Standpoint Epistemology
Not Just for Philosophers Anymore

3,188 words

The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know — to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. — Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The term “epistemology” is a portmanteau word derived from ancient Greek which has become one of the central pillars of Western philosophy, concerned as it is with truth and the conditions for truth. Standpoint epistemology, a recent arriviste on the philosophical scene, has rapidly become one of the supporting pillars of “woke,” and places the whole concept of truth at serious hazard as it escapes the seminar rooms to infect the wider populace like an academic lab-leak.

Standpoint epistemology has had something of a journey, travelling from Marxism to militant feminism before arriving in today’s Western culture, such as it is. The phrase “standpoint epistemology” raises forebodings just by its construction. Epistemology deals not with the truth per se but the conditions that must be met before something can be considered to be true. It has interpersonality woven into it. A standpoint is just that, a point at which one stands. Debaters hold various differing standpoints. The suspicion that the truth may be one or another standpoint or position to the exclusion of others is not just anti-communitarian, it is dangerously close to solipsism, to which we will return.

Standpoint epistemology, by its own account, is statedly not in the Western tradition of epistemology (tainted as that now is within academia by virtue of its whiteness), whose center of gravity is truth and the conditions that affirm it. Nor is it disinterested enquiry, which ought to be epistemology’s gold standard:

[F]eminist epistemologies seem to be located within the contradictory pull of the politicized material and experiential concerns of feminism and the abstract universal concerns of epistemology. Feminist epistemological projects began as a critique of that tradition but have evolved beyond the critical to reframe and reconceptualize the problems of knowledge and the epistemological project itself. — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, italics added

Casting epistemology as a “project,” as though it were some sales figures allocated to a team member in a marketing office, may be technocratically fashionable, but it makes a staggering claim about the nature of truth before any such project has begun. Epistemology is not a “project,” it’s not a vacation requirement for a grade-schooler, it is the record of the millennia-old philosophical attempt to come as close to the truth as that discipline can. Feminist epistemology, springing into life like something from the Greek mythology it despises, is not an attempt to do the same and is very much a project, and a vanity project at that. Standpoint epistemology may be a descendant of Marxism, cultural or standard issue, but it is not concerned with the redistribution of wealth, more with the redistribution of truth. And should the ivory towers of academe seem too remote and inconsequential to have any meaningful effect on ordinary lives, it is instructive to see standpoint epistemology at work in the wider community.

Philosophy is often chided for being otherworldly and for not being relevant to the lives of real people. Standpoint epistemology rather breaks that mold, as a very small sample of its range of effects shows. In 2018, a British doctor with 26 years’ experience was fired for “misgendering” a patient. In 2021, a schoolgirl was raped in a female bathroom in Loudon, Virginia. Her 15-year-old rapist wore a skirt. The same year, Professor Kathleen Stock, an analytical philosopher, was forced to resign her post at the University of Sussex for comments she made about gender in both her lectures and a book (I’ve written more fully about Professor Stock at Counter-Currents elsewhere). All three may be surprised to learn — although Professor Stock would be better equipped to understand — that their respective calamities had one common cause: standpoint epistemology.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.

Here, the epistemological standpoint concerns gender, and that passage from the woke mission statement which states that an individual who elects to choose a gender different from their actual gender is to be regarded as having that elective gender. This, as we shall see, extends to the individual seen as a legal entity.

At this point it is common to write that of course there are people with genuine psychological problems concerning their gender, and of course some people are born in the wrong body. But those people are a psychological sideshow at best. They are not as important as rape, not as important as a popular academic being defenestrated from the Marxist finishing school my alma mater has become, not as important as a community losing an experienced medic with over two decades of experience over an impertinent frivolity.

Proponents of standpoint epistemology know enough of the new cultural habitat to employ a little victimhood. A paper by Briana Toole published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press, one of the world’s most famous academic imprints, is entitled “Demarginalizing Standpoint Epistemology.” Its abstract opens with a perfect illustration of standpoint philosophy posing as a corrective to centuries of intellectual endeavor undertaken by privileged white men:

Standpoint epistemology, the view that social identity is relevant to knowledge-acquisition, has been consigned to the margins of mainstream philosophy. In part, this is because the principles of standpoint epistemology are taken to be in opposition to those which guide traditional epistemology.

Standpoint epistemology, if it really has been “consigned to the margins of philosophy,” deserves nothing more than a kick in the rear to speed it on its way, and administered by anyone who claims to be serious about philosophy. But that once-venerable discipline lacks the cultural power it used to have. Withering on the vine academically; seen as antique in the wake of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; racialized; decolonized; and generally traduced by the new ideologues, philosophy lost her employment as theology’s handmaiden only to find she couldn’t get a job in the new marketplace of science and technology. After the Industrial Revolution, philosophy was redundant, left with the things science had no use for, those being primarily morality and metaphysics.

