Starting from Marginalized Lives: A Conversation with Sandra Harding.

Abstract

For philosopher of science Sandra Harding, dominant traditions of Western science suffer from a want of objectivity. As a major exponent of what been called feminist standpoint theory, Harding argues that maximized not by excluding social factors from production of knowledge?as Western scientific method purported to do?but precisely by process of inquiry from an explicitly social location: lived experience of those persons who have traditionally been excluded from knowledge production (for example, women). This methodological innovation turns traditional standards of science and philosophy against themselves in what Harding describes as a deconstructive strategy. By taking experience of of color and gays and lesbians and working class people and people of various ethnicities as a starting point?rather than as a foundation in traditional sense?standpoint epistemology seeks to produce a stronger objectivity, a generally body of knowledge, and a way beyond impasse between foundationalism on one hand and relativism, or naive experientialism, on other. As a corollary, standpoint theory entails an epistemological as well as ethical obligation on of dominant groups to theorize as rigorously as possible their own position as socially situated subjects of knowledge. Thus transmuted in a process of what Harding calls strong reflexivity, dominant position may itself become a positive resource in production of a more generally useful knowledge. As these formulations suggest, standpoint theory participates in postmodern turn away from founda tional epistemologies without, however, abandoning search for what Harding calls the most comprehensive account of how things work. For Harding, feminism is a postmodernism, then, in sense that postmodernism part of modernity... a kind of later development of it. In a similar spirit, Harding acknowledges that her own insistence on language of strong objectivity represents a calculated attempt to appro priate dominant rhetoric of science for purpose of changing how science done, but she also emphasizes that notion of has progressive possibilities in what she terms a substantive sense.