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MIRANDA FRICKER
To cite this article: MIRANDA FRICKER (1999) Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege,
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29:sup1, 191-210, DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1999.10716836
[T)he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes - pur-
poses that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees
inimical to our development and even existence. 1
We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of op-
pression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there
is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the
world is "structured" by the powerful to the detriment of the power-
less, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not
been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The
word 'structured' may be read materially, so as to imply that social
institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as
to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for
present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading,
which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage
in "structuring" our understandings of the social world. I will try to
present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope
thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a
kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically
oppressed.
If the possibility of epistemic oppression does not register much in
mainstream theory of knowledge, it registers loud and clear in femi-
1 N. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO:
'Westview Press, 1998), 241.
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Women's labor, like that of the male worker, is contact with material necessity.
Their contribution to subsistence, like that of the male worker, involves them
in a world in which the relation to nature and to concrete human requirements
is central, both in the form of interaction with natural substances whose qual-
ity, rather than quantity, is important to the production of meals, clothing, etc.,
and in the form of close attention to the natural changes in these substances. 6
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Next she highlights certain features of women's labour that are seen
to distinguish it from male proletarian labour: the "double shift" of
paid work followed by unpaid domestic labour; the larger proportion
of time devoted to producing "use-values" rather than commodities;
and the particular nature of the repetitiousness of women's work where
not only does she repeatedly make the meals, as if on a production
line, but she also repeatedly dears up after their production (and con-
sumption), too. This rather bleak view of women's unpaid domestic
labour is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir's description of domestic
drudgery and "immanence" in The Second Sex:
Since the husband is the productive worker, he is the one who goes beyond
family interest to that of society, opening up a future for himself through co-
operation in the building of the collective future; he incarnates transcendence.
Woman is doomed to the continuation of the species and the care of the home
-that is to say, to immanence?
7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Picador,
1953),449.
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from that social positioning. That view has rather to be struggled for
against the current of a corrupting ideology. Just as proletarians' ac-
tual views may be distorted by capitalist ideology, so may women's
actual views be distorted by patriarchal ideology - or by gender ide-
ology, which notion is perhaps the more relevant these days. 8 The mis-
match between the ideal and the actual views held by members of
oppressed groups is explained in each case by the notion of false con-
sciousness. Consequently, feminist standpoint theorists argue that the
views of social reality that are proper to the "standpoint of women,"
as Alison Jaggar has called it, can only arise as the result of intellectual
and political struggle to overcome the false consciousness imposed by
patriarchal ideology:
[T)he standpoint of women is not discovered by surveying the beliefs and atti-
tudes of women under conditions of male dominance, just as the standpoint of
the proletariat is not discovered by surveying the beliefs and attitudes of work-
ers under capitalism. The standpoint of women is that perspective which re-
veals women's true interests and this standpoint is reached only through
scientific and political struggle.9
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10 For an argument questioning the degree of the fidelity, see Bat-Ami Bar On,
'Marginality and Epistemic Privilege,' in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. L. Alcoff
and E. Potter (New York/London: Routledge, 1993).
11 Hartsock, 'The Feminist Standpoint,' 290.
12 In the original paper Hartsock does sound a cautionary note about the issue:
"In addressing the institutionalized division of labour, I propose to lay aside
the important differences among women across race and class boundaries and
instead search for central commonalities ... Still, I adopt this strategy with some
reluctance, since it contains the danger of making invisible the experience of
lesbians or women of color" ('The Feminist Standpoint,' 290). But a cautionary
note cannot dispel the difficulty.
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The place of women ... is where the work is done to facilitate man's occupation
of the conceptual mode of action. Women keep house, bear and care for chil-
dren, look after him when he is sick, and in general provide for the logistics of
his bodily existence.... Women work in and around the professional manage-
rial scene in analogous ways ... They do the clerical work, giving material form
to the words or thoughts of the boss. They do the routine computer work, the
interviewing for the survey, the nursing, the secretarial work. At almost every
point women mediate for men the relation between the conceptual mode of
action and the actual concrete forms on which it depends. 15
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Admittedly, this picture of women's lives may still be all too familiar.
