EPISTEMOLOGIES, FEMINISMS AND THE ENDS
OF EDUCATION
Ian McPherson
Educational Studies, Northern College of Education
Paper (slightly revised) presented at the Scottish Educational Research Association (SERA) Annual Conference (September 24-26 1998, West Park Conference Centre, Dundee)
ABSTRACT
Many thinkers have traditionally stressed the singularity of epistemology, as the normative theory of knowledge. Recent interest in the plurality of epistemologies may be read as tending to subvert either any normative theory of knowledge or only certain kinds of normative epistemology. I shall argue that better kinds of feminism tend to support the second of these readings.
Drawing on Plato (in his Theaetetus dialogue), as well as his successors and competitors, subsequent mainstream epistemology has promoted a three-part analysis of knowledge. The three essential criteria, for this tradition, are that one should believe or accept some proposition as true; that the proposition should be true, not false; and that one should be able to give some kind of account which sufficiently justifies one's belief in, or acceptance of, this proposition as true. This three-part project has often been linked with some picture of the ideal knower who would possess, and so could offer, certainty and infallibility in and through knowledge.
My argument seeks to support the claim that this three-part model of knowledge is at best incomplete and at worst flawed because of its would-be isolation from biological, social, historical and cultural considerations. Varieties of feminist critic have recognised, to different extents, such limitations and flaws, and consequently how we might appropriately respond to them. Learning, as coming to know and understand, is sometimes like repairing a boat at sea, but also sometimes like building a structure based on rock, or like following the changing channels of a river. We need to learn all we can from the sciences relevant to our human mental powers, without getting mired in the mixture of scientism, speculation and incompetent philosophy which sometimes mars Darwinian psychology.
Much of what we need for a better understanding of varieties of knowledge is already at hand in Plato, Aristotle, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, as well as in the work of twentieth century women philosophers such as Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Lorraine Code, Genevieve Lloyd, Martha Nussbaum, Catherine Elgin, Susan Haack, Gillian Rose, Nancy Sherman and Linda Zagzebski. Learning in the longer run typically involves three-way interaction (responsibly, accountably engaged dialogue) between each more or less whole learner, and what is learnable, and other learners. My account borrows heavily from Haack's foundherentist epistemology.
I aim to argue that the enriched notion of rationality we need, to understand knowledge better, involves personally significant shared narratives which contribute towards more balanced accounts of our ideals, standards, norms, goals and virtues. Plurality and singularity can work together. Feminists and others cannot afford just to stress differences at the expense of similarities, if they and we need to persist in our commitment to fairer and more reasonable, more considerate relationships, both locally and internationally. Equally, we need to be able to appreciate and celebrate the similarities between the ends of education, as well as their differences, if education and our understanding of its many manifestations are to flourish.
1.Introduction
1.1Epistemology, whether seen more in its actual plurality and variety, or more in its ideal singularity, coherence and comprehensiveness, is a complex and challenging theme. The same can be said of feminism and of education. However, I am not wilfully aiming for us to multiply complexity with complexity, challenge with challenge, so as hopelessly to overload the time allocated by our conference programme. For, understood at the appropriate level, epistemologies, feminisms and the ends of education are already much tangled and need to be better woven together. In any case, the richness of this area of crossing-points should offer us plenty for discussion.
1.2If rational inquiry, interpretation and understanding are to be appreciated appropriately, i.e. if our model of rationality is to be appropriately inclusive, then we need to, and should be able to, mediate better between actual plurality, variety and difference, and ideal singularity, coherence and comprehensiveness, so as to give better, more responsible accounts, showing (if not describing) the interdependence of these valued and valuable aspects. If this is right, then it is right for epistemology, feminism and education.
Let us remember how common the folly is, of going from one faulty extreme into the opposite. (Thomas Reid 1785/1983, Essay 6, chapter 4, page 262).
The faulty extremes to which I refer are abstractly ideal singularity and abstractly actual plurality.
2.Many philosophers have tended to stress the singularity of epistemology, as the normative theory of knowledge, i.e. that our theory of knowledge must or should be ideally single, coherent and comprehensive. In contexts where the opposite is taken for granted, or dogmatically inculcated, or where the need for a guiding theory is not appreciated, the traditional stress on singularity could have some justification. Another possibility is that some thinkers have been more or less close to the kind of inclusive, well-balanced approach to which this paper aspires, but have often been crudely misunderstood. Perhaps this is true of much of the reception or non-reception of Hegel and Dewey, for example (Rescher 1988 and 1992-1994).
