Antifoundationalism

1
Anti-foundationalism

• rejects the view that there can be an ultimate
  unjustified justifier for all knowledge claims
• hence opposes both foundationalist rationalism
  and foundationalist empiricism
• holds that justification involves appeal to the
  appropriate knowledge formation process

2
Feminist epistemology

• Social epistemology is the anti-foundational view
  that social factors about knowledge production
  crucially determine what we can know.
• Feminist epistemology is one form of social
  epistemology that claims that the sex of the
  knower is a crucial determinant in what she or he
  can be said to know.

3
Code, Is the Sex of the Knower Significant?

• Traditional knowledge claim S knows that p.
• Asking what sex is S? is traditionally
  considered an ad hominem fallacy -- personal
  features of knower irrelevant to justification.
• Code argues the sex of the knower has been
  implicitly considered epistemologically
  significant.

4
What does it mean to say that the sex of the
knower is epistemically significant?

• Some types of knowledge may be inaccessible to
  one or the other sex -- inaccessibility problem.
• One or the other sex may be taken to have no
  authority over some types of knowledge claims --
  authority problem.

5
Inaccessibility problem

• Some knowledge may be inaccessible to one or the
  other sex
• because of social roles into which the sexes are
  trained
• because of different biological capacities of
  each sex
• because one sex is denied access to the
  institutions that support knowledge production
  (sexism)

6
Authority problem

• One or the other sex may not be considered
  credible when they say I know that p because of
  the authority that is invested in persons of one
  sex or the other this is the ad hominem fallacy

7
Masculine values in method, content, and norms of
epistemology

• The adversarial method
• Propositional knowledge as paradigm form of
  knowledge
• Knowledge to be owned and produced by lone
  thinker