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."
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!
The history of the social sciences suggests careful attention is still needed when it comes to what theories “come to mind” or “seem plausible and worth investigating” and how data is collected, coded, and interpreted (think of early 20th century anthropology). Plausibly, one’s background and identity affect these things, as Victor points out with Hrdy, and as many feminist philosophers have pointed out with the “value free” ideal in science. Maybe eventually the identities of people could fall out…
Fwiw I think a version of the value free ideal is still very much defensible, in a way that the discovery/justification distinction clarifies. When it comes to what's interesting, what's worth investigating--stuff on the discovery side of the distinction--I agree values have an ineliminable role to play. But when it comes to justification, I tend to think that apparent cases where you need to appeal to values (eg, in deciding what p values should be considered significant) can be reconciled with a version of the ideal.
Liam Kofi Bright has a nice recent defense of the value free ideal that he finds in DuBois, and while it was published in 2017, the democratic aspects of it--roughly, you want outputs of science to be trusted by people who don't necessarily share the values of scientists--really resonate post-covid.
Sounds like we all agree? So long as we think that identity can lead to hypotheses about how how to collect, code, interpret data, etc., which then have to be justified publicly. Glad to sponsor this accord!
Dan, I had a parenthetical sentence in the penultimate draft saying that values play a legitimate role only in the context of discovery but deleted it for the sake of focus! I have to read Liam's paper.
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?
Nice. A view I'm more sympathetic to than standpoint theory is that cognitive diversity is epistemically valuable, and I think your idea supports that view.
About Hrdy... Compared to other primates, living and extinct, humans children do remain vulnerable and dependent for much longer. Cooperative parenting is one putative reason. What else could explain it?
Alas I don’t have a theory of extended childhood. But Hrdy’s view seems to have two major problems. First, it claims that extended childhood evolved because humans evolved to parent in packs. But surely it could have gone the other way: we could have evolved to parent in packs because of our extended childhoods. Indeed, I suspect that pack-parenting and extended childhood may have had a common cause. Second, having many people be responsible for you rather than just one or two is not necessarily advantageous. Indeed, when 10 people are responsible for something (like keeping a shared kitchen clean), that’s often the practical equivalent of no one's being responsible for it.
"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."
Recently I've been thinking about a slightly different problem with standpoint theory, or perhaps better with the discourse surrounding it. Too much focus on insights about your own experience and threats you encounter can lead to the mistake of assuming that, because someone occupies a particular social position (they are a woman, black, disabled) then any insights they might have to offer come from or somehow reflect their personal experience. I'm particularly interested in this sort of problem in thinking about health and the contributions patients can make to understanding and treating medical conditions they or someone close to them have. It is tempting to say nice sounding things about the important of "patient experience" or the "patient perspective". This is no doubt well intentioned, but it effectively restricts the sphere within which patients can contribute something valuable to their own experiences. Far from empowering people, this actually can serve to sideline them--they may be a source of insight into their own experience, but we shouldn't take what they have to say about e.g. the causes or appropriate treatment for a medical condition seriously.
Super interesting. So: by recognizing that marginalized people have insights based on their experience, people end up assigning excessively low epistemic value to ideas not based on their experience. (Now gotta come up with a label for this new type of epistemic injustice!) Seems like a tough problem -- how do you acknowledge genuine standpoint expertise without having this side-effect? If there are no good options, and if the cost outweighs the benefit, there seems to be an argument against applying standpoint theory?
Yeah that’s roughly the idea. Because it’s a problem of practice/application it isn’t exactly an objection to standpoint theory itself, but I think of it as a bit like Táíwò’s objection: in practice standpoint epistemology often makes for bad politics/epistemology.
I’ll let you write the paper on the new form of epistemic injustice.
I know this is an older post but I just came here from the BTIT list...
I think where a diversity of lived experience matters most is actually not just in the ranks of trainees and faculty but in funders, administrators, and gatekeepers (journal editors, for example). In my field (psych/neuro/bio), funding drives most of the projects we do, and for a long time, work on women's health was simply not funded or prioritized, leaving major gaps in our understanding of women's risk factors for cardiac disease or brain disease. Similarly, a lot of our early studies of psychotherapy were done on mostly white, affluent samples and there was no funding momentum to correct that. Of course, as you write, being a woman or minority doesn't automatically make someone a better researcher of women's health, but it does make one more aware of the gaps in the field. This fits with your claim about discovery. One of the best arguments, in my mind, to continue to diversity the trainee/faculty pipeline is that ultimately those folks fuel the gatekeeper/funder class and create a broader scientific tent.
