain the sense in which the feminist sciences bring an objective advance in knowledge without implicating One True Theory. I argue that a certain non-linguistic theory of truthlikeness is especially well-suited to this purpose and complements the feminist epistemologies of Harding, Haraway, and Longino.

The polemical debate, within feminist theory in North America, in the 1980s, around essentialism is the central focus of this thesis.

This article offers a reconceptualization of “the political” from the standpoint of women working in and for low-income neighborhoods, with special emphasis on the contradictions between their actions as community workers and their understandings of the political aspects of their work. The author also examines how their gender and race identity influenced their political consciousness and practice. The date are drawn from in-depth interviews with forty-two perdominantly African American and Puerto Rican women from New York City and Philadelphia who were (...) hired in community action programs established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. (shrink)

How can constructivism and feminism inform and strengthen one another? The author of this text is a constructivist-feminist hermaphrodite, and so s/he addresses this question in the form of an inner dialogue. Instead of taking sex as a characteristic of individuals, s/he analyzes it as something performed locally in ways that vary from one situation to another. Investigating these performances offers constructivism an interesting theoretical opportunity and a chance to turn away from a sterile anti-epistemological stance. For feminism, a radicalized (...) notion of the construction of sexes opens up new political spaces and strategies. Constructivist texts, moreover, have the potential to "do" both the contingency and the necessity of our forms of life in their very style. (shrink)

This essay considers the social effects of the strategy of "speaking out" about sexual violence to transform rape culture. I articulate the paradox that women's identification as victims in the public sphere reinscribes the gendered norms that enable the victimization of women. I suggest we create a more diversified public narrative of sexual violence and sexuality within the context of the movement against sexual violence in order to deconstruct masculinist power in feminine victimization.

The feminist goal of challenging inequality requires distinctive methods such as combining social action with research and using participatory approaches. These methods strengthen scientific standards of good evidence and open debate, but they conflict with elitism and careerism in academia and hence are rarely used. Nonhierarchical structures must be created.

This thesis investigates the structure of knowing, and it argues that existential trust is an epistemological category. The aim of the dissertation is to develop a view according to which all human activity is seen as an activity of a lived body, and in which the understanding of the structure of such activity is regarded as central for the solution even of epistemological problems. This view is not rooted in any one philosophical tradition, but circles around activity of the lived (...) body. It connects thinkers who in other respects belong to different "isms" in philosophy. Central to the dissertation are Aristotle, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Anscombe, Polanyi, and Grene. Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge, and connected concepts like attend to, attend from, and subsidiary awareness, are presented. Different kinds of subsidiary awareness, not noted by Polanyi, are distinguished. It is also argued that Polanyi has not seen all the implicatons of his view that instruments can be interiorized and be part of the lived body. Conversely, parts of the normally lived body can be exteriorized. Nor has Polanyi seen that one has subsidiary awareness of oneself as a certain kind ofperson. This fact, in turn, is shown to have implications for the way we constitute ourselves as agents. Since we are engendered agents, we always attend from gender. In the last decade, the concept of trust has definitely entered epistemology. Mostly, it has been in terms of trusting testimony and/or testifier. This thesis wants to deepen that account. There is a more fundamental kind of trust, namely trust in oneself and trust in the world. It is called existential trust, and it is of epistemological importance, too. Existential trust, it is claimed, is necessary in all acts of knowing. Probably, this fact is hard to discover without having recourse to a distinction like that between attending from and attending to. Existential trust is shown in the way we attend from something. Observation and thinking are central epistemological categories, of course, but they should be supplemented by trust. Without trust they cannot perform any epistemological work. Linguistically, 'to know' is a state verb. Superficially, it describes only a state, not an activity. This fact, however, does not contradict the view of knowledge put forward in the dissertation. To know is to have a disposition to perform successfully either some kind of action, or to perform some kind of true assertive speech act. Basically, knowing is an activity. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy seems to conflict with traditional philosophical methodology. For example, some uses of the concept of gender by feminist philosophers seem to commit the genetic fallacy. I argue that use of the concept of gender need not commit the genetic fallacy, but that the concept of gender is problematic on other grounds.

The feminist in academe, says Paula Bennett, is like Procne married to Tereus, "inextricably wedded to the sources of her harm." An ethical justification of academic feminism can be found, not in cooperation and affiliation, but in the strategies currently necessary to ensure curricular and cultural diversity. Historically contextualized and strategically politicized, this ethic is founded on the claim that universities are places where we may all learn to know what is other than ourselves.

Applying the insights of Donna Haraway (1989, 1991) and Helen Longino (1989, 1990), this paper reviews Sandra Harding's (1986a) tripartite model of feminist critiques of science-empiricist, standpoint, and postmodern-and argues that it is based on misunderstandings of the relationship between scientific inquiry, objectivity, and values. An alternative view of scientific inquiry makes it possible to see feminist scientists as postmodern and postmodern feminists as having standpoints.

The paper proposes that gender can be used to explore alternative epistemologies represented within AI systems. Current research on feminist epistemology is reviewed then criticisms of the main philosophical position dominant in AI are outlined. These criticisms say little about epistemology and nothing about gender. It is suggested that the way forward might be found within the sociology of scientific knowledge as its approach is in accord with the postmodernist view of feminist epistemology in seeing knowledge as a cultural product. (...) However, the sociology of knowledge must brush up its feminist credentials and feminist epistemology must supply more concrete examples with which to test out our theories in AI. (shrink)