Feminist standpoint theorists have, for quite some time now, argued that there is an epistemic advantage to being oppressed (i.e., the “inversion thesis”).Footnote 1 Recently, the need to address certain ambiguities in the epistemic advantages that these theories have attributed to the oppressed has received significant attention.Footnote 2 This has resulted in more precise articulations of the epistemic advantages that can be appropriately attributed to oppressed members of society.
For the most part, however, these approaches have focused on the way that being oppressed provides epistemic advantages specifically regarding knowledge about those processes of social marginalization impacting the agents themselves. While I agree that such knowledge about the mechanisms and effects of social marginalization is significant epistemic privilege, I do not believe that these are sufficient to account for the various ways in which members of marginalized groups have epistemic advantages in scientific contexts. Indeed, if these were meant to account for all of the epistemic advantages of being oppressed, then one might question the extent to which members of oppressed social groups have significant epistemic advantages that are scientifically relevant.
Feminist philosophers of science – pointing to the many ways in which scientific research is imbued with the social values of the scientists conducting it – have argued that such epistemic advantages of being oppressed are more relevant to scientific research than those espousing a “value-free ideal” of science have claimed.Footnote 3 While feminist philosophers of science have convincingly demonstrated that there is some information that is more available to members of oppressed social groups – and that this information can be shown to be highly relevant to some areas of scientific researchFootnote 4 – they have also not limited their claims about the epistemic advantages of being oppressed to “knowledge-that;” i.e., knowing certain facts that the privileged members of their society do not tend to learn about. Instead, several of these theorists have argued that the oppressed members of a society participating in scientific communities – who have commonly been referred to as “insider-outsiders” – have epistemic advantages in developing certain forms of “knowledge-how;”Footnote 5 i.e., knowing how to utilize techniques for obtaining more reliable beliefs (techniques which the privileged members of their society are much less likely to use). This latter type of epistemic advantage is the one with which I will be primarily interested here and the one that has proven the most difficult to precisely articulate. Thus, I will be focusing on how to answer the following question: How can we better characterize the more significant epistemic advantages in knowledge-how of the members of oppressed social groups who are participating within scientific communities?
My approach diverges from previous ways of answering this question by focusing on the epistemic advantages that are associated with the processes of critical reflection through which agents develop their conceptual frameworks. In particular, I argue that developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks gives agents epistemic advantages in their abilities to both identify potentially problematic assumptions of these frameworks and to improve upon those assumptions that are judged to be problematic. That is to say, this paper aims to show both that there is a scientifically relevant knowledge-how of critically reflecting on the under-examined assumptions within one’s conceptual frameworks and that insider-outsider members of scientific communities will have certain epistemic advantages when it comes to developing this knowledge-how.
To be clear, my view of these scientifically relevant epistemic advantages of the marginalized members of societies aligns with Lidal Dror’s suggestion that the epistemic privileges of being oppressed are contingent in an important sense.Footnote 6 This means that I do not believe that being oppressed is something that guarantees that one will have these scientifically relevant epistemic privileges. Instead, I am simply claiming that the insider-outsider members of scientific communities will tend to be in better positions to cultivate certain epistemic privileges that are relevant to the advancement of scientific knowledge.
In Section 1, I will go into more detail about the epistemic advantages that standpoint theorists and feminist philosophers of science have attributed to members of marginalized social groups. Of particular interest to me are the ways in which theorists have proposed that there are epistemic advantages of knowledge-how to being oppressed. Section 2 presents my account of the type of “critical reflection” through which agents identify and correct the potentially problematic assumptions within their conceptual frameworks. My view diverges from previous accounts in my emphasis on the role of agents using multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks within their critical reflections and my suggestion that this constitutes a form of knowledge-how that is relevant to scientific inquiry. In Section 3, I propose an explanation of why insider-outsider members of scientific communities have epistemic advantages when it comes to developing the ability to critically reflect upon the assumptions of their scientific community’s conceptual frameworks. This explanation points to the social-historical contexts in which the dominant conceptual frameworks of scientific communities have been developed and why members of marginalized social groups will tend to be more likely to critically reflect on certain assumptions that the privileged members of their society tend to take up unreflectively. Finally, in Section 4, I compare my explanation to alternatives in the literature and use this to highlight some further benefits of my view.
1. Oppressed persons’ epistemic advantages in obtaining certain knowledge-how
At the outset, I want to flag the way that I will be using “epistemic advantage” and how this can be understood in relation to “epistemic privilege.” When claiming that an agent has an “epistemic advantage,” I mean to indicate that this agent is in a particularly advantageous position to obtain certain “epistemic privileges” such as coming to know more information on a topic or developing a conceptual framework that allows one to better interpret that information.Footnote 7 For instance, if you are attending a university at which a famous philosopher holds a professorship, this philosopher has recently published a book that sets forward her new theory, she will be teaching a course covering the new book, and you have registered for that course, then you have some epistemic advantages in regards to learning about this philosopher’s new theory that most other agents do not have. Of course, having such epistemic advantages will not guarantee that you will obtain the corresponding epistemic privileges related to forming a good understanding of this philosopher’s new theory. If you do not read the philosopher’s book and/or you do not attend her class, for example, then you would not be likely to obtain the potential epistemic privileges of one’s epistemically advantageous position.