3.However, during much of the 20th century, there have been strong trends towards stressing the plurality of epistemologies, culminating, perhaps, in obsessions with difference and repeated deferment of the acknowledgement of shared understanding and trust, in some radical versions of multiculturalism and neo-liberalism, and in self-styled post-modern suspicions of meta-narratives or more inclusive accounts. Here, traditional stresses on the normativity and ideal character of epistemology have been increasingly filtered out, often in favour of the power or authority of (a certain form of) discourse, or (certain forms of) social and cultural structure. Alternatively, traditional stress on the normativity of epistemology has been replaced, in projects for naturalising epistemology, with arguably under-critical respect for the power and authority of somewhat over-ambitious models of scientific method and theory, i.e. scientism. This, in turn, may feed (sometimes by intended counter-movements) into more pluralised versions of science.
4.Now all such trends towards stressing plurality (whether of the actual, or the possible, or both), may have some justification as, at least in part, needed correctives for inadequate, unjust, violent or non-peace-making versions of singularity. However, this does not require abandoning or abolishing the normative, ideal character of epistemology as such. On the contrary, it requires and enables the clarification, development and enrichment of epistemology. Recent concern with the plurality of epistemologies should not be read as tending to subvert the possibility of any normative or ideal theory of knowledge, but only to subvert certain inadequate versions of epistemology, which are now being recognised as inadequate. Proper recognition of such inadequacies, here as in other areas, only comes about as we become better able to recognise some less inadequate alternative or alternatives. It is here that some feminist criticisms of allegedly sexist bias in some traditional types of epistemology have a valuable contribution to make to epistemological development, in cultural, political, individual and educational contexts.
5.While types of feminism can be classified in different ways for different purposes, it is striking that more than one influentual taxonomy appears to be influenced by epistemological considerations. Sandra Harding (1986) identified three main strands of feminist inquiry which were influentual in the early 1980s, i.e. feminist empiricism, standpoint theory and postmodernism. While "[t]his taxonomy has been superceded" (Code 1998, p176), many have found it a useful approach. More recently Donna Haraway (1991) has argued for "situated knowledges", aiming to appreciate both objective and subjective poles of knowledge and stressing "the critical and interpretative core of all knowledge" (1991, p191). Note how Haraway needs to move between "knowledges" and "knowledge". Similarly, feminist thinkers need to move between "feminisms" and "feminism", as can be observed, for example, in many parts of The Blackwell Companion to Feminist Philosophy (Jagger and Young 1998, pp168-169, 82-83, 118-127, 168-169, etc.).
6.Emblematic of the entanglements of knowledge, sex and gender in our inherited traditions is the story of how Adam knew Eve (Genesis4:1). This prompts the question, "Did Eve know Adam?" This is a question which could well have been debated with some refinement by rabbinic interpreters. In favour of Eve as knower, as well as known, might be that tradition in Genesis which can be read as maintaining that God made both male and female in his own image (Genesis1:27ff). However that may be, the Hebrew idiom still suggests a patriarchal conflation of male knowledge and male power, given the limits of pre-scientific knowledge of human reproduction, limits also painfully evident in Aristotle and Aquinas, for example. However, I am not suggesting that here we are faced only or even primarily by mere ignorance, as other parts of this paper should suggest.
In any case, Genesis 4:1 etc. is surely one key context for evaluating all those figures of speech in Francis Bacon and later writers, concerning knowledge and learning as male mastery, or worse, of female nature. (Compare Landau 1998).
7.How might feminism be identified in its ideal or normative singularity? Various attempts seem plausible. If we think in terms of feminism as justice, then we have the ideal of a world in which core rights and duties are not allocated on the basis of biological sex. More positively, the ideal requires that the traits held to be desirable for human beings should be equally open to women and men, or, with regard to virtues, equally expected of both women and men, other things being equal. (Compare Sterba 1998, pp77-81). In this case, the plurality of feminism would be identifiable in terms of what this ideal of justice would require in more or less specific situations and in relation to other types of justice, e.g. economic, racial and multicultural; and in relation to other types of virtue. Thus the plurality of feminism does not mean the exclusion of the ideal or normative, but only that it becomes relatively implicit. Likewise, the singularity of feminism does not mean the exclusion of the actual, or possible, or different, but only that they become relatively implicit. The same is true of the singularity and plurality of epistemology and of education.
8.Alternatively, ideal or normative feminism might be identified in terms of a virtue other than justice. Care might be one, probably more controversial, possibility. If so, the same general points, made in the previous paragraph, would apply again here. This is not the place in which to enter controversies concerning justice and care provoked by the work of Carol Gilligan (Gilligan 1982; Larrabee 1993). However, it is worth noting that a decent epistemology should be inclusive enough to cover also our moral knowledge, understanding and imagination, areas sadly inexplicit or impoverished in much epistemology since the 17th century. By imagination is meant the ability to think of possibilities, an ability vital for our perception, knowledge and understanding of actualities.
