Ecological Thinking and Epistemic Location: The Local and the Global

I was in the audience for a book panel on Lorraine Code's book, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (1991), held at the 1992 annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA). It was at those meetings as well that the CPA voted to implement an affirmative-action policy for hiring women in philosophy. That these two things happened at the same conference was more than mere coincidence. Code's work, both before and after What Can She Know? forms part of a history of feminists finding their voice and their place in the discipline of philosophy, a discipline that had (and some would say, continues to have) a too-rigid understanding of the proper methods and topics of philosophical inquiry and of who is capable of engaging in this inquiry.

I was a graduate student at the time and these conference events helped shaped who I was becoming as a philosopher and a feminist. I learned that Code and other feminists were raising important objections to mainstream epistemological accounts of knowers as interchangeable and of knowledge as emerging from a methodology that is impartial, objective, and bias free. By rejecting the idea that knowledge is value neutral and that description can be sharply delineated from prescription, they challenged the separation of epistemology from moral and political theory. And by rejecting the idea that truth emerges from philosophers' thinking and writing in isolation from real-world circumstances, they made the case for breaking down barriers between philosophy and other disciplines. If real-world circumstances matter to explanations of how knowledge is acquired, what can be known, and who gets to know, then women's experiences as described by sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, scientists, and other professionals are relevant to accounts of knowledge. I also learned that these attempts to loosen the boundaries of the discipline and to broaden the inquiry were being challenged and resisted.

The panelists and audience members were particularly concerned about Code's idea that knowledge is constructed in ways that make people's location and circumstances relevant to accounts of what they can know placing her dangerously close to relativism. If who and where you are, what you do, and what you are taken to be shape the facts, then it seems that there are no "facts." Most important with respect to Code's work at the time was the worry that if there are no facts, then questions could be raised about the very legitimacy of the feminist project of describing the facts of women's oppression and being committed to eradicating it. Code did not answer questions back then about whether the relativist charge could be made to stick. I now realize that refusing to answer that question was Code's way of answering it because it pointed to why the philosophers' debate about relativism and truth more generally was itself problematic.

A telling and perhaps surprising passage from the 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy reads: "Contemporary philosophers generally apply the term [relativism] to some position they disagree with or consider absurd, seldom to their own views; social scientists, however, often classify themselves as relativists" (Edwards 1967, 75). If we understand relativism as holding that truth is merely what individuals or members of a particular community believe, then it seems all too easy to conclude that relativists give up on truth altogether. But this prospect seems threatening mostly, if not only, to philosophers committed to the idea that if there is no truth in the heavens apart from human interpretation, then all interpretations by individuals or cultures are on a par. Code's book and her way of engaging with the issues at that panel in 1992 succeeded in revealing the spaces between realism and relativism, in opening up inquiry into philosophy's commitment to particular accounts of knowledge, and in examining the effects of these accounts on those who do not have a voice or who are not believed. By revealing gaps in traditional topics, methods, and modes of inquiry, Code created spaces for thinking differently and for...