In this way, what positing such epistemic advantages aims to explain are tendencies of people in certain positions to more often (relative to people who are not in such positions) develop epistemic privileges relative to a given epistemic domain. This is how Dror frames what he refers to as the “Weak Inversion Thesis” according to which “socially marginalized people, by virtue of their social location, tend to have a superior epistemic position than non-oppressed people when it comes to knowing things about the workings of social marginalization that concern them, because they tend to have more relevant experience and motivation (experiences and motivation which are in principle open to the non-oppressed)” (Dror Reference Dror2022: 624). This is in contrast to the “Strong Inversion Thesis,” which is the claim that being in a marginalized position guarantees agents epistemic privileges that are unavailable to the non-oppressed. When positing these epistemic advantages, then, I am appealing to the “Weak Inversion Thesis” that being socially marginalized can put an agent in an advantageous position to obtain certain epistemic privileges.
At this point, I would like to distinguish between two kinds of relevant epistemic privileges that have been recognized in the literature: “knowledge-that” and “knowledge-how.” “Knowledge-that” is simply the epistemic privilege of knowing certain factual information. For instance, a doctor might have “knowledge-that” regarding the most common symptoms of tuberculosis. “Knowledge-how’ is also an epistemic privilege that tends to be a highly valued part of developing an expertise in an area. If a mechanic has not had the chance to examine your malfunctioning car, then he might not have knowledge-that regarding what is wrong with it (for instance, knowledge-that it has a faulty ignition). However, the mechanic will likely have knowledge-how regarding the steps that need to be taken – i.e., how one should go about taking each step – in order to fix a car that has a faulty ignition. As one can probably tell from the examples above, developing expertise in a given area will almost always involve obtaining significant amounts of both knowledge-that and knowledge-how.
An important difference between knowledge-that and knowledge-how is the way in which each of these kinds of knowledge can be obtained. Knowledge-that is often associated with propositional knowledge that can be learned through the testimony of others. Knowledge-how, on the other hand, is often considered to be something that is only “developed through practice” (Dror Reference Dror2022: 636). As Alison Hills writes, general abilities are not obtained “through testimony. Instead, you have to practice” (Hills Reference Hills2009: 119).
Most standpoint theorists have suggested that being oppressed has epistemic advantages relevant to both knowledge-that and knowledge-how.Footnote 8 However, the examples of knowledge-how in the literature have tended to focus on things such as the fact that being marginalized will tend to make one better at achieving competence in how to navigate institutions that are systematically oppressive or how to interpret experiences of being systematically oppressed.Footnote 9 While I agree that such knowledge-how constitutes an epistemic privilege that is incredibly important for living in an oppressive society, this knowledge-how would appear to be limited to knowledge regarding how to appropriately respond to oppressive practices within one’s society. What I am proposing is that there are other important forms of knowledge-how that are overlooked when one focuses exclusively on the knowledge-how of navigating one’s oppressive society, and that these alternative forms of knowledge-how are crucial for explaining the full extent of the scientifically relevant epistemic advantages of insider-outsiders.
To get a better sense of the types of knowledge-how, I will be focusing on for the rest of the article, let us return to the example of the mechanic. While a mechanic might have knowledge-how about how to perform the steps needed to fix a given problem with a car, the mechanic could also have knowledge-how regarding what things to check for – and how to check for these competently – in order to reach a more reliable conclusion about what the problem is with your car. This is a type of knowledge-how that is related to how to conduct fruitful inquiries in the given epistemic domain. Another type of knowledge-how that could be attributed to some mechanics is related to the very task of learning these techniques for repairing problems with cars and how to make adjustments to these techniques to get better results in the situations in which one finds oneself. That is to say, a mechanic could also have knowledge-how about more effective ways of developing the conceptual framework one uses within one’s inquiries into how a given car is functioning and knowledge-how about making adjustments to this framework as one learns from one’s experiences in this area.
In the next section, I will elaborate on what the knowledge-how of critically reflecting on the assumptions of one’s conceptual frameworks entails and why this is a knowledge-how that is relevant to making improvements within one’s scientific inquiries.
2. The knowledge-how of critical reflection
For my purposes, I will be using ‘critical reflection’ to refer to the processes through which agents consciously acknowledge and reevaluate the assumptions of the conceptual frameworks with which they are familiar. And, throughout the article, I use “assumptions” to refer to those beliefs that are generally taken to be settled convictions within a given conceptual framework. I will be intentionally avoiding the use of the term “background assumption” because this phrase has at times referred to those beliefs that, by definition, cannot be consciously doubted by agents who hold a given conceptual framework. So, instead, I use “assumptions” to refer to those beliefs within a conceptual framework that tend to be taken for granted by the agents using it, but that those agents are capable of reflecting upon and modifying when they see fit.