Though I was arguing not that identity doesn’t guarantee being a better researcher (obviously true, not even worth arguing for) but that any putative discoveries that are motivated by identity have to be vetted more widely to be justified.
Consider this contrast: More and more trans people have become involved in gatekeeping wrt youth medical transitions and it’s had some benefits but also distorted care and research because it was justified only to a narrow class.
I would agree with your main point just because diversity enhances inquiry and decision makers have often been quite homogeneous. To reach your conclusion it’s not obvious that you need to claim beyond that, as standpoint theorists do, that marginalized people have an intellectual advantage.
I agree- you don't need to claim that there's an intellectual advantage to being marginalized, unless you operationalize 'intellectual advantage' broadly enough to include 'ability to see gaps in our existing body of knowledge due to having lived experience that is not yet represented by that body of knowledge.' Certainly if you look at what's been funded/ prioritized within biomedical science over the last century or two, it's pretty clear that having the decision-makers be white men until a couple decades ago has dramatically shaped what we have deemed worthy of investigation, and greatly constrained discovery. Ironically, just as funding bodies like NIH and NSF were starting to finally incentivize more inclusive and representative study designs, the DOGE/MAGA thought police has shut these efforts down.
Great essay, thanks! I love the distinction between discovery and justification. Very clear and very apt.
I'm not sure I get your last point about hypotheses generated by marginalization exhibiting wider variance. I can see how those hypotheses are outside the "range" of ones made by non-marginalized people; in this sense taking them into account create more variance amongst all hypothesis. But why would hypothesis made by marginalized people be, as a class, exhibiting more variance than the class of hypothesis made by non-marginalized people?
Good question. It's mostly just a hunch based on exposure. But perhaps marginalized people, skeptical of ideas from dominant groups, react by thinking outside the box, and this can lead them to reject good mainstream ideas as well as bad.
Great points about Lidal’s paper. I think he’s coming up with really interesting and plausible stuff.
I also think Dubois’s chapter on double consciousness is much more complex and ambivalent than the bad old cartoon interpretation. If the standpoint of the oppressed is strictly better, what are we supposed to make of the metaphor of the veil? Of the claim that the world awards those behind the veil “no true self-consciousness”? Of the claim that they “would not Africanize America”?
Here’s the full context of the last quote.
“He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
To me, the value of standpoint epistemology is that of developing novel hypotheses, but its value stops right there.
If you assume that there are infinitely more false hypotheses than true hypotheses, then any hypothesis, regardless of the standpoint of the person that developed it, is far more likely false than true. And so the truth-value of any hypothesis should not rest on the standpoint of the person that developed it but on the robustness of the empirical evidence collected about it (and, even then, only after this evidence has been critically tested, investigated, and analyzed in good faith).
Likewise, if you assume that everyone, regardless of their standpoint, is subject to biases and limitations (like, very relevantly, observer’s bias), then no standpoint should be seen as having greater or lesser access to the approximate truth of a subject.
It’s true that some hypotheses should be taken more seriously than others, and it’s fair, I think, to consider the personal, lived experience (read: standpoint) of the person who developed the hypothesis when making decisions about which hypotheses to take seriously (and, therefore, which to test with empirical evidence) and which to ignore. But just because someone has personal experience with a subject doesn’t mean that they understand it: think about how many people have gotten sick over the last 300,000 years of human history, then consider just how many completely wrong explanations we had for this (like “bad air”) until germ theory was first developed and tested only a few hundred years ago. If the experience of getting sick doesn’t give you any special ability to understand the mechanisms that cause sickness, then why would the experience of any other subject give you any special insight into understanding how it generally, approximately tends to work?
If you can accept that all people are epistemological equals in that it’s much easier to have false beliefs than true ones, then you should never assume that a person’s standpoint gives them any special access to truth; in fact, it’s only likely to make their beliefs wrong in new and different ways.
We can’t ever hope to approximate the truth of the world without, first, speculating about it, and diverse standpoints can clearly help us to generate new speculations, which is great, but treating these speculations as anything but speculations is, to my mind, a very silly (but unfortunately pernicious) intellectual error.
"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."