Now, just as it is axiomatic that after war the victors write the history books, so too in the culture wars, where the “woke” victors are getting to write the philosophy books as well. The first European universities, in Bologna and Paris in the twelfth century, taught philosophy (principally Aristotle’s Organon) as the curriculum’s core subject before going on to their chosen field, usually theology in France and medicine and law in Italy. The faculty of and texts studied at these original universities were incidentally elected by the student body, and Professor Stock will ruefully compare this with the way students run today’s campuses, as they clearly do. But, as noted, philosophy now haunts the places she used to own in search of a little work. Philosophy is weak, and epistemology ailing with it. Enter standpoint epistemology, culturally prominent and with the weight of the state behind it.

Standpoint epistemology reduces to the standard cultural-Marxist talisman of oppressor/oppressed. Have dialectic, will travel, and the statement that oppressed minorities have access to a competing version of truth by virtue of their oppression is, like so much of “woke” theory, critical race theory and its offshoots, composed of what I have called an ex cathedra statement created ex nihilo. It has all the gravitas and range of effects of a Medieval Papal pronouncement but no supporting reasoning, like a mathematics answer submitted without the workings.

But there is a far more serious consequence. Truth is now no longer the preserve of philosophers but of politically-active sociologists, and the identity one selects from a supermarket-like range has overtaken the standard Enlightenment apparatus of reason as granting access to the truth according to a sort of societal sympathy vote. But the final and most ruinous aspect of standpoint epistemology is that it is a road that leads to solipsism.

Solipsism is Cartesian universal skepticism as a pathological condition. The entry for the topic in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy — invaluable and cheap; do buy one — defines solipsism as “[t]he belief that only oneself exists.” This radical existential autonomy can be a childlike sense of independence from reality, or a darker version with wider implications:

A more radical version is that one’s own immediate experience has a fundamental, self-certifying reality and that comparable knowledge of “physical” or “public” items is unobtainable.

This, of course, is Cartesian territory. René Descartes is best known for the cogito ergo sum argument, that universal doubt can be overcome by recognizing the exemplary act of thinking itself, which guarantees existence even if perception is faulty or reason skewed. The argument, by which the existence of the real world of experience is shown as existing outside of the percipient mind, is actually an unpacking of the so-called “proto-cogito” argument made by St. Augustine in City of God, but Descartes gets the credit historically. But another, less-lauded aside in the Meditations also repays inspection:

[M]y mind loves to wander, and cannot yet suffer itself to be restrained within the just limits of truth . . . [W]hen looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men . . . And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge these to be men . . . by the faculty of judgment which rests in my mind, I comprehend that which I believed I saw with my eyes.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

To believe that rather than passersby one is seeing robots dressed for the cold, or simply hats and coats containing nothing, would be a sign of a problematic psychological condition, a type of de-realization. Fortunately for the human mind, the faculty of judgment is available to keep psychological order. Therefore, when we look down and see the procession of hats and coats, we judge that we are seeing people, other people, differing in identity from ourselves.

Believing oneself to be the only existence in existence is an interesting thought experiment — as much of philosophy is — but once it begins to operate in the realm of the real, when it even leagues with punitive governmental legislation, truth becomes a yard sale. And you had better get there early before all the good stuff is gone. The inbuilt fault line within standpoint epistemology is that by wresting the arbitration concerning the truth from the white patriarchy and granting it to the favored oppressed, they have left it running wild with no keeper.

The current parsing out of contemporary identity politics comes with a goodie bag filled with privileged epistemological vantage points. Everyone outside of an asylum has a coherent epistemology, whether they like it or not, but to divorce that system of organization from the communal and tether it to the individual is ruinous. To replace “experience” (fundamentally interpersonal) with the modish “lived experience” (quasi-solipsistic) is to make truth a lottery as each standpoint becomes valid. To paraphrase Obama: If you like your worldview, you can keep it.

It may not seem relevant to include Oprah Winfrey in this tale of competing epistemologies, but she plays a significant role by virtue of her position in media-tainment. Her interview with the curious creature Meghan Markle included the claim that the British Royal Family is “institutionally racist,” and Ms. Winfrey conceded that, while there was no right or wrong in the rather spurious claim, “her truth” (i.e. Markle’s) was equally as valid as any other narrative. Standpoint epistemology just got the equivalent of a half-time ad slot at the Super Bowl.

Standpoint epistemology also offers something for the resentful. It is, effectively, giving a formal academic framework to a person’s grudges, which will already have arrived pre-fabricated via their prior education. It also births a whole new language, or at least a whole new arrangement of language. Simply noting perceived injustice and railing against it is shouting in a bar. Far better to concoct a lexicon which can give your animosity against inequality both the respected livery of academia and the attention of the media. And if the effects of this lexicon can be rendered punitive, then power and control — two sides of the same coin — will not be long in arriving.