But shared domestic labour between men and women has increased,
even if the bulk still falls to women in the notorious "double shift."
Future progress will involve a continued movement away from a uni-
formity of activities among women, paid and unpaid. Consequently,
even if there were currently enough uniformity in women's labour so
as to make available a distinctive feminist standpoint, no feminist
would hope that this situation continue. Thus - overgeneralization
aside- women's labour could in any case provide only a transient,
unstable grounding for a feminist standpoint.
Our objection has been an empirical one: women's activity is not so
uniform as standpoint theory requires. This should not be conflated
with any charge of essentialism. Perhaps it will help avoid confusion
to say something about how things stand with regard to the frequently
made objection that standpoint theory is essentialist. How things stand
depends on how we understand essentialism, of course. Suppose we
define it so that a claim about women is "essentialist" just if it is about
the alleged nature of woman, or some other essence of woman. 16 On
this definition we can quickly see that Hartsock's view is not essen-
tialist, for her account is not one of women's nature, or essence, but
rather of women's place in history.
This may seem too quick, for some may want to define essential-
ism more generously so that mere universalism is sufficient for it. On
the generous definition, if Hartsock's claims about women's labour
and the feminist standpoint have universalist pretensions, then they
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20 See, for instance, C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers
2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); P. Winch, The Idea of a Social
Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1990); and J. Searle,
The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995). Searle's account
is perhaps more properly categorized as a species of conventionalism than a
hermeneutical view, but I use 'hermeneutical' in the broadest possible sense to
capture the basic idea that social facts are dependent upon some human practice
of meaning. The differences between approaches within this broad category
are not of present concern. For a discussion of the different approaches, see F.
Collin, Social Reality (London/New York: Routledge, 1997).
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Our extant practice- the meanings we actually make use of- is also
a site of potential meanings, any of which we may come to actualize
in practice as we are prompted to by the facts. 22
The possibility of this sort of conceptual innovation raises a politi-
cal question: whose outlooks, and whose interests, are served by the
set of existing concepts? With the possibility of such a question, we
confront the disunity of the "we" who agree in form of life. If the dif-
ferent "we"s within a form of life stand to one another in relations of
advantage and disadvantage, power and powerlessness, then this in-
equality is likely to be reiterated in interpretive practice. But these rela-
tions of advantage and disadvantage - the interpretive inequalities
-will be especially hard to detect. For it is precisely in the formation
of our tools of understanding that the inequality inheres.
How does such hermeneutical inequality come about? Let's start
with the idea that one's identity and social experience condition one's
interpretive habits. This is in itself an uncontroversial and even mun-
dane point: because of who (or what) one is, one is likely to pick out
certain aspects of some situation as significant, while someone with a
different social experience is likely to pick out different aspects. But
this seemingly mundane point has radicalizing implications in the
hermeneutical context. Given that selected features of situations are
the materials for an interpretive process, then the fact that one has
picked out these rather than those features as salient may lead one to
a very different interpretation of events from the next person's. If, for
example, someone fails to pick up on the significance for a given in-
teraction of the fact that only one of the two participants has the power
to fire the other, or to fail the other in exams, or to prevail in a physical
fight, then she may misunderstand the nature of the interaction alto-
gether. This sort of misunderstanding may arise from a more or less
systematic cognitive failing on her part. More interestingly, there can
be collective systematic cognitive failings of a similar kind. Where a
given misinterpretation stems from a collective failure to understand
the nature of some type of social experience- what it's like, for ex-
22 There is, of course, more to be said on this subject, but this is not the place to
try to say it.
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V Conclusion
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The hallmark of reality ... is that it looks different to those differently placed in
it; consequently realism requires an epistemology of largesse: the problem for
knowledge is the problem of partiality not in the sense of bias but in the sense
of incompleteness. 24
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