This is not the core idea in standpoint theory. The core idea is, simply put, that our This is not the core idea in standpoint theory. The core idea is, simply put, that our understanding of the world is situated—it is a direct critique of the “view from nowhere” that underpins dominant moral theories and epistemologies. The prevailing idea that one can remove oneself from one’s experience and arrive at objectively true observations concerning others’ experience or a universalistic experience is not only a myth that stems from the modern belief in a pure intellectual self, disconnected from bodily and sentimental experience, but, as history has shown, it has also worked to reinforce structural oppression. For example, in every country that has experienced colonialism, Black people’s health is significantly worse than that of their white counterparts (Arianne Shahvisi, 2022).
You are right to observe that, for some, this means socially marginalized groups may have a vantage point that is sensitive to power asymmetries and therefore better qualified to examine the relationship between knowledge and oppression. However, this does not mean there is a need to abandon the scientific process altogether, and definitely does not mean that “marginalized groups are just overall smarter than privileged groups.” The interpretation that some identities are better suited for knowledge discovery is a misinterpretation and probably comes from an analysis that leaves the logic of identity intact, something that contemporary standpoint theory scholars have discussed in depth, following postmodernist criticism and Black and decolonial thought. See, for instance, Iris Young, Joan Tronto, María Lugones, Collins, and Haraway.
Standpoint theory has a history of more than three decades of lively discussion and has come a long way. It is worth looking at its history and how it has evolved.
Thanks. Standpoint theory is pretty diverse, and you're right that one element is that knowledge is situated. But that's not all there is to it. Check out the second two elements given in the IEP entry.
(2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. (3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized. (https://iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/)
Or look at discussion of the "inversion thesis," formulated e.g., as the idea that "certain [socially marginalized] locations themselves foster more accurate beliefs, not only concerning one's own social position, but also the social and natural world more broadly” (https://philarchive.org/rec/SAIPAP-4)
My essay is trying to eliminate bad interpretations of this further element and articulate a better interpretation.
I find the main thrust of this argument to be compelling even as I disagree with the conclusions reached by most of its antecedents. The idea that different perspectives lead to different observations and thus different hypotheses ought to be obvious on its face. The idea that testing these hypotheses should be done in a sort of ideological clean room should attain the same degree of obviousness.
Instead of talking about different ways of knowing we should talk about different vistas of experience. I love this.
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!
Oh nice, glad to think through this problem! I feel that tension in many discussions of "Indigenous ways of knowing."
The history of the social sciences suggests careful attention is still needed when it comes to what theories “come to mind” or “seem plausible and worth investigating” and how data is collected, coded, and interpreted (think of early 20th century anthropology). Plausibly, one’s background and identity affect these things, as Victor points out with Hrdy, and as many feminist philosophers have pointed out with the “value free” ideal in science. Maybe eventually the identities of people could fall out…
Fwiw I think a version of the value free ideal is still very much defensible, in a way that the discovery/justification distinction clarifies. When it comes to what's interesting, what's worth investigating--stuff on the discovery side of the distinction--I agree values have an ineliminable role to play. But when it comes to justification, I tend to think that apparent cases where you need to appeal to values (eg, in deciding what p values should be considered significant) can be reconciled with a version of the ideal.
Liam Kofi Bright has a nice recent defense of the value free ideal that he finds in DuBois, and while it was published in 2017, the democratic aspects of it--roughly, you want outputs of science to be trusted by people who don't necessarily share the values of scientists--really resonate post-covid.
Sounds like we all agree? So long as we think that identity can lead to hypotheses about how how to collect, code, interpret data, etc., which then have to be justified publicly. Glad to sponsor this accord!
Dan, I had a parenthetical sentence in the penultimate draft saying that values play a legitimate role only in the context of discovery but deleted it for the sake of focus! I have to read Liam's paper.
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?
Nice. A view I'm more sympathetic to than standpoint theory is that cognitive diversity is epistemically valuable, and I think your idea supports that view.
About Hrdy... Compared to other primates, living and extinct, humans children do remain vulnerable and dependent for much longer. Cooperative parenting is one putative reason. What else could explain it?
Alas I don’t have a theory of extended childhood. But Hrdy’s view seems to have two major problems. First, it claims that extended childhood evolved because humans evolved to parent in packs. But surely it could have gone the other way: we could have evolved to parent in packs because of our extended childhoods. Indeed, I suspect that pack-parenting and extended childhood may have had a common cause. Second, having many people be responsible for you rather than just one or two is not necessarily advantageous. Indeed, when 10 people are responsible for something (like keeping a shared kitchen clean), that’s often the practical equivalent of no one's being responsible for it.
At one point you say:
"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."
