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Lorraine Code What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1991. Pp.349.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lynn Hankinson Nelson
Lynn Hankinson Nelson*
Affiliation:
Rowan College of New Jersey, Glassboro, NJ08028-1701, USA
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Critical Notice
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 295 - 326
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Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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References

1 ‘Colloquium on Science, Technology, and Culture,’ sponsored by The Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, 22 October 1991, Douglass College.

2 Nelson, Lynn Hankinson ‘Who Knows? What Can They Know? And When?’ delivered at the symposium ‘Feminist Philosophy Reconsidered,’ sponsored by the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society, Washington, DC, December 1992, and published in Reason Papers 8 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press 1993) 45-56Google Scholar

3 The notion of ‘cognitive authority,’ and arguments for the epistemological significance of divisions in cognitive labor and authority, were first clearly articulated in Kathryn Pyne Addelson, ‘The Man of Professional Wisdom,’ in Harding, S. and Hintikka, M. eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: D Reidel 1983).Google Scholar

4 Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York and London: Routledge 1993).Google Scholar In addition to the Alcoff and Potter anthology, recent collections include Griffiths, M. and Whitford, M. eds., Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Garry, A. and Pearsall, M. eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Unwin Hyman 1989)Google Scholar; and Antony, L. and Witt, C. eds., A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Boulder: Westview Press 1993).Google Scholar

5 Code describes her analysis as an ‘institutional-political analysis, in which the “institution” under scrutiny comprises the range of practices — research, conference presentations, articles in learned journals … that constitute professional philosophy’ (x).

6 Recent collections in which these issues are addressed include Alcoff and Potter, Feminist Epistemologies; and Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge 1990).

7 Ruth, Sheila ‘Methodocracy, Misogyny, and Bad Faith: Sexism in the Philosophic Establishment,’ Metaphilosophy 10 (1979) 46-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harding, Sandra ‘The Social Function of the Empiricist Conception of Mind,’ Metaphilosophy 10 (1979) 38-47Google Scholar; Moulton, Janice ‘A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method,’ in Harding, S. and Hintikka, M. eds., Discovering Reality.Google Scholar

8 Among the topics on which Code focuses are the stereotypes that inform ‘ordinary knowledge’ and their effect on women’s sense of identity and cognitive authority (188-202); medical, psychiatric, and therapeutic interventions in women’s lives (203-15); and a ‘double standard’ in credibility and its consequences for the content of scientific and other knowledge, and women’s cognitive agency (222-50).

9 See, especially, Chapters Five and Six.

10 Some of the complexity is also due to the fact that Code uses some of the terms that are central to her analysis in several ways. For example, she uses ‘objective’ in some instances to denote objects or facts ‘independent of’ human conceptual schemes or interests; in other instances, the term refers to the attitude of the inquirer, i.e., as detached and/or neutral in regards to the inquiry. As Elisabeth Lloyd notes, the two senses are frequently entangled in philosophical analysis (private correspondence). Code’s use of the term in several senses is, I assume,atleast partly deliberate; for she describes her project as ‘working at once with the [pivotal ideals of epistemology] and against them’ (xi).

11 This is especially apparent in Code’s first four chapters, in which she undertakes analyses of earlier work in feminist philosophy that attributed ‘maleness’ to philosophy and/ or attempted to affect evaluative reversals of femininity. But it is also apparent in her discussion of recent attempts to articulate theories of ‘women’s ways of knowing’ (250-64).

12 A third important aspect of Code’s engagement with feminist theory involves an effort to articulate a notion of female subjectivity that ‘traces a path between’ essentialist and postessentialist tendencies’ in feminist theory. Here, ‘essentialism’ incorporates not only the assumption of essential ‘femaleness,’ but the modern view of the self as a concrete and stable entitity. The ‘postessentialist’ tendencies Code refers to are postmodern arguments against the ‘self.’ I explore Code’s proposal for a view of subjectivity (in the sense of personal identity) in the fourth section of my discussion.

13 I have argued for this point in my ‘Who Knows? What Can They Know? And When?’ A recent call for papers for a special issue of The Monist, devoted to the topic ‘Feminist Epistemology — For and Against,’ is a vivid example of the assumption that both ‘epistemology’ and ‘feminist epistemology’ are monolithic (and mutually exclusive) enterprises.

