At evolutionary psychology conferences, there’s never a line for the women’s restroom. Perhaps not coincidentally, the field has long fixated on stereotypically male pastimes like hunting animals, getting laid, and murdering people. Sarah Hrdy’s insight seems obvious in retrospect: the adaptive benefits of childrearing are far more crucial.
Anyone who has raised kids knows that childhood can feel endless. Hrdy, inspired by her own experiences as a parent, hypothesized that the reason humans enjoy extended childhoods is that we evolved to parent in packs. In no other primate do mothers receive as much support from grandmothers, fathers, aunts, and other relatives. With a whole village to raise them, children could afford to spend more and more time accumulating knowledge and building skills, delaying their launch into responsible adulthood.
And why is theory of mind so much richer in humans than other primates? Hrdy reasoned that needy human offspring were more likely to survive with caregivers who could grasp their thoughts and desires. We gained the ability to understand each other so intimately—better than any species on Earth—in part so that we could care for and apprentice our precocious wards.
Hrdy is one of many women who advanced scientific knowledge by cutting through sexist biases in male-dominated fields. Emily Martin exposed how sexist metaphors distort biologists’ understanding of fertilization. (Turns out a sperm doesn’t simply force itself into a submissive egg.) Cordelia Fine challenged theories of hard-wired sex differences propped up by gender stereotypes. Scores of female researchers shed light on medical conditions that have been understudied because they afflict only women.
Parallel breakthroughs reshaped moral and political philosophy—fields that have tended to obscure oppressive structures and underrate their importance. Susan Moller Okin showed how gendered divisions of labor contribute intricately to injustice, Charles Mills how racism is baked into the social contract and white supremacy cultivates ignorance about it. The tree remembers, even while the axe wants everyone to forget.
All of these intellectual achievements are illustrations of standpoint theory—the idea that a marginalized vantage point can yield unique and valuable insights. Once a niche philosophical doctrine, the theory has since slipped from the ivory tower and seeped into popular culture.
Standpoint theory fueled #Metoo, which urged the public to trust women’s accounts of sexual assault, alleviating the epistemic injustice of excessive skepticism toward women’s testimony (even if #metoo’s excesses sometimes compromised due process for the accused).
Similarly, if a woman confides to me that a guy we know is a creep, I should update my beliefs even if his behavior has never struck me as suspicious. In general, we should lend credence to the interpersonal judgments of people whose vision has been sharpened by mistreatment.
Other cultural manifestations of standpoint theory have been less inspired. As a human, it’s tiresome to hear people gratuitously preface statements of their views with a declaration of their identity. A speaker’s background may signal relevant experience, but too often it’s invoked to shield contentious moral and political ideas from criticism.
As a tactic, it works. Liam Kofi Bright warns that excessive deference to identity has warped the cultural institutions that cater primarily to whites, such as newsrooms, magazines, and universities. This new culture prints a license to grift—a chance for marginalized people to sell comforting rationalizations to privileged whites in exchange for cash and clout. If a Black intellectual endorses DEI, white progressives can feel cleansed, their support for DEI sanctified. (Privileged people insist that their identity precludes knowledge; Emily Tilton calls this “a woke excuse for ignorance.”)
As I see it, all of this intellectual malpractice is an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise positive and indeed necessary development: the diversification of science, academia, and media. Inquiry flourishes when it draws on a diversity of viewpoints and experiences.
I’ve always been sympathetic to standpoint theory. There’s clearly something to it. Yet in a recent conversation with friends, it came out that we’ve all become more skeptical. We agree that marginalized people have unique and valuable insights about their own experiences and about threats they regularly encounter. What’s less clear is how far those insights stretch—to what extent identity can bolster broader claims about the world.
I’ll speak only for myself. I still think standpoint theory is true—but I’ve come to believe that its sight is more limited than I’d once imagined.
The core idea in standpoint theory is that marginalized people possess certain intellectual advantages. But this is radically incomplete. It’s not like marginalized groups are just overall smarter than privileged groups. We’re not doing reverse race science here.
So where exactly does the theory apply?
Some advocates cast standpoint theory across the humanities and soft sciences. But this is untenable. Even if marginalized people enjoy intellectual advantages, they also bear disadvantages. For one thing, privilege often buys superior formal education.
Maybe the scope is narrower? Just oppression studies? As Lidal Dror and others suggest, marginalized people have deeper experiences of oppression and stronger motivation to understand it. Navigating a world designed for the privileged, perhaps they can better understand oppression because they achieve what Du Bois called “double consciousness.”
Dror captures the unique vantage that springs from marginalization. Yet insights about oppression can also come from reaping its benefits—or from knowledge gleaned in boardrooms or legislative chambers that are open only to privileged elites. Some marginalized people even prefer, adaptively, to maintain ignorance about their oppression. (Dror is alive to all of these issues; he just doesn’t show that marginalized people still have a net edge.)
Oppression studies is also too narrow—it leaves out evolutionary psychology, biology, and other fields where marginalized social positions have led to breakthroughs. Perhaps the advantage lies specifically in fields of inquiry where marginalized people are outnumbered and more likely to overcome the majority biases that distort inquiry. (Not just in academia: journalism, government, any knowledge-seeking institution.)
