I was pointed to your article by Dan Williams and am very glad to have found it. This observation particularly caught my eye:
“We can grant that outsiders will never fully understand what it is like to experience oppression firsthand. But they can still develop significant understanding through imaginative engagement—a process Amy Kind calls “imaginative scaffolding.”15 It involves drawing on familiar emotions or experiences, such as feelings of unease, exclusion, or vulnerability, to build a bridge toward the perspectives of marginalized groups.”
Perhaps this is reductive, but what you describe here looks very much to me like empathy, the cultivation of which I highly endorse.
I would differ, though, with your concluding comment that “President Trump’s dismantling of DEI programs undercuts these voices at a time when their contributions are most needed to combat entrenched inequality.” While I do not by any means agree with Trump’s overall approach, I think it is worth stepping back to assess whether and to what extent DEI programs, as currently configured, are worth preserving.
My own provisional assessment, from what I have seen and read, is that they not only do not work, but are at this point actually helping to harm, cutting us all into grievance-based slices, completely counterproductive to creation of community. Here is what I thought to be a fair-minded, and problem-solving-oriented assessment from a lifelong educator who has been examining this issue for quite some time: https://intrepidednews.com/dismantling-dei-to-reimagine-purpose/
What I worry about, in this current environment, and DEI is just one example, is that too many of us become reactive, such that, when Trump is the one to propose something, the immediate response is we must do the opposite, if that makes sense. I am not by any means suggesting you are doing that, but your thought-provoking article brought this to mind. Thank you.
Thank you for taking the time to read my article and for replying. I completely agree with you that imaginative scaffolding is at least similar to empathy, and might even be the same thing as at least some kinds of empathy (e.g,. cognitive rather than emotional). I actually think empathy plays a really important role in politics, and I've written an article on that topic here: https://philpapers.org/rec/HANEUA. So, I share your interest in cultivating the capacities that help people better grasp perspectives outside their own.
On DEI programs, I actually agree with a lot of what you’re saying. They’re not beyond criticism, and in some cases, they’ve arguably done more harm than good—whether by deepening societal divisions, reinforcing essentialist assumptions, or conflating demographic diversity with cognitive diversity. I wasn’t aiming to give an unqualified defense of them. I think what I was trying to do in the article was circle back to their role and why, despite legitimate criticisms, getting rid of them entirely could risk sidelining voices that might otherwise be overlooked. But I can see how I might have come across as more in favor of them than I actually am.
I’ll take a look at the article you linked. Thanks so much for sharing it! And I also agree with you that we've become too reactive in the sense that we tend to reject anything Trump says. I think this is partly what explains why it was seen as beyond the pale to entertain the "lab-leak" theory back at the start of the pandemic, even though it's now the most likely explanation.
Your thoughtful, intelligent, and informative response makes me even more glad to have discovered you. I look forward to reading the article you linked, and to reading further posts here. I am not a philosopher, and I can find the language used a bit beyond me (but then, I am a retired attorney, and so live in a glass house when it comes to hard-to-decipher language). What I can see from your post here and your generous response is that you, like Dan Williams, are a good teacher with the capacity to challenge and deepen our ability to think constructively about crucial problems in our present moment. Thank you, and welcome to Substack!
I only wish that experiencing oppression encouraged open- mindedness. If it did we’d expect Hamas members to be among the most open-minded people in the Mideast.
I see what you’re getting at, but just to clarify how I think standpoint theorists might reply: the idea isn’t that experiencing oppression automatically fosters open-mindedness—it’s that it can sometimes create insights into power structures, injustice, or social dynamics that others might not easily see. That doesn’t mean every oppressed group or individual will become more open-minded as a result. Not sure if this helps at all. It's definitely not guarantee epistemc virtue. Oppression can also entrench dogmatic thinking, reactionary politics, or ideological rigidity, depending on the conditions.
I guess that points toward the empirical question of how much, *in practice*, these epistemically unique/advantaged positions also tend to come with the other preconditions leading to additional insight (as opposed to remaining untapped potential, or backfiring in some other way per your last sentence). And how this insight shows up.
I have no idea how we would assess or correlate this! Perhaps the very qualities that make such hard-won insights insights, are the same qualities making it hard to quantify, systematically demonstrate or otherwise prove to people who don't have the same epistemic advantage (or to the public at large). The very idea of standpoint privilege implies the need for special methods capable of capturing it in a way that could convince those who don't have it. Still, it would be interesting to survey what formal empirical evidence and supporting research is already out there, flawed or not.
[Edit: Wrote this before seeing Dan Greco's comment - looks like he's covered this already!]
This is a bit orthogonal to your main point, but I want to ask about 3 and 4, the idea that marginalized individuals--by virtue of their marginalization--are likely to have distinctive advantages in understanding oppression, as well as what it would take to combat it.
I think there's a tension between, on the one hand, thinking that these advantages are substantial, and on the other hand, believing in the project of social science. What do I mean by believing in the project of social science? Roughly, believing that the methods appropriate for investigating the social world are largely continuous with the methods appropriate for investigating the natural world. Whether we're trying to learn about the effectiveness of a drug for treating cancer, or an educational intervention for treating illiteracy, we'll want theory, testable hypotheses suggested by theory, and systematic data collection and analysis to actually do the testing. Moreover, once we have all that, the identities of the people involved in the theorizing, data collection, and hypothesis testing largely fall out of the picture. (Not entirely; you might become suspicious of a study that finds that Pfizer's new drug works brilliantly when you learn about financial conflicts of interest on the part of the researchers who conducted the study.)