14 Susan Haack has argued, for example, that the ‘rubric, feminist epistemology, is incongruous on its face’ in ‘Epistemological Reflections of An Old Feminist,’ presented at the symposium ‘Feminist Philosophy Reconsidered’ sponsored by the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society, Washington, DC, December 1992, and published in Reason Papers 18 (1993).

15 That said, it is also true that Code’s critique of the assumptions, categories, exclusions, and emphases of philosophical epistemology provides conceptions of knowers, of paradigmatic knowing, and of epistemic communities that might well serve as important aspects of feminist theories of knowledge, a point to which I return in my concluding remarks.

16 See n. 10. As I explore below, Code also uses ‘subjectivity’ in a sense closest to ‘personal identity,’ and maintains that a person’s subjectivity (in the latter sense) is formed in relation to specific contexts.

17 See for example the articles in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies and Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism.

18 See, for example, Harding, Sandra The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca and London: Comell University Press 1986)Google Scholar; Longino, Helen Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; my Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1990); and Alcoff and Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies.

19 Code relates the importance Currently attributed to these features of ‘the knower’ to what she calls empiricism’s ‘distrust of testimony’ (110-13). As I argue in my concluding remarks, this is not a view appropriately ascribed to all empiricists. Indeed, as I explore in my Who Knows, Quine advocates a coherence account of evidence, insisting that part of what constitutes the evidence for specific claims is a broad system of theories (indeed, in some sense, all our Current theories) and that the other broad constraint—experience—is itself shaped and mediated by those theories. Hence ‘testimony’ (in the sense most obviously contrasted with ‘self-reliant’ knowledge acquisition)is central in shaping what an individual could know.

20 Baier, Annette ‘Cartesian Persons,’ in her Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985)Google Scholar

21 Baier’s claim might in fact be the claim that to be a person is to be a person to someone else (and perhaps to take someone else to be a person). I am focusing on Code’s use of Baier’s conception of ‘second persons’ to argue against features of epistemological individualism.

22 I have made an attempt to do so in my Who Knows and ‘ A Question of Evidence’ in Hypatia 8 (1993) 172-89.

23 There is something close to this view in Code’s discussion of the role of human creativity in the construction of knowledge and in her consideration of Kant’s claim that the imagination mediates between understanding and sense perception (56-7), but it doesn’t appear to be developed as I am suggesting it might be. As I explore in my concluding remarks, while the views I have outlined are arguably not dominant in contemporary empiricism (that is, a survey of journal articles in the area of epistemology would support Code’s contention that the’S knows that p’ rubric enjoys hegemony), many are to be found in strains of contemporary empiricism, most notably perhaps in Quine’s work.

24 Alcoff, Linda ‘Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (1988) 405-36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 See the works cited in nn. 4, 6, 18, and 22, above. See also Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ in Feminist Studies 14 (1988) 575-99.

26 Other feminists, and particularly those advocating standpoint epistemologies, have used the notion of ‘situated-ness’ to argue for vantage points of epistemological advantage and disadvantage. Several articles in Feminist Epistemologies, edited by L. Alcoff and E. Potter, address the debate over standpoint epistemologies and the relationship between the view that knowers (and knowledge) are ‘situated’ and relativism.

27 Code’s reference to the care needed in articulating an ecological model reflects some of the problems she notes (and other feminists have recognized) in linking feminism and ecology, and/ or women and ecology— including, of course, traditional and essentialist arguments linking women to nature (273-5).

28 Code also states that ‘a feminist epistemology would seem to require a basis in assumptions about the essence of women and of knowledge’ (315). I have argued against this view in my ‘Epistemological Communities,’ Feminist Epistemologies, Alcoff and Potter, eds. At least it seems to be an unsettled issue.

29 I am speaking of Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge, my Who Knows, and Duran, Jane Toward a Naturalized Feminist Epistemology (Totowa, NJ: Rowan & Littlefield 1990)Google Scholar, among others. Longino does not call the view she develops ‘feminist empiricism,’ but ‘contextual empiricism.’

30 Richmond Campbell argues for a similar point in In Defense of a Feminist Empiricism,’ delivered at the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, May 1993.

31 In my Who Knows.

32 Jane Rinehart, Review of Mary O’Brien’s Reproducing the World, in Hypatia 7 (1992), 161