Knowing and being known about

Miranda Fricker claims that one form sexism takes is the denigration of womens' status as knowers. The perception is self-fulfilling: because women are not taken to be knowers (e.g., to have epistemic authority), they in fact wind up with less epistemic authority than they could (and, presumably, should) have. The process by which this is made true is called "looping" (at least by Haslanger and Langton). A Beauvoir-ian critique is appropriate here: one shouldn't directly dispute the truth of the claim that women unequal knowers. Instead, one should demonstrate that, to the extent that the claim is true, it is only "contingently" true (contingent in a special sense which Beauvoir drew attention to--ie., changeable). Since the status quo is revealed to be both contingent and manifestly unjust, the proper course of action suggests itself.

One way "looping" happens--though probably not the only way--is in performatives. If men (as opposed to women) have the requisite authority to successfully execute performatives, they will more often be in a position to make certain sentences express true propositions. This is something that MacKinnon has often pointed out: there is a relationship between power (that which bestows or constitutes authority) and truth. Or, to put the same point a bit differently: the more power you have, the more you know, because of your ability to make things true. The advantage a powerful person has when it comes to knowing things does not indicate any superior rationality.

It may be a prerequisite of the Beauvoir-ian maneuver to be anti-essentialist about the gender of women. This does not seem to be a problematic commitment; it was certainly a commitment for which Beauvoir presented a strong (and eloquent) defense. It is really no more than Kripke's acceptance of modality de re; in other words, a working assumption of contemporary analytic philosophy. [*ah, minus Kripke's odd essentialism of origins!]

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All of the foregoing seems unquestionably correct to me. But what interests me more is not so much women's status as knowers, but their status as things that are known about. So here is an additional empirical claim I am prepared to make about the status of women: women are denigrated in their status as known (about).

There seems to be a divergence of views on this point, akin to reactions to the claim that women are not knowers. One is to deny the truth of the claim. The problem is that in practice this means women are mistaken for men. For example, women were, for a long time, considered "small, weak men" from the point of view of medical research, with deplorable results.

An alternative, which I see everywhere these days, is to accept the claim, because (the story goes) women are intrinsically mysterious. Oppressive features of such view suggest themselves immediately. Because women are regarded as mysterious, there is no profit in doing research about them. The result is, of course, that less is known about women, which reinforces the impression that they are mysterious and unknowable. (I think there is something right here about the society characterizes the psychology of women, as well as their physiology. Thus "what do women want?" is somehow a bizarrely unknowable question, rather than a stupid question which can only receive an equally stupid answer.)

I believe we are ripe for a Beauvoir-ian move here as well: it is contingently true that women are "mysterious"; ie, that less is known about them than is known about men. Women's status as mysterious is not essential to them; rather, it tells us something about us: about the epistemic community that considers them. (Complaints about projection go here.) Thus when Luce Irigaray complains that the concept woman has no coherent unity*--all the coherent unity having been awarded to the concept man--I take her to be making a true claim about the concept. The corresponding claim about women themselves is, I believe, false; at least, once we make the scope distinction, there is no reason to believe that it is true.

(*Beauvoir, of course, would add here that there is something intrinsically confused and contradictory about the ordinary socially accepted notion of woman, since society compels women to assume a contradictory role as simultaneously free and unfree.)

I think my position would not be widely accepted by feminists. The reason is that it is here that the more metaphysical point Beauvoir wanted to make appears to come into conflict with a progressive goal to which feminism has been drawn: to acknowledge women as a diverse category. As Butler puts it, feminism should not be exclusive; it should not burden women with an image of themselves they cannot recognize. After all, we have had enough of that!

Does the claim that women are diverse conflict with the denial of the claim that women are mysterious? It might. A sufficiently heterogenous set of objects will fail to constitute a projectable kind; thus there will be obstacles in principle to knowing truths about such a (gerrymandered) kind. But I can be conciliatory: the thesis is that if women are diverse, they are not that diverse. A brief survey of the extent of the gerrymandering which philosophers can conceive should be sufficient to reassure all parties that both parties can be right. Most terms are vague in the philosophical sense, but no injustice is thereby perpetrated upon the borderline cases. Closer to home: women's magazines present me with a portrait of womanhood which I do not identify with. But it does not depress me, and it certainly does not oppress me.