Standpoint Epistemology
The standpoint epistemologist says that a person’s identity or standpoint is relevant to their knowledge in some strong way. For example, whether or not someone is racially black may give them a special epistemic insight into whether they are being treated in a racist way. This standpoint will contribute to their knowledge, but it is a standpoint unavailable to whites.
Standpoint epistemology is part of a family of views called anti-intellectualism, where practical facts make a difference to knowledge. However, what is curious to me is how Toole (2022), leading standpoint epistemologist, puts the matter:
As I will interpret it, standpoint epistemology takes an epistemic agent’s social identity to be a non-epistemic factor that makes a difference to what she is in a position to know. (48)
She goes on to list examples of epistemic features: evidence, truth, reliability, justification. Standpoint epistemologist is distinctive because it identifies a distinctive non-epistemic feature — social identity — to be relevant to our knowledge.
Another way of thinking of things, of course, is to say that social identity is an epistemic feature, although a surprising one. (She mentions this as a possibility at the end of the paper.) If social identity is part of what makes it true that we have knowledge, then it seems plausibly identified as an epistemic feature. So what is at stake in the epistemic/non-epistemic distinction, here?
Standpoint epistemology, as defined as the idea that non-epistemic features make a difference to what a person is a position to know, seems to herd philosophers into objecting to whether identity is really epistemic. But I wonder if the interesting thing about standpoint epistemology might be the way it challenges the epistemic/non-epistemic distinction itself.