Recently I've been thinking about a slightly different problem with standpoint theory, or perhaps better with the discourse surrounding it. Too much focus on insights about your own experience and threats you encounter can lead to the mistake of assuming that, because someone occupies a particular social position (they are a woman, black, disabled) then any insights they might have to offer come from or somehow reflect their personal experience. I'm particularly interested in this sort of problem in thinking about health and the contributions patients can make to understanding and treating medical conditions they or someone close to them have. It is tempting to say nice sounding things about the important of "patient experience" or the "patient perspective". This is no doubt well intentioned, but it effectively restricts the sphere within which patients can contribute something valuable to their own experiences. Far from empowering people, this actually can serve to sideline them--they may be a source of insight into their own experience, but we shouldn't take what they have to say about e.g. the causes or appropriate treatment for a medical condition seriously.
Super interesting. So: by recognizing that marginalized people have insights based on their experience, people end up assigning excessively low epistemic value to ideas not based on their experience. (Now gotta come up with a label for this new type of epistemic injustice!) Seems like a tough problem -- how do you acknowledge genuine standpoint expertise without having this side-effect? If there are no good options, and if the cost outweighs the benefit, there seems to be an argument against applying standpoint theory?
Yeah that’s roughly the idea. Because it’s a problem of practice/application it isn’t exactly an objection to standpoint theory itself, but I think of it as a bit like Táíwò’s objection: in practice standpoint epistemology often makes for bad politics/epistemology.
I’ll let you write the paper on the new form of epistemic injustice.
I know this is an older post but I just came here from the BTIT list...
I think where a diversity of lived experience matters most is actually not just in the ranks of trainees and faculty but in funders, administrators, and gatekeepers (journal editors, for example). In my field (psych/neuro/bio), funding drives most of the projects we do, and for a long time, work on women's health was simply not funded or prioritized, leaving major gaps in our understanding of women's risk factors for cardiac disease or brain disease. Similarly, a lot of our early studies of psychotherapy were done on mostly white, affluent samples and there was no funding momentum to correct that. Of course, as you write, being a woman or minority doesn't automatically make someone a better researcher of women's health, but it does make one more aware of the gaps in the field. This fits with your claim about discovery. One of the best arguments, in my mind, to continue to diversity the trainee/faculty pipeline is that ultimately those folks fuel the gatekeeper/funder class and create a broader scientific tent.
Super interesting, I agree.
Though I was arguing not that identity doesn’t guarantee being a better researcher (obviously true, not even worth arguing for) but that any putative discoveries that are motivated by identity have to be vetted more widely to be justified.
Consider this contrast: More and more trans people have become involved in gatekeeping wrt youth medical transitions and it’s had some benefits but also distorted care and research because it was justified only to a narrow class.
I would agree with your main point just because diversity enhances inquiry and decision makers have often been quite homogeneous. To reach your conclusion it’s not obvious that you need to claim beyond that, as standpoint theorists do, that marginalized people have an intellectual advantage.
I agree- you don't need to claim that there's an intellectual advantage to being marginalized, unless you operationalize 'intellectual advantage' broadly enough to include 'ability to see gaps in our existing body of knowledge due to having lived experience that is not yet represented by that body of knowledge.' Certainly if you look at what's been funded/ prioritized within biomedical science over the last century or two, it's pretty clear that having the decision-makers be white men until a couple decades ago has dramatically shaped what we have deemed worthy of investigation, and greatly constrained discovery. Ironically, just as funding bodies like NIH and NSF were starting to finally incentivize more inclusive and representative study designs, the DOGE/MAGA thought police has shut these efforts down.
Great essay, thanks! I love the distinction between discovery and justification. Very clear and very apt.
I'm not sure I get your last point about hypotheses generated by marginalization exhibiting wider variance. I can see how those hypotheses are outside the "range" of ones made by non-marginalized people; in this sense taking them into account create more variance amongst all hypothesis. But why would hypothesis made by marginalized people be, as a class, exhibiting more variance than the class of hypothesis made by non-marginalized people?
Good question. It's mostly just a hunch based on exposure. But perhaps marginalized people, skeptical of ideas from dominant groups, react by thinking outside the box, and this can lead them to reject good mainstream ideas as well as bad.
Great points about Lidal’s paper. I think he’s coming up with really interesting and plausible stuff.
