Summarizing some key points from Harding and feminist standpoint epistemology:
explicitly focuses on such Others and that Chapter 11 examines how we might
reinvent ourselves as other.}
Harding must deal with the critique of standpoint epistemology according to which it
maintains a commitment to objectivity and foundationalism. She recognizes that
standpoint epistemology must maintain standards but she sees these standards as distinct
from the kind required by conventional epistemology.
The need to maintain standards: there have to be standards for distinguishing
between how I want the world to be and how, in empirical fact, it is. Otherwise,
might makes right in knowledge seeking just as it tends to do in morals and
politics (160). {Is the crux of the problem for Harding? What does she mean by
empirical fact?}
Standpoint theorists do argue that womens lives provide scientifically preferable
starting points for generating and testing scientific hypotheses compared with the
lives of men in the dominant groups.
Distinguishing between womens experience and womens standpoint: what
women say and what women experience do provide important clues for research
designs and results, but it is the objective perspective from womens lives that
gives legitimacy to feminist knowledge (167).
One can rationally distinguish social conditions giving rise to false beliefs from
those giving rise to less false ones (168).
Ambivalence regarding truth: standpoint theory claims that we can provide good
reasons for dividing beliefs into the false and the probably less false (169); we
can sort our beliefs into the more versus the less partial and distorted, or into the
more versus the less false, without having to commit ourselves to the belief that
the results of feminist research are true (185).