This refinement is more plausible, but it has implications that some might be uncomfortable embracing. Academic fields that study politics are filled with progressives, who tend to have distorted views of those with other political identities. If we should center women in evolutionary psychology, perhaps we should also center conservatives in political philosophy and political science.
Even this limited scope is contracting. Fields that were once male-dominated now approach gender parity. In the 1990s, women were unveiling sexist distortions left and right, but that very success has stripped the orchard of low-hanging fruit. And as biases recede, so do the vantage points they created. This hardly vindicates a more traditional outlook—many fields continue to be majority-privileged and biases linger even after demographics shift—but it tapers the field of vision.
Even within these narrow lanes, standpoint theory stumbles.
First there’s elite capture. Olúfémi Táíwò observes that the privileged often defer to marginalized people who are privileged by class or pedigree. You can’t just defer to whoever’s “in the room,” you need to revise the guest list. Otherwise you get elite capture—“control over political agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people.”
Then there’s ideologue capture. In knowledge professions—science, academia, journalism, and government—the privileged often defer to marginalized people who are ideologues. For instance, white Democrats have been deferring to Hispanic interest groups on illegal immigration, leading them to embrace views on border control that are unpopular not just nationwide but among Hispanic people too.
These two forms of capture are linked. The views of ideologues are often shaped by elite interests and status competitions.
I’ve so far skirted a complication: some standpoint theorists say that intellectual advantages arise not from marginalization alone but from political struggle. Yet filtering for political struggle only feeds ideologue capture.
It’s true that political awareness sharpens the perception of bias. But standpoint theory’s appeal is that it justifies crediting people you don’t already agree with. Swap identity for ideology and that appeal fades.
Deference is fraught. Next, we’ll see that it’s unwarranted.
Some interpretations of standpoint theory suffer from a fatal flaw: they treat marginalized knowledge as essentially private—incapable in principle of being shared with others. This can’t be right. Hrdy’s thesis about cooperative parenting was credible only because the supporting evidence was accessible to the scientific community.
Here’s what I suggested to my friends: identities are relevant to the context of discovery but not to the context of justification. Roughly, that means that being marginalized can help you discover new hypotheses but not justify them.
For instance, a woman may have a good hunch about patterns of gender-based disadvantage. But whether those patterns are real, and whether they constitute genuine oppression, is no clearer from her vantage point than from anyone else’s. Only if the evidence is public can truth be objective. Ultimately, an evaluation of the evidence is more reliable when the evaluators are diverse and even include some who are skeptical about the prevalence of patriarchy, so long as they reason in good faith.
I might go further: the hypotheses generated by marginalization aren’t more likely to be accurate; they just exhibit wider variance. That means more gems but also more duds. On balance, though, that mix improves inquiry if a diverse panel of critics is poised to sort the good hypotheses from the bad.
Where does this leave us?
We should amplify marginalized voices not across the board, nor simply in oppression studies, but in fields of inquiry that remain majority-privileged. We should also seek to do so in ways that avoid capture, and we mustn’t forgo the usual social checks on verification.
This renders standpoint theory less powerful than some would hope. But it affords a better view.
Michael Hannon had a post on social identity and epistemic privilege back in January where I raised the following comment:
"I think there's a tension between, on the one hand, thinking that [epistemic advantages that come with being oppressed] are substantial, and on the other hand, believing in the project of social science. What do I mean by believing in the project of social science? Roughly, believing that the methods appropriate for investigating the social world are largely continuous with the methods appropriate for investigating the natural world. Whether we're trying to learn about the effectiveness of a drug for treating cancer, or an educational intervention for treating illiteracy, we'll want theory, testable hypotheses suggested by theory, and systematic data collection and analysis to actually do the testing. Moreover, once we have all that, the identities of the people involved in the theorizing, data collection, and hypothesis testing largely fall out of the picture."
https://michaeljhannon.substack.com/p/social-identity-and-epistemic-privilege/comments
I think your way of understanding it, though--social identities are relevant to the context of discovery, but not the context of justification--threads this needle. That is, there's no tension between the idea that being oppressed may suggest hypotheses you wouldn't have otherwise come up with, and the idea that you still need social science to provide solid evidence for hypotheses about the social world. So, great!
Cool essay. I think a key distinction for preserving and constraining standpoint epistemology, though, isn’t between justification and discovery but between insight and understanding. Briefly, both the oppressed and the non-oppressed have unique and valuable insights about oppression, but neither fully understands it if they’ve never been on the other side. And that has nothing to do with oppression per se but with the general epistemic principle that you can’t fully understand P without understanding not-P. Take David Foster Wallace’s old joke about the fish who don’t realize they’re in water. They don’t understand not-P (not being in water), so they don’t understand P. Understanding, in brief, often requires synthesizing insights from multiple perspectives.
On a side note, Hrdy’s evolutionary stories seem pretty wild to me. Children could afford to remain for years in a state of utter vulnerability and dependence, unable to outrun or fight off predators, just because they had people looking after them other than their parents?