I also think Dubois’s chapter on double consciousness is much more complex and ambivalent than the bad old cartoon interpretation. If the standpoint of the oppressed is strictly better, what are we supposed to make of the metaphor of the veil? Of the claim that the world awards those behind the veil “no true self-consciousness”? Of the claim that they “would not Africanize America”?
Here’s the full context of the last quote.
“He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
To me, the value of standpoint epistemology is that of developing novel hypotheses, but its value stops right there.
If you assume that there are infinitely more false hypotheses than true hypotheses, then any hypothesis, regardless of the standpoint of the person that developed it, is far more likely false than true. And so the truth-value of any hypothesis should not rest on the standpoint of the person that developed it but on the robustness of the empirical evidence collected about it (and, even then, only after this evidence has been critically tested, investigated, and analyzed in good faith).
Likewise, if you assume that everyone, regardless of their standpoint, is subject to biases and limitations (like, very relevantly, observer’s bias), then no standpoint should be seen as having greater or lesser access to the approximate truth of a subject.
It’s true that some hypotheses should be taken more seriously than others, and it’s fair, I think, to consider the personal, lived experience (read: standpoint) of the person who developed the hypothesis when making decisions about which hypotheses to take seriously (and, therefore, which to test with empirical evidence) and which to ignore. But just because someone has personal experience with a subject doesn’t mean that they understand it: think about how many people have gotten sick over the last 300,000 years of human history, then consider just how many completely wrong explanations we had for this (like “bad air”) until germ theory was first developed and tested only a few hundred years ago. If the experience of getting sick doesn’t give you any special ability to understand the mechanisms that cause sickness, then why would the experience of any other subject give you any special insight into understanding how it generally, approximately tends to work?
If you can accept that all people are epistemological equals in that it’s much easier to have false beliefs than true ones, then you should never assume that a person’s standpoint gives them any special access to truth; in fact, it’s only likely to make their beliefs wrong in new and different ways.
We can’t ever hope to approximate the truth of the world without, first, speculating about it, and diverse standpoints can clearly help us to generate new speculations, which is great, but treating these speculations as anything but speculations is, to my mind, a very silly (but unfortunately pernicious) intellectual error.
Awesome piece. I think Dan Williams has a longer essay that is on this point as well.
"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."
This is not the core idea in standpoint theory. The core idea is, simply put, that our This is not the core idea in standpoint theory. The core idea is, simply put, that our understanding of the world is situated—it is a direct critique of the “view from nowhere” that underpins dominant moral theories and epistemologies. The prevailing idea that one can remove oneself from one’s experience and arrive at objectively true observations concerning others’ experience or a universalistic experience is not only a myth that stems from the modern belief in a pure intellectual self, disconnected from bodily and sentimental experience, but, as history has shown, it has also worked to reinforce structural oppression. For example, in every country that has experienced colonialism, Black people’s health is significantly worse than that of their white counterparts (Arianne Shahvisi, 2022).
You are right to observe that, for some, this means socially marginalized groups may have a vantage point that is sensitive to power asymmetries and therefore better qualified to examine the relationship between knowledge and oppression. However, this does not mean there is a need to abandon the scientific process altogether, and definitely does not mean that “marginalized groups are just overall smarter than privileged groups.” The interpretation that some identities are better suited for knowledge discovery is a misinterpretation and probably comes from an analysis that leaves the logic of identity intact, something that contemporary standpoint theory scholars have discussed in depth, following postmodernist criticism and Black and decolonial thought. See, for instance, Iris Young, Joan Tronto, María Lugones, Collins, and Haraway.
Standpoint theory has a history of more than three decades of lively discussion and has come a long way. It is worth looking at its history and how it has evolved.
Thanks. Standpoint theory is pretty diverse, and you're right that one element is that knowledge is situated. But that's not all there is to it. Check out the second two elements given in the IEP entry.
(2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. (3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized. (https://iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/)
Or look at discussion of the "inversion thesis," formulated e.g., as the idea that "certain [socially marginalized] locations themselves foster more accurate beliefs, not only concerning one's own social position, but also the social and natural world more broadly” (https://philarchive.org/rec/SAIPAP-4)
My essay is trying to eliminate bad interpretations of this further element and articulate a better interpretation.
I find the main thrust of this argument to be compelling even as I disagree with the conclusions reached by most of its antecedents. The idea that different perspectives lead to different observations and thus different hypotheses ought to be obvious on its face. The idea that testing these hypotheses should be done in a sort of ideological clean room should attain the same degree of obviousness.
Instead of talking about different ways of knowing we should talk about different vistas of experience. I love this.