Wendy Olsen Unit 7 : Feminist Epistemological

Aims of the Unit The overall purpose of this unit is to get you to read some writings by feminists and see the profoundly new and perhaps unsettling epistemological ideas they have put forward. We hope that by the end of the unit no one will characterise feminist philosophers of science as a unified school. Objectives By the end of this unit you should be able to:) See some limitations of grounded theory from specific feminist perspectives;) Identify gender essentialism and question its assumptions;) Tell about why post-modern feminists do not see any solid foundation for epistemology;) Explain two aspects of feminist epistemology besides social constructionism, from among the following: standpoint theory; the personal being political; and epistemological relativism. In this Unit we will cover the rest of Smith's Chapter 7, and we will also cover a little additional ground based on research being done by academics at the University of Bradford and elsewhere in paradigms not treated much by Smith. I will use as a framework for discussion Anne Scott's spectrum from anti-foundationalism to foundationalism. She has suggested that different schools of thought can be placed along a spectrum, although of course they differ in more respects than merely the simplicity of their ontology. Her diagram is shown in Figure 7.1 below, and I then discuss the different sub-positions of different groups of feminists in the sections that follow.