The aim of the “woke” lexicon is not to achieve the upper hand in debate — Kryptonite to the Left — but to control meaning itself as a facilitator of power. This is the danger represented by the extreme end of the modern Left, the academics and public-sector managers just as much as overweight street tumblers with nose rings and bad haircuts, that it threatens to untether the truth as being correspondent with the real world. All that matters is the ascension to and the maintenance of power. Not only is truth the first victim of the culture war, it is viewed as acceptable collateral damage. Socrates warns us of a dangerous dichotomy in Plato’s Philebus:

[S]urely we are not now simply contending in order that my view or that yours may prevail, but I presume that we ought both of us to be fighting for the truth.

But the truth for the malevolent Left is malleable, Protean, and has no fixed referent outside of a self-referential arbitration sanctioned by standpoint epistemology. The Left are contending not for the truth but so that their model of society will prevail and, as Solzhenitsyn wrote in August 1917, “If the truth doesn’t suit us, away with the truth!” Standpoint epistemology is a preliminary stage on the way to mandated communal ontology and, far more seriously, it has wormed its way into the legislative process.

The UK got its first taste of standpoint epistemology funding legislation following the controversial 1999 MacPherson Report, which was conducted after the brutal killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a gang of white men in 1993. The report led to the now-notorious (and ubiquitous) description of the United Kingdom’s police force as “institutionally racist.” But one sentence is emblematic of standpoint epistemology in action: “A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person” [Italics added].

This is a handy get-out clause for the perpetrator of crime. If someone else sees the incident and deems it racist — and that party might be a stranger, the perp’s mother, or a disgruntled gang associate — then it is racist. Reality is unimportant; what counts is input from individual standpoints, preferably sited well within the territory of oppressed victimhood. This is the sharp end of standpoint epistemology, but it operates in more mundane ways in order to enforce the new societal order.

Anyone insisting on personal pronouns being used is a radical standpoint epistemologist. They are informing you, via the delivery system of their social requirements and protocols, that you are to deny your reality — the one you implicitly share with most other people — and accept and announce theirs. This is power at the capillary point of its application, power intruding into basic social transactions.

Britain’s recent Online Safety Bill continues the new strain of legislation laced with standpoint epistemology. Definitions are seen as outmoded, and justice will be better served by listening to people’s feelings, and the Bill

. . . will make it easier to prosecute online abusers by abandoning the requirement under the old offences for content to fit within proscribed yet ambiguous categories such as “grossly indecent,” “obscene” or “indecent”. Instead it is based on the intended psychological harm, amounting to at least serious distress, to the person who receives the communication, rather than requiring proof that harm was caused [Italics added].

The new epistemology finds the self-evidence of truth not to reside in the fixity and applicability of the statement, which can be shared and assessed by all, but the metaphysical self, the subject. Thus, a subject only finds the idea of a self-evident truth strange when the evidence resides in the outside world, available for a community of investigators to compare and contrast, whereas the several actual “truths” are those garnered from a thousand viewpoints, each of which is true. Again, there is no anchor-point, no foundation or means of stability. Let a thousand realities bloom, eight billion monads and their lived experience ready to report back on their truths. For something to be self-evident, for the postmodern citizen the evidence of the self will suffice; any self, as long as it comes in the right color and has the required resumé of oppression. Without a center of gravity, truth relativizes and becomes ideological power play. No debate, just bring your ideas to the party. Everyone is invited and everyone gets in.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s From Plato to Postmodernism here

This “opinionated relativism” is the epistemological turn we have seen accelerate this millennium, the fault line running through the decline of the West. Productive of anarchy and nihilism, this ability to shift ideological position and even one’s identity with no epistemological justification for it is usually the prerogative of children and the insane. Now, it is standard practice for those who are increasingly running Western societies.

When one reads phrases such as “a post-truth society,” or sees a bubble-gum version of Derrida apparently explaining that “social constructs can be deconstructed” as well as any number of other epistemological fortune-cookie mottoes, there is a sense that the children want to dress and behave like adults, like Mummy and Daddy. But it is not quite so anodyne. Adults acting like children is amusing in the right context but rather more serious in others. The problem with children is that they are all self. We often hear of approaches to a given problem as being “person-centered.” The West’s problem is that its populace, as well as its rulers, have all become person-centered, with the results we see around us as Europe, Great Britain, and the United States slip ever further into cultural decline.

The “fight for the truth” has funded Hollywood storylines, political campaigns, and governmental inquiries. Now we have moved on, and the fight is for the right to set the conditions of truth, for the role of epistemological arbitrator. And the incumbents are unlikely to relinquish power easily. There is a type of cultural Iron Dome in place on the Left which ruthlessly attacks anyone who is seen as critical of its diktats. The squealing outrage over Dave Chappelle’s latest jibe at the LGBTQ “community” also struck at standpoint epistemology, an attack the Left dimly understand is counterrevolutionary and therefore unpardonable.

Technology has provided Generation Z with everything it can from the delights of the digital world, but now all the levels of all the video games have been played and mastered, all the influencers are saying and doing the same thing, and anything offering intellectual sustenance is off the menu anyway for the Left. They need something more: next-generation kicks, an aggravated solipsism that can allow today’s psychologically skittish young people to remake the world in their image. And, in standpoint epistemology, they have the means. It was only a matter of time.