(1) Women are unknown.
I think so, but establishing it is a bit trickier, I think, than establishing Fricker's thesis that
(2) Women are not knowers.
Fricker's analysis makes a suggestion about the reason why (2) is true. With "I" standing for the point of view of society at large, (2) can be expanded to:
(2a) Women are not knowers and I believe they are not knowers.
But social wisdom errs in establishing the direction of fit between the two conjuncts of (2a):
(2b) I believe women are not knowers because they are not knowers.
[Form: I believe p because p.]
(2c) Women are not knowers because I believe they are not knowers.
[Form: p, because I believe p.]
(2b) is false, and (2c) is true, and this is what is often missed. Langton puts the point effectively with regard to the belief that women are submissive:
"[Objectifiers] believe truly that women are submissive, [but] their belief about that belief is false. They believe they believe it because women are submissive. Wrong...women are submissive because they believe it." (288)
The direction of fit is, of course, important because if (2b) is true, then discrimination against women is justified. If (2c) is true, then discrimination against women is not justified.
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And (1)? It begins with a lack of interest in women. (Old medical literature is probably the best case here, simply because it is so clear and accessible.)
But what is the significance of this?
First, the claim in (1) is severely underspecified.
Something cannot be "known" or "unknown" simpliciter; things are known or unknown by particular agents (at particular times, under particular modes of presentation, etc., etc...)
So let's be clear: the particular agents we are speaking of are Fricker's agents: the agents that constitute society at large. Men, as disproportionally powerful, are disproportionally represented here.
The mode of presentation under which women are known here is...qua women.
So here is the belief:
(1a) Women are unknown and I believe women are unknown.
(1b) I believe women are unknown because women are unknown.
[Form: I believe p because p.]
(1c) Women are unknown because I believe women are unknown.
[Form: p because I believe p.]
There is a substantive question in epistemology regarding whether I can know something despite my belief that I do not know it (to wit: whether 1c is true a priori where p is a statement about my own epistemic states). But resolving this question isn't really necessary here.
The diagnosis from Fricker (and de Beauvoir) is that discriminators engage in projection: they believe they are responding to an objective feature of the world, but really they are making their beliefs true by responding to them as if they were true. So the truth that "women are unknown" (a formulation which implies some cognitive defect in a potential knower) is instead conceptualized as "women are unknowable" or "women are mysterious" (a formulation which implies that the obstacle to knowledge is to be found in women themselves.)
(1b') I believe women are mysterious because women are mysterious.
[Form: I believe p because p.]
(1c') Women are mysterious because I believe they are mysterious.
[Form: p because I believe p.]
My thesis is that (1b') is false, (1c') is true, and (1) is widely believed. This is an instance of epistemic looping.
***
Why are things unknown? [from old draft]
Why is it hard to know things about nonravens? There are two possible responses: (i) perhaps there are no facts about nonravens, because nonravens do not form a natural kind; [nonraven-hood is not suitable for induction.] (ii) perhaps facts about nonravens do exist, but they are not known because we have not invested sufficient resources in investigating them. The latter option is more cautious: if we are not sure that our kinds do cut the world at its joints, we should be hesitant to conclude that anything we do not know about lacks internal unity. After all, we do not know about it; so we do not know whether it has internal unity.
(1) women are the victims of epistemic discrimination (which may or may not take the form of looping.)
(2) women are inherently so internally diverse that it is impossible to know anything about them as a group.
I want to emphasize that the objective/subjective distinction that is implicit in these competing theses is only a distinction of degree. Both (1) and (2) can be true to some degree, and "impossible" may be too strong a word to characterize the position in (2). To any extent that women are internally diverse, human beings will be internally diverse
What I want to caution against is the characterization of women as "the unknowable half of humankind."
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Tough Love
I don't care whether some women are excluded by a definition of womanhood which is beneficial to women as a whole. Well, ok, I care: but that fact isn't important enough to prevent enacting a policy which is beneficial to women as a whole.
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Do I need to present evidence for (1)? Can I just get away with the comment about "what women want"?
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