It seems to me that to the extent that you think social science is required for deep understanding of the social world--just like natural science is required for deep understanding of the natural world--you should also think that whatever epistemic advantages tend to be conferred by marginalization, there's a pretty serious cap on how far they get you, insofar as experiencing marginalization doesn't tend to involve becoming a social scientist, or consuming a great deal of social science. Moreover, whatever the epistemic disadvantages of not being marginalized, there's a floor on how bad things can be, insofar as the non-marginalized *can* become social scientists themselves, or at least can read the research social scientists produce.
I hope this doesn't come across as naively optimistic about the power of social science. The replication crisis illustrates how badly social science can mislead us. But the lesson to draw, I think, is that understanding the social world is really, really hard. If a community of researchers can go so badly wrong even when trying in good faith to be systematic in their data collection and analysis, we should be all the more pessimistic about the prospects for individuals trying to understand the social world using only the data of their own lived experience, even if their experience involves marginalization.
Hi Dan! That's a really interesting challenge about the tension between standpoint epistemology and the idea that social science, properly conducted, should give us the best understanding of oppression and how to combat it. I think I largely agree that, at least ideally, social science would be the best tool for understanding the social world. If the methods are rigorous, the hypotheses well-formed, and the data collection free from distortion, then the identity of the researcher may largely drop out, as you've said.
I hope I've not misinterpreted you, but I would imagine standpoint theorists saying that the social science you describe doesn’t always match reality. One concern is that social scientific inquiry isn’t done in a vacuum—it’s shaped by existing structures of power, funding incentives, and cultural assumptions. If social science data turns out to be skewed by systemic biases, then marginalized perspectives might play an important role in identifying those blind spots. This doesn’t mean that lived experience alone is sufficient to understand oppression, but it does suggest that these perspectives can help guide, refine, and correct social scientific inquiry in ways that might not happen otherwise.
Your comment reminded me of a chapter by Quassim Cassam in "The Epistemology of Democracy," where he argues against people who are pro-empathy for improving understanding in politics. He says we should instead be doing social science and relying on systematic methods of inquiry rather than assuming that imaginative engagement or perspective-taking will lead to accurate knowledge about social and political realities.
I'm not familiar with the Cassam Chapter, I am a big fan of Paul Bloom's "Against Empathy", which sounds similar in spirit.
On the idea that marginalized perspectives can "help guide, refine, and correct social scientific inquiry in ways that might not happen otherwise", I certainly agree with that weak claim. Though I'm agnostic about how significant it ends up being in practice. Here would be an interesting question. There have been lots of attempts to gauge the replicability of various areas of social science. But I don't know if people have ever tried to see whether social scientific research done by racially diverse teams is more reliable--e.g., holds up better under attempts at replication--than research done by racially homogenous teams. By my lights, the question of just how big a corrective role is likely to be played by including diverse perspectives in the practice of social science is itself a social scientific question about which we shouldn't have all that strong a priori opinions.
Also, and along the lines of Susan Shneid's comment, I don't really see what all this has to do with the sorts of programs targeted by the recent executive orders. It really turns on how, in practice, programs bearing the "DEI" label tend to function. My sense is that, at least in the United States, the idea that one of their main functions is to ensure that marginalized perspectives that would otherwise be overlooked are taken seriously--given a seat at the table to contend with other, competing perspectives--is naively optimistic. If anything, I think they tend to have the opposite effect (ie to shrink, rather than expand, the range of perspectives brought to bear on complex social questions). E.g., take the much disputed hypothesis that stigma associated with "acting white" is a significant cause of academic gaps between Black and non-Black students in various educational settings in the United States. You can find social science that seems to point in both directions on whether it's a significant factor. A bit of quick googling will show you prominent Black thinkers who think it's important, and others who regard that theory as racist victim blaming.
Do you think debate about and understanding of this question is likely to be better, or worse, in an institution with an active and powerful DEI office? My pretty strong guess is worse; I think given how DEI functions in the real world, places with influential DEI offices will be places where people who do think stigma associated with "acting white" is important will be more likely to hold their tongues.
As a concrete example, I read with great interest the report of the Advisory Committee on the University of Michigan Principles of Diversity of Thought and Free Expression (linked below, if you're interested). This is a school that, as reported in the nytimes, has had perhaps the biggest and best funded DEI bureaucracy in the country. Search within the document for DEI to get a sense of what people said. Here's a representative quote from an anonymous faculty member:
“With a population of 50,000 students, 30,000 staff members, and 8,000 faculty members, one would expect to observe a spectrum of opinions on DEI&SJ issues, reflective of the national debate. However, at UM, there is a conspicuous absence of voices openly questioning or challenging the prevailing DEI&SJ narrative...The complete absence of such openly dissenting voices at UM is a telling indicator of the suppressive environment that has developed on our campus.”
To be clear, the people interviewed by the committee had various positions, and some were much more positive on DEI. But the point is that, at least as practiced, it's far from clear that the sorts of programs targeted by the EOs tend to increase the range of perspectives people bring to bear in trying to understand complex social issues.
Maybe I'm being too trusting of the author, but I found it hard to read the story without thinking that, at least at UMich, the program has been a truly massive (and massively *expensive*) failure.
I pretty much agree with everything you’ve said. And I like the way you frame the issue, especially the idea that we shouldn’t assume the impact of diverse perspectives in social science without treating it as an empirical question. Your idea about testing whether research done by more racially diverse teams holds up better under replication is really interesting. I'd like to see more studies like this done, including studies on the alleged epistemic virtues that result from marginalization. But I do think there’s some interesting work in standpoint theory that shows how certain scientific fields have had blind spots because they were missing (or ignoring) the perspectives of researchers from marginalized groups. There are plenty of cases where including perspectives from women etc. has led to better scientific inquiry, especially when their exclusion was part of the problem in the first place. But yeah, none of this amounts to anything like a controlled study, and it’s easy to overstate how much of a difference it actually makes.