9.This requirement, that our epistemology should also be open to our moral knowledge, understanding and imagination, goes together well with recognition that epistemology in general can and should be regarded as the ethics of belief. Hence the need to sort out from one another, so far as we can, better and worse kinds of normativity in epistemology, so that we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Hence the criterion, amongst others, for assisting the identification of better and worse kinds of feminist theory, that such theory should support appropriately discerning judgement about better and worse kinds of normativity in epistemology.
10.Mainstream epistemology has drawn on Plato, in his Theaetetus dialogue, as well as on his successors and competitors, to promote a three-part analysis of knowledge. The three essential criteria for analysing the meaning of knowledge (NB not criteria for the methodology of inquiry) according to this tradition, are roughly as follows, i.e. that:
(i)one should believe or accept some proposition as true;
(ii)the relevant proposition should be true, not false or hopelessly confused;
(iii)one should be able to give, by some kind of account, a (good enough) justification of one's belief in or acceptance of, this proposition as true.
11.This three-part analysis has often been linked with some picture of the ideal knower who would possess, and so could offer, certainty and even infallibility in and through knowledge, being free from irrelevant distraction by illusions and fantasies, desires and irrational emotions.
12.Critics of this three-part model and its associated imagery have argued, in my view often rightly, that it is at best incomplete and at worse flawed because of its would-be isolation from other relevant considerations. While varieties of feminist thinkers have contributed to this process of criticism, they have not been the only such critics. Moreover, the limitations and flaws they claim to identify are not uniformly shared by all male thinkers or their epistemologies. Some male epistemologists, in fact, go considerable distances towards avoiding or remedying the problems identified by feminists and others. Moreover, some of the most acute and original women epistemologists seem to go to some lengths to suggest that currently recognised feminist epistemologies are not necessary conditions for good epistemology (Haack 1993; Zagzebski 1996). On the other hand, it seems not unreasonable to hope that better epistemology might develop together with better justice for girls and women, as well as for boys and men. (Compare MacIntyre 1988).
13.Feminist criticisms of epistemology can be given a certain focus by means of a psycho-analytic account of male development, such as was given by Nancy Chodorow (1978) drawing on British so-called "object relations" interpretation of Freud. Assuming a typical family in which mothers remain primary care-givers, girls identify more enduringly with the 'caring' parent, developing their identity with greater continuity in this personal relationship, while boys typically have to develop and reidentify with the typically more distant parent, the father. Consequently, boys tend to grow up to be (allegedly) more easily distant, detached, 'objective', competitive and at risk of estrangement, while girls tend to grow up to be (allegedly) more concerned with inter-personal relationships, cooperation, emotional intimacy and openness, and at risk of becoming submerged by those for whom they care. Without attempting to evaluate here the strengths and weaknesses of this influentual theory (Brennan 1988; Scheff 1997), we can see how it conveniently focuses criticisms of the excessive individualism, impersonality, emotional repressiveness and mystification, bodily and material alienation, and combative rationality which have often been discerned by critics of epistemology before feminism.
14.The three-part model seems to isolate propositional knowledge from the inter-personal and practical knowledge which form its matrix. While biology and psychology cannot be adequate substitutes for normative epistemology, they can complement it, given a moderately naturalised epistemology, which takes account, for example, of how we are born with inherited abilities to recognise human faces and to imitate their moving patterns.
15.Moving on to the second part of the three-part analysis, the goal of enquiry is not just knowledge of true propositions. Truth is only an aspect of the goal or goals of enquiry. For the goal is arguably to get or access or appreciate as much interesting and important truth of relevant kinds as we can. As well as truth then, the other key feature is importance or relevance. What is the point of amassing staggering amounts of utterly trivial or irrelevant propositional truths? When we evaluate the epistemic character or virtue of an enquirer, we need to consider the balance between their carefulness over securing the truth of their beliefs and their creativity in ensuring and appreciating the depth of importance or relevance of their beliefs. (Compare Susan Haack 1993, p199). In achieving such balance, a variety of methods, guidelines and methodologies of enquiry may be helpful, as well as our quest for explanatory coherence.
16.However, it is in the area of the third part that the three-part analysis seems most obviously open to challenge. For many critics have pointed out what seems to be the variety of possible answers to questions about the criteria for what should count as a good enough justification or rationale, entitling us to hold our beliefs as true in an responsible, accountable way, rather than just happening to get them right by chance, if we are lucky enough. Here the core issue is arguably what should be our criteria of justification. Alternatively, are our criteria of justification indicative of truth? Only when we have gained some clarity about these questions can we sensibly move on to consider subsidiary issues such as the role of enquirers' perspectives and our background beliefs.