With this said, there are two kinds of knowledge-how that are associated with this type of critical reflection that I wish to highlight: 1) The knowledge-how of being able to identify potentially problematic assumptions within a conceptual framework; and 2) The knowledge-how of being able to replace those assumptions deemed problematic with better-justified beliefs.
For a clearer picture of what is involved with these two kinds of knowledge-how that are associated with critical reflection, I want to present a model for the way that agents learn new conceptual frameworks and make adjustments to those conceptual frameworks based on their experiences and the results of their inquiries. To be clear, this will involve appealing to a model of inquiry that has been adopted by many philosophers and has been particularly common among philosophers who are engaging closely with classic American pragmatism; i.e., the theories of Charles Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. This model arises, in part, from Peirce’s criticism in ‘The Fixation of Belief’ of those who refuse to change their beliefs in response to the conflicting experiences that they encounter within their inquiries and the role reflection should play in such situations. As Peirce writes, ‘the force of habit will sometimes cause a man to hold on to old beliefs, after he is in a condition to see that they have no sound basis. But reflection upon the state of the case will overcome these habits, and he ought to allow reflection its full weight’ (Peirce Reference Peirce, Moore and Kloesel1877). Thus, the model of inquiry to which I will be appealing is not unique to my approach. Instead, what is distinctive about my approach is my emphasis on the way that agents use their development of multiple conceptual frameworks within this kind of inquiry.
My account of critical reflection takes agents to be capable of developing a number of conceptual frameworks that are potentially useful for conducting inquiries across a number of epistemic domains. For example, utilitarianism is a conceptual framework for conducting moral inquiries, quantum mechanics is a conceptual framework for conducting inquiries in physics, and there is nothing that would prevent an agent from simultaneously developing both of these conceptual frameworks. Conceptual frameworks are designed to be flexible and capable of being used across a wide range of inquiries within a given domain. With this said, every conceptual framework will have its limitations, and there will inevitably be times when agents’ inquiries lead them into areas of investigation in which their conceptual frameworks are unable to help them produce reliable answers. In such cases, agents can either suspend their inquiries into the matter or else take up the task of further developing their conceptual frameworks in the hopes that this will allow them to reach more reliable conclusions about the phenomena being investigated. Here, I am primarily interested in what happens when agents take the latter option and what those agents must do to develop their conceptual frameworks in order to make the desired progress within their inquiries. For instance, when scientists adjust their conceptual frameworks in response to what Thomas Kuhn referred to as “anomalies” that the currently accepted framework is unable to explain.Footnote 10
In order to develop a given conceptual framework, agents will at times need to step back and consider some of the assumptions being made within it. This is done in order to identify whether there are any problematic assumptions that are the source of the difficulties that they are encountering within their inquiries. However, as many feminist epistemologists have pointed out, there is no “view from nowhere” that an agent could occupy that would be outside of all conceptual frameworks.Footnote 11 Instead, this process would appear to require agents to switch over to other conceptual frameworksFootnote 12 that they have available to them and to evaluate the assumptions of the conceptual framework in question from these alternative perspectives. While some theorists have pointed to the way that critically reflecting on a conceptual framework – by taking up alternative perspectives – is important for allowing agents to make improvements to that conceptual framework,Footnote 13 the processes through which agents perform this type of critical reflection have remained highly undertheorized. And, I am claiming that agents’ abilities to improve in their performance of this process of critical reflection are a commonly overlooked form of epistemic advantage.
There are a few ways in which developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks can improve agents’ processes of critical reflection. First, by developing several highly functional conceptual frameworks that conflict in their assumptions, agents have a better sense of why it is not necessary to maintain all of the assumptions in one’s conceptual frameworks. That is to say, one becomes aware of having options regarding the assumptions that one can take up within each of one’s conceptual frameworks. Second, when the assumptions of different conceptual frameworks conflict, one has reasons to question whether one (or both) of these assumptions has been accepted unreflectively or uncritically within that conceptual framework. In this way, even when agents have not experienced difficulties within their own inquiries, they could still end up identifying unsupported assumptions that have been leading other agents’ inquiries astray. Finally, when agents determine that an assumption in one of their conceptual frameworks has been widely accepted without sufficient support, those agents who are already familiar with the alternative assumptions of other conceptual frameworks will have readily accessible replacements for the problematic assumptions that they have identified. These are the reasons for positing that the development of multiple conceptual frameworks plays an important role within agents’ processes of critical reflection. And, particularly, why developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks can improve the results of agents’ inquiries. Altogether, these reasons suggest that agents who have knowledge-how about developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks – and knowledge-how about evaluating the assumptions of one conceptual framework from the perspectives of the others – will have epistemic advantages when it comes to performing such critical reflection.
To get a better sense of the kind of critical reflection I have in mind, as well as a sense of where my account diverges from previous approaches, I wish to consider a couple of other accounts of the epistemic benefits that can arise from agents performing critical reflection within their different kinds of inquiries. In the context of agents developing their moral frameworks – and the self-conceptions that arise from such frameworks – through inquiry, Michele Moody-Adams claims that moral inquiry can