I’ll also admit that the connection I made to the DEI programs targeted by the executive orders isn’t as strong as I’d like. Honestly, I started and ended with that angle because I’m still figuring out how to write for a non-academic audience, and it seemed like a way to tie some of the more theoretical points about standpoint epistemology to something timely. Not a perfect fit, though.
I also share your skepticism about some of the empirical claims made by both standpoint theorists and DEI advocates. I’ve actually pushed back (successfully, at least once) on attempts to change hiring practices at Nottingham when the justification was based on DEI arguments without any solid evidence. And I completely agree with your point that DEI programs may even shrink, rather than expand, the range of perspectives in institutions. The places that push these initiatives the hardest are likely more ideologically homogenous, and the kind of “diversity” they’re interested in may be pretty narrow. That’s probably one of my biggest concerns with how these programs work in practice.
Interesting about UMich in particular. I've recently been chatting with Elise Woodard about this topic, and she did her PhD there. Thanks for linking to the NYT piece and the report on Diversity of Thought and Free Expression. I'll read as soon as I finish marking these student essays!
I'd be curious to hear sometime about how much of the report, and the NYtimes story, jibes with Elise's experience there.
And I just want to agree about the existence of cases where neglecting marginalized perspectives has made science worse. When I've taught philosophy of science I've assigned some of Elizabeth Lloyd's work on bias in primatology, and while I have found myself having the sort of questions I asked here (just how systematic are these sorts of mistakes?) they're really gripping examples.
"But I don't know if people have ever tried to see whether social scientific research done by racially diverse teams is more reliable--e.g., holds up better under attempts at replication--than research done by racially homogenous teams."
Which immediately raises the question - how racially diverse should such a team be? And as it obviously can't be comprehensively diverse, how do we select racial groups to best optimize the alleged benefits of such diversity?
I'm presently unpersuaded that this advances the ball.
The problem isn't DEI as a concept; the problem has been in the implementation.
I'm sure some readers here have gone through these "trainings." Many of them are little more than Maoist/Stalinist-style struggle sessions.
They're not helping anyone understand anyone else's experience. They're just bludgeons beating participants over the heads with guilt-tripping and ideology.
I despise Trump with every fiber of my being. But as the adage goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day: he was right on getting rid of the "trans" insanity and DEI.
A thesis of epistemic diversity is a much better fit for more scientific analyses like yours than a thesis of epistemic advantage/privilege, which better serves as a political framework.
The more broadly one reads academic literature on oppression written by groups outside of one's own, the easier it is to see that the perspective and standpoint of the oppressed is frequently the one best placed to identify the presence and implementation of discriminatory social power structures, as well as voice the experience of being oppressed and start the fight for change, yet it is also a standpoint often disadvantaged in fully understanding the thought processes and inner motivations of those enabling discriminatory power structures.
It is natural for oppressed groups to frame their perspectives and standpoints as advantages inaccessible to others - indeed there is a political upside to doing so as the empowering and dignifying qualities of that narrative help drive movements to instigate change. Yet achieving true epistemic advantage over the entirety of a discriminatory social structure is only possible at a collective level, by correctly determining the realities and motivations of both the oppressed and the oppressor.
In the context of Trump's election and destruction of DEI programmes, I think that is a relevant point of failure to focus on. Where an oppressed group lacks the material and political power to bring about change by itself, it must rely on persuasion of members of the oppressor group through convincing narratives that make sense to that group. Late 20th century DEI objectively failed in that regard. Not only did it fail to properly engage with the true nature of discrimination and provide a liberatory narrative away from oppression, even worse it entrenched race essentialism among its supporters.
I know it's not a pretty look to dunk on American DEI at this time, but I often feel the understanding of the nature of oppression and how to tackle it was better in works written in 1965 than ones from 50 years later.
Some further reading on epistemic diversity and epistemic advantage here:
“It is almost a truism that individuals with different experiences will never fully grasp each other’s perspectives, as understanding is almost always partial, even of our own experiences”
Is it true though? We often speak about people who are more or less skilled at empathic learning about others, and we recognize that intimacy is a direct line to improved understanding. So much so that it is a cliche to say about some people we are very close to that “they know us better than we know ourselves.”
I have always taken the “achievement of a standpoint” you mention, contra merely “having a perspective,” as entailing an admixture of the subjects perspective with something like Arthur Fine’s “point of view of nobody in particular.” That is, the standpoint is the understanding of the perspective-for-itself as applied to the understanding of the perspective-for-others. If that’s not possible—irbecause we only ever have partial understanding of our own phenomenal knowledge, unless you mean that in the trivial sense that no one has perfect theoretical knowledge of the material universe—then, as Baudelaire claims in the Eyes of the Poor, such intimate empathy is impossible. But gloomy French social realism notwithstanding, or at least superficial interpretations of it, such intimate empathy is possible, albeit perhaps more rare than we would like. therefore it is not the case that our understanding is not limited to partiality in some meaningful sense. No? In which case, any epistemic privilege that obtains with a standpoint is a necessarily contingent one. Which raises what I think is the more interesting and useful political question which asks under what conditions does the epistemic privilege obtain and in what circumstances is it neutralized. Because my intuition is that the latter is what we really ought to be attempting to create as a part of any political project for liberation, at least if we accept that oppression is a a necessary condition for achievable standpoints to arise at all.
