Original Article
Article first published online: 5 NOV 2015
DOI: 10.1111/hypa.12221
© by Hypatia, Inc.
Issue
Hypatia
Feminist
epistemologies consider ways in which gender (among other social
factors) influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a
particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist
radical empiricism (where the empiricism, not the feminism, is radical).
I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as
empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical
evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to
talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as
objective facts: not just whether we have achieved said equality in our
society, but whether we are, in fact, all equal. I will raise the
concern that the way in which they model the role of values in
epistemology may be a problematic idealization of the open-mindedness of
human agents. In some cases, resistance to value-change cannot be
diagnosed as a failure to respond adequately to evidence. If so, the
strategy of empirically testing our values that some feminist radical
empiricists suggest may not be as useful a tool for social change as
they think.
