Standpoint Then and Now

Abstract

This chapter explains the nature of standpoint epistemology; detail its evolution through the responses offered by its supporters to their critics; and briefly point to the continued fruitfulness of the approach. Standpoint theory shares with postmodernism a commitment to the situated knowledge thesis. The chapter offers an overview of each of the three theses characteristic of standpoint before discussing its evolution since its earliest versions in the mid-1980s. In its earliest formulation feminist standpoint theory is based on an analogy with Marxian accounts of the standpoint of the proletariat. According to the latter the working class occupies a unique social position within the capitalist system. Capitalism is defined in part as a system of production predicated on a division of labor by class. Alison Wylie has, building on the work of Patricia Hill Collins and earlier standpoint theorists, developed arguments for the inversion thesis that bring standpoint closer to feminist empiricism.