1. I think an important question is what WEIGHT should be attached to the epistemic advantage of certain life experiences. I totally agree that the matter is one of grades. So let's say we want to understand what it feels like to be a redhead in this world, and let's agree that while I (having brown hair) will never understand it as good as my redheaded friend, I can get some understanding from listening to him, reading relevant literature, articles, research, etc... So let us assume that on this factor of "learning from personal experience" he gains a 100/100 grade and I gain a 40/100. But now I want to add more factors. Maybe I am a person full of empathy and can identify with experiences I read from many different redheads, My friend is pathologically self centered. So as far as learning from the experiences of others, I gain 80/100 and he only 10/100. Not let's assume his memory is really very so-so and he tends to forget a lot of his own experiences while I remember each word describing the sentiments and experiences of other redhead, so grade us on that too. And now let's assume that my friend is very simplistic in his thinking and interprets everything through one lens while I have a broader view of things, etc.. etc... So when we factor the many different factors that feed into the creation of even experience-based standpoint, the epistemic advantage of the redheaded individual remains, buy may become significantly diluted.
2. The second question is about the weight and significance of the overall experience-based understanding. Let's say again I want to understand the phenomenon of anti-redheads' discrimination. We already know that understanding the experience of the discriminated is important (as a jurist, is surely carries some legal weight). BUT is it clear that he enjoys not merely *unique* epistemic position, but one that is necessarily *advantageous*? Can it not be that he suffers epistemic *disadvantage*? The perpetrator of discrimination for instance, also carries a unique perspective, and she who wants to understand discrimination should aim to build on his unique perspectives as well. This of course is not a case against DEI, because properly applied it will make sure we are exposed to both sets of experiences, but the point is that they should be labelled as different, not necessarily as of more or less value. Indeed, the opressed my also suffer epistemic *disadvantages*. For instance, he might be quick to see discrimination everywhere because he is so used to suffering discrimination. Perhaps when a dermatologist suggest he needs to limit his exposure to the sun, personal experience might bring someone to suspect this is motivated not by science but by disregard to the leisure needs of the redhead. Maybe the example becomes more plausible if we think about health warnings related to obesity, and the spread of "transphobia" claims in my legal world as expressed through the experience of some obese individuals.
Your article, by saying those who are not oppressed can achieve some understanding but not FULL understanding of the lives of the oppressed, seems to suggest that those who are oppressed can and do achieve FULL understanding of their own lives. But being oppressed no more implies a deep understanding of that oppression than being a fish implies a deep understanding of water. A (let's say: even upper-class) Black academic from Africa can better understand the life of an Alabaman white lower class prostitute being exploited by a white pimp than that prostitute herself, given interviews with hundreds of such prostitutes, a rich set of data and suitable data-driven theoretical tools from, say, sociology or psychology. Living a life is compatible with understanding very little about it. Your distinction between a perspective and a standpoint seemed to point in this direction, but your emphasis that the outsider's understanding can only be partial then suggests that the insider's understanding can be full, and will necessarily be deeper than any outsider's. My apologies if I am badly misreading you. Otherwise a very valuable piece disaggregating the divergent claims that could be lurking under superficially the same or similar words.
Decades ago, psychology went through a crisis of 'implanted memories'. What happened was that some poor unfortunate people went to a psychologist or a psychiatrist looking for some help with a mental or social problem or difficulty. And after sessions with the therapist, they recovered memories of terrible events -- often ritual Satanic abuse -- at the hands of their relatives and others in their communities. The problem was that the events they recalled never happened. These people weren't in any way faking things for attention, but somehow or other they were able to generate these vivid imagined scenes of things which didn't happen to them. But they believed that they had, very much, and ruminated on their supposed experiences a great deal, often for years, when at some point it became clear that things couldn't have happened the way they thought it did.
Now, for the purpose of this discussion, the interesting thing is that nobody has ever been able to find a psychological test that can tell the difference between people who have gone through a real experience of ritual abuse and people who are really good at generating such imagined scenes who only thought they had. You have to disprove these things by objective detective work -- finding out, for instance that some of the remembered participants were already dead at the time things were supposed to have occurred. There was enormous demand for such a test -- the police badly wanted to know how to tell if there were heinous criminals that needed arresting or if the whole thing was a therapeutic fabrication.
But this begins to look as if it is possible to have lived experience of things that never happened. Your experience of Satanic abuse is not tied to an actual event, but rather to the stories that you told yourself, or you and your therapist told you about such an event.
"At the heart of standpoint theory are two central claims:
The situated knowledge thesis: What one experiences or knows is often shaped by one’s social location, social identity, or lived experience.
The epistemic advantage thesis: Individuals from oppressed groups possess an epistemic advantage in understanding their oppression and that of their group."
Sounds good. Let's conduct a thought experiment.
Consider a group of individuals who are extremely poorly educated. They have at best elementary analytical tools with which to collect data and evaluate arguments.
Let's further assume that this places them at a socio-economic disadvantage. It certainly seems credible, to me at least, that this background witll result in a distinctive "social location, social identity, or lived experience."
Do they feel disadvantaged? I would hazard to guess that they do. They may articulate that disadvantage differently..
The interesting question arises - do they feel oppressed? Maybe some do and others don't. Maybe some reflective souls recognize that their background and their application at school didn't prepare them for a different life. But maybe others 'blame the man.'
The question now arises: for those that do 'blame the man' they surely have situated knowledge, do they posses an epistemic advantage? And what are we to make of the epistemic advantage of a group who by stipulation do not possess the analytical tools to thoroughly investigate their situation.
Of course, to some degree, all of us are subject to tooling weaknesses and analytical blunders. But what are we to make of this case? And does this case have any real world correlates?
I was pointed to your article by Dan Williams and am very glad to have found it. This observation particularly caught my eye:
“We can grant that outsiders will never fully understand what it is like to experience oppression firsthand. But they can still develop significant understanding through imaginative engagement—a process Amy Kind calls “imaginative scaffolding.”15 It involves drawing on familiar emotions or experiences, such as feelings of unease, exclusion, or vulnerability, to build a bridge toward the perspectives of marginalized groups.”
Perhaps this is reductive, but what you describe here looks very much to me like empathy, the cultivation of which I highly endorse.
I would differ, though, with your concluding comment that “President Trump’s dismantling of DEI programs undercuts these voices at a time when their contributions are most needed to combat entrenched inequality.” While I do not by any means agree with Trump’s overall approach, I think it is worth stepping back to assess whether and to what extent DEI programs, as currently configured, are worth preserving.
My own provisional assessment, from what I have seen and read, is that they not only do not work, but are at this point actually helping to harm, cutting us all into grievance-based slices, completely counterproductive to creation of community. Here is what I thought to be a fair-minded, and problem-solving-oriented assessment from a lifelong educator who has been examining this issue for quite some time: https://intrepidednews.com/dismantling-dei-to-reimagine-purpose/
What I worry about, in this current environment, and DEI is just one example, is that too many of us become reactive, such that, when Trump is the one to propose something, the immediate response is we must do the opposite, if that makes sense. I am not by any means suggesting you are doing that, but your thought-provoking article brought this to mind. Thank you.
Hi Susan,
Thank you for taking the time to read my article and for replying. I completely agree with you that imaginative scaffolding is at least similar to empathy, and might even be the same thing as at least some kinds of empathy (e.g,. cognitive rather than emotional). I actually think empathy plays a really important role in politics, and I've written an article on that topic here: https://philpapers.org/rec/HANEUA. So, I share your interest in cultivating the capacities that help people better grasp perspectives outside their own.
On DEI programs, I actually agree with a lot of what you’re saying. They’re not beyond criticism, and in some cases, they’ve arguably done more harm than good—whether by deepening societal divisions, reinforcing essentialist assumptions, or conflating demographic diversity with cognitive diversity. I wasn’t aiming to give an unqualified defense of them. I think what I was trying to do in the article was circle back to their role and why, despite legitimate criticisms, getting rid of them entirely could risk sidelining voices that might otherwise be overlooked. But I can see how I might have come across as more in favor of them than I actually am.
I’ll take a look at the article you linked. Thanks so much for sharing it! And I also agree with you that we've become too reactive in the sense that we tend to reject anything Trump says. I think this is partly what explains why it was seen as beyond the pale to entertain the "lab-leak" theory back at the start of the pandemic, even though it's now the most likely explanation.
Your thoughtful, intelligent, and informative response makes me even more glad to have discovered you. I look forward to reading the article you linked, and to reading further posts here. I am not a philosopher, and I can find the language used a bit beyond me (but then, I am a retired attorney, and so live in a glass house when it comes to hard-to-decipher language). What I can see from your post here and your generous response is that you, like Dan Williams, are a good teacher with the capacity to challenge and deepen our ability to think constructively about crucial problems in our present moment. Thank you, and welcome to Substack!
I only wish that experiencing oppression encouraged open- mindedness. If it did we’d expect Hamas members to be among the most open-minded people in the Mideast.
I see what you’re getting at, but just to clarify how I think standpoint theorists might reply: the idea isn’t that experiencing oppression automatically fosters open-mindedness—it’s that it can sometimes create insights into power structures, injustice, or social dynamics that others might not easily see. That doesn’t mean every oppressed group or individual will become more open-minded as a result. Not sure if this helps at all. It's definitely not guarantee epistemc virtue. Oppression can also entrench dogmatic thinking, reactionary politics, or ideological rigidity, depending on the conditions.
I guess that points toward the empirical question of how much, *in practice*, these epistemically unique/advantaged positions also tend to come with the other preconditions leading to additional insight (as opposed to remaining untapped potential, or backfiring in some other way per your last sentence). And how this insight shows up.
I have no idea how we would assess or correlate this! Perhaps the very qualities that make such hard-won insights insights, are the same qualities making it hard to quantify, systematically demonstrate or otherwise prove to people who don't have the same epistemic advantage (or to the public at large). The very idea of standpoint privilege implies the need for special methods capable of capturing it in a way that could convince those who don't have it. Still, it would be interesting to survey what formal empirical evidence and supporting research is already out there, flawed or not.
[Edit: Wrote this before seeing Dan Greco's comment - looks like he's covered this already!]
This is a bit orthogonal to your main point, but I want to ask about 3 and 4, the idea that marginalized individuals--by virtue of their marginalization--are likely to have distinctive advantages in understanding oppression, as well as what it would take to combat it.
I think there's a tension between, on the one hand, thinking that these advantages are substantial, and on the other hand, believing in the project of social science. What do I mean by believing in the project of social science? Roughly, believing that the methods appropriate for investigating the social world are largely continuous with the methods appropriate for investigating the natural world. Whether we're trying to learn about the effectiveness of a drug for treating cancer, or an educational intervention for treating illiteracy, we'll want theory, testable hypotheses suggested by theory, and systematic data collection and analysis to actually do the testing. Moreover, once we have all that, the identities of the people involved in the theorizing, data collection, and hypothesis testing largely fall out of the picture. (Not entirely; you might become suspicious of a study that finds that Pfizer's new drug works brilliantly when you learn about financial conflicts of interest on the part of the researchers who conducted the study.)
It seems to me that to the extent that you think social science is required for deep understanding of the social world--just like natural science is required for deep understanding of the natural world--you should also think that whatever epistemic advantages tend to be conferred by marginalization, there's a pretty serious cap on how far they get you, insofar as experiencing marginalization doesn't tend to involve becoming a social scientist, or consuming a great deal of social science. Moreover, whatever the epistemic disadvantages of not being marginalized, there's a floor on how bad things can be, insofar as the non-marginalized *can* become social scientists themselves, or at least can read the research social scientists produce.
I hope this doesn't come across as naively optimistic about the power of social science. The replication crisis illustrates how badly social science can mislead us. But the lesson to draw, I think, is that understanding the social world is really, really hard. If a community of researchers can go so badly wrong even when trying in good faith to be systematic in their data collection and analysis, we should be all the more pessimistic about the prospects for individuals trying to understand the social world using only the data of their own lived experience, even if their experience involves marginalization.
Hi Dan! That's a really interesting challenge about the tension between standpoint epistemology and the idea that social science, properly conducted, should give us the best understanding of oppression and how to combat it. I think I largely agree that, at least ideally, social science would be the best tool for understanding the social world. If the methods are rigorous, the hypotheses well-formed, and the data collection free from distortion, then the identity of the researcher may largely drop out, as you've said.
I hope I've not misinterpreted you, but I would imagine standpoint theorists saying that the social science you describe doesn’t always match reality. One concern is that social scientific inquiry isn’t done in a vacuum—it’s shaped by existing structures of power, funding incentives, and cultural assumptions. If social science data turns out to be skewed by systemic biases, then marginalized perspectives might play an important role in identifying those blind spots. This doesn’t mean that lived experience alone is sufficient to understand oppression, but it does suggest that these perspectives can help guide, refine, and correct social scientific inquiry in ways that might not happen otherwise.
Your comment reminded me of a chapter by Quassim Cassam in "The Epistemology of Democracy," where he argues against people who are pro-empathy for improving understanding in politics. He says we should instead be doing social science and relying on systematic methods of inquiry rather than assuming that imaginative engagement or perspective-taking will lead to accurate knowledge about social and political realities.
I'm not familiar with the Cassam Chapter, I am a big fan of Paul Bloom's "Against Empathy", which sounds similar in spirit.
On the idea that marginalized perspectives can "help guide, refine, and correct social scientific inquiry in ways that might not happen otherwise", I certainly agree with that weak claim. Though I'm agnostic about how significant it ends up being in practice. Here would be an interesting question. There have been lots of attempts to gauge the replicability of various areas of social science. But I don't know if people have ever tried to see whether social scientific research done by racially diverse teams is more reliable--e.g., holds up better under attempts at replication--than research done by racially homogenous teams. By my lights, the question of just how big a corrective role is likely to be played by including diverse perspectives in the practice of social science is itself a social scientific question about which we shouldn't have all that strong a priori opinions.
Also, and along the lines of Susan Shneid's comment, I don't really see what all this has to do with the sorts of programs targeted by the recent executive orders. It really turns on how, in practice, programs bearing the "DEI" label tend to function. My sense is that, at least in the United States, the idea that one of their main functions is to ensure that marginalized perspectives that would otherwise be overlooked are taken seriously--given a seat at the table to contend with other, competing perspectives--is naively optimistic. If anything, I think they tend to have the opposite effect (ie to shrink, rather than expand, the range of perspectives brought to bear on complex social questions). E.g., take the much disputed hypothesis that stigma associated with "acting white" is a significant cause of academic gaps between Black and non-Black students in various educational settings in the United States. You can find social science that seems to point in both directions on whether it's a significant factor. A bit of quick googling will show you prominent Black thinkers who think it's important, and others who regard that theory as racist victim blaming.
Do you think debate about and understanding of this question is likely to be better, or worse, in an institution with an active and powerful DEI office? My pretty strong guess is worse; I think given how DEI functions in the real world, places with influential DEI offices will be places where people who do think stigma associated with "acting white" is important will be more likely to hold their tongues.
As a concrete example, I read with great interest the report of the Advisory Committee on the University of Michigan Principles of Diversity of Thought and Free Expression (linked below, if you're interested). This is a school that, as reported in the nytimes, has had perhaps the biggest and best funded DEI bureaucracy in the country. Search within the document for DEI to get a sense of what people said. Here's a representative quote from an anonymous faculty member:
“With a population of 50,000 students, 30,000 staff members, and 8,000 faculty members, one would expect to observe a spectrum of opinions on DEI&SJ issues, reflective of the national debate. However, at UM, there is a conspicuous absence of voices openly questioning or challenging the prevailing DEI&SJ narrative...The complete absence of such openly dissenting voices at UM is a telling indicator of the suppressive environment that has developed on our campus.”
To be clear, the people interviewed by the committee had various positions, and some were much more positive on DEI. But the point is that, at least as practiced, it's far from clear that the sorts of programs targeted by the EOs tend to increase the range of perspectives people bring to bear in trying to understand complex social issues.
Here's the report: https://president.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/09/advisory-committee-report_principles-on-diversity-of-thought-and-freedom-of-expression.pdf
And for good measure, here's an NYTimes story on DEI at UMich:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/magazine/dei-university-michigan.html
Maybe I'm being too trusting of the author, but I found it hard to read the story without thinking that, at least at UMich, the program has been a truly massive (and massively *expensive*) failure.
I pretty much agree with everything you’ve said. And I like the way you frame the issue, especially the idea that we shouldn’t assume the impact of diverse perspectives in social science without treating it as an empirical question. Your idea about testing whether research done by more racially diverse teams holds up better under replication is really interesting. I'd like to see more studies like this done, including studies on the alleged epistemic virtues that result from marginalization. But I do think there’s some interesting work in standpoint theory that shows how certain scientific fields have had blind spots because they were missing (or ignoring) the perspectives of researchers from marginalized groups. There are plenty of cases where including perspectives from women etc. has led to better scientific inquiry, especially when their exclusion was part of the problem in the first place. But yeah, none of this amounts to anything like a controlled study, and it’s easy to overstate how much of a difference it actually makes.
I’ll also admit that the connection I made to the DEI programs targeted by the executive orders isn’t as strong as I’d like. Honestly, I started and ended with that angle because I’m still figuring out how to write for a non-academic audience, and it seemed like a way to tie some of the more theoretical points about standpoint epistemology to something timely. Not a perfect fit, though.
I also share your skepticism about some of the empirical claims made by both standpoint theorists and DEI advocates. I’ve actually pushed back (successfully, at least once) on attempts to change hiring practices at Nottingham when the justification was based on DEI arguments without any solid evidence. And I completely agree with your point that DEI programs may even shrink, rather than expand, the range of perspectives in institutions. The places that push these initiatives the hardest are likely more ideologically homogenous, and the kind of “diversity” they’re interested in may be pretty narrow. That’s probably one of my biggest concerns with how these programs work in practice.
Interesting about UMich in particular. I've recently been chatting with Elise Woodard about this topic, and she did her PhD there. Thanks for linking to the NYT piece and the report on Diversity of Thought and Free Expression. I'll read as soon as I finish marking these student essays!
I'd be curious to hear sometime about how much of the report, and the NYtimes story, jibes with Elise's experience there.
And I just want to agree about the existence of cases where neglecting marginalized perspectives has made science worse. When I've taught philosophy of science I've assigned some of Elizabeth Lloyd's work on bias in primatology, and while I have found myself having the sort of questions I asked here (just how systematic are these sorts of mistakes?) they're really gripping examples.
"But I don't know if people have ever tried to see whether social scientific research done by racially diverse teams is more reliable--e.g., holds up better under attempts at replication--than research done by racially homogenous teams."
Which immediately raises the question - how racially diverse should such a team be? And as it obviously can't be comprehensively diverse, how do we select racial groups to best optimize the alleged benefits of such diversity?
I'm presently unpersuaded that this advances the ball.
Thanks Dan for recommending this. I knew of your work in Political Epistemology but had no idea you had caught the bug of substack.
Great stuff :)
Keep posting please.
The problem isn't DEI as a concept; the problem has been in the implementation.
I'm sure some readers here have gone through these "trainings." Many of them are little more than Maoist/Stalinist-style struggle sessions.
They're not helping anyone understand anyone else's experience. They're just bludgeons beating participants over the heads with guilt-tripping and ideology.
I despise Trump with every fiber of my being. But as the adage goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day: he was right on getting rid of the "trans" insanity and DEI.
A thesis of epistemic diversity is a much better fit for more scientific analyses like yours than a thesis of epistemic advantage/privilege, which better serves as a political framework.
The more broadly one reads academic literature on oppression written by groups outside of one's own, the easier it is to see that the perspective and standpoint of the oppressed is frequently the one best placed to identify the presence and implementation of discriminatory social power structures, as well as voice the experience of being oppressed and start the fight for change, yet it is also a standpoint often disadvantaged in fully understanding the thought processes and inner motivations of those enabling discriminatory power structures.
It is natural for oppressed groups to frame their perspectives and standpoints as advantages inaccessible to others - indeed there is a political upside to doing so as the empowering and dignifying qualities of that narrative help drive movements to instigate change. Yet achieving true epistemic advantage over the entirety of a discriminatory social structure is only possible at a collective level, by correctly determining the realities and motivations of both the oppressed and the oppressor.
In the context of Trump's election and destruction of DEI programmes, I think that is a relevant point of failure to focus on. Where an oppressed group lacks the material and political power to bring about change by itself, it must rely on persuasion of members of the oppressor group through convincing narratives that make sense to that group. Late 20th century DEI objectively failed in that regard. Not only did it fail to properly engage with the true nature of discrimination and provide a liberatory narrative away from oppression, even worse it entrenched race essentialism among its supporters.
I know it's not a pretty look to dunk on American DEI at this time, but I often feel the understanding of the nature of oppression and how to tackle it was better in works written in 1965 than ones from 50 years later.
Some further reading on epistemic diversity and epistemic advantage here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/epistemic-diversity-and-epistemic-advantage-a-comparison-of-two-causal-theories-in-feminist-epistemology/CB6106C0F8A6D89C79E40290B7EC67EF#
“It is almost a truism that individuals with different experiences will never fully grasp each other’s perspectives, as understanding is almost always partial, even of our own experiences”
Is it true though? We often speak about people who are more or less skilled at empathic learning about others, and we recognize that intimacy is a direct line to improved understanding. So much so that it is a cliche to say about some people we are very close to that “they know us better than we know ourselves.”
I have always taken the “achievement of a standpoint” you mention, contra merely “having a perspective,” as entailing an admixture of the subjects perspective with something like Arthur Fine’s “point of view of nobody in particular.” That is, the standpoint is the understanding of the perspective-for-itself as applied to the understanding of the perspective-for-others. If that’s not possible—irbecause we only ever have partial understanding of our own phenomenal knowledge, unless you mean that in the trivial sense that no one has perfect theoretical knowledge of the material universe—then, as Baudelaire claims in the Eyes of the Poor, such intimate empathy is impossible. But gloomy French social realism notwithstanding, or at least superficial interpretations of it, such intimate empathy is possible, albeit perhaps more rare than we would like. therefore it is not the case that our understanding is not limited to partiality in some meaningful sense. No? In which case, any epistemic privilege that obtains with a standpoint is a necessarily contingent one. Which raises what I think is the more interesting and useful political question which asks under what conditions does the epistemic privilege obtain and in what circumstances is it neutralized. Because my intuition is that the latter is what we really ought to be attempting to create as a part of any political project for liberation, at least if we accept that oppression is a a necessary condition for achievable standpoints to arise at all.
Thanks for this, two comments:
1. I think an important question is what WEIGHT should be attached to the epistemic advantage of certain life experiences. I totally agree that the matter is one of grades. So let's say we want to understand what it feels like to be a redhead in this world, and let's agree that while I (having brown hair) will never understand it as good as my redheaded friend, I can get some understanding from listening to him, reading relevant literature, articles, research, etc... So let us assume that on this factor of "learning from personal experience" he gains a 100/100 grade and I gain a 40/100. But now I want to add more factors. Maybe I am a person full of empathy and can identify with experiences I read from many different redheads, My friend is pathologically self centered. So as far as learning from the experiences of others, I gain 80/100 and he only 10/100. Not let's assume his memory is really very so-so and he tends to forget a lot of his own experiences while I remember each word describing the sentiments and experiences of other redhead, so grade us on that too. And now let's assume that my friend is very simplistic in his thinking and interprets everything through one lens while I have a broader view of things, etc.. etc... So when we factor the many different factors that feed into the creation of even experience-based standpoint, the epistemic advantage of the redheaded individual remains, buy may become significantly diluted.
2. The second question is about the weight and significance of the overall experience-based understanding. Let's say again I want to understand the phenomenon of anti-redheads' discrimination. We already know that understanding the experience of the discriminated is important (as a jurist, is surely carries some legal weight). BUT is it clear that he enjoys not merely *unique* epistemic position, but one that is necessarily *advantageous*? Can it not be that he suffers epistemic *disadvantage*? The perpetrator of discrimination for instance, also carries a unique perspective, and she who wants to understand discrimination should aim to build on his unique perspectives as well. This of course is not a case against DEI, because properly applied it will make sure we are exposed to both sets of experiences, but the point is that they should be labelled as different, not necessarily as of more or less value. Indeed, the opressed my also suffer epistemic *disadvantages*. For instance, he might be quick to see discrimination everywhere because he is so used to suffering discrimination. Perhaps when a dermatologist suggest he needs to limit his exposure to the sun, personal experience might bring someone to suspect this is motivated not by science but by disregard to the leisure needs of the redhead. Maybe the example becomes more plausible if we think about health warnings related to obesity, and the spread of "transphobia" claims in my legal world as expressed through the experience of some obese individuals.
Your article, by saying those who are not oppressed can achieve some understanding but not FULL understanding of the lives of the oppressed, seems to suggest that those who are oppressed can and do achieve FULL understanding of their own lives. But being oppressed no more implies a deep understanding of that oppression than being a fish implies a deep understanding of water. A (let's say: even upper-class) Black academic from Africa can better understand the life of an Alabaman white lower class prostitute being exploited by a white pimp than that prostitute herself, given interviews with hundreds of such prostitutes, a rich set of data and suitable data-driven theoretical tools from, say, sociology or psychology. Living a life is compatible with understanding very little about it. Your distinction between a perspective and a standpoint seemed to point in this direction, but your emphasis that the outsider's understanding can only be partial then suggests that the insider's understanding can be full, and will necessarily be deeper than any outsider's. My apologies if I am badly misreading you. Otherwise a very valuable piece disaggregating the divergent claims that could be lurking under superficially the same or similar words.
Decades ago, psychology went through a crisis of 'implanted memories'. What happened was that some poor unfortunate people went to a psychologist or a psychiatrist looking for some help with a mental or social problem or difficulty. And after sessions with the therapist, they recovered memories of terrible events -- often ritual Satanic abuse -- at the hands of their relatives and others in their communities. The problem was that the events they recalled never happened. These people weren't in any way faking things for attention, but somehow or other they were able to generate these vivid imagined scenes of things which didn't happen to them. But they believed that they had, very much, and ruminated on their supposed experiences a great deal, often for years, when at some point it became clear that things couldn't have happened the way they thought it did.
Now, for the purpose of this discussion, the interesting thing is that nobody has ever been able to find a psychological test that can tell the difference between people who have gone through a real experience of ritual abuse and people who are really good at generating such imagined scenes who only thought they had. You have to disprove these things by objective detective work -- finding out, for instance that some of the remembered participants were already dead at the time things were supposed to have occurred. There was enormous demand for such a test -- the police badly wanted to know how to tell if there were heinous criminals that needed arresting or if the whole thing was a therapeutic fabrication.
But this begins to look as if it is possible to have lived experience of things that never happened. Your experience of Satanic abuse is not tied to an actual event, but rather to the stories that you told yourself, or you and your therapist told you about such an event.
"At the heart of standpoint theory are two central claims:
The situated knowledge thesis: What one experiences or knows is often shaped by one’s social location, social identity, or lived experience.
The epistemic advantage thesis: Individuals from oppressed groups possess an epistemic advantage in understanding their oppression and that of their group."
Sounds good. Let's conduct a thought experiment.
Consider a group of individuals who are extremely poorly educated. They have at best elementary analytical tools with which to collect data and evaluate arguments.
Let's further assume that this places them at a socio-economic disadvantage. It certainly seems credible, to me at least, that this background witll result in a distinctive "social location, social identity, or lived experience."
Do they feel disadvantaged? I would hazard to guess that they do. They may articulate that disadvantage differently..
The interesting question arises - do they feel oppressed? Maybe some do and others don't. Maybe some reflective souls recognize that their background and their application at school didn't prepare them for a different life. But maybe others 'blame the man.'
The question now arises: for those that do 'blame the man' they surely have situated knowledge, do they posses an epistemic advantage? And what are we to make of the epistemic advantage of a group who by stipulation do not possess the analytical tools to thoroughly investigate their situation.
Of course, to some degree, all of us are subject to tooling weaknesses and analytical blunders. But what are we to make of this case? And does this case have any real world correlates?
One certainly has to question whether they are equipped to move from a 'perspective' to a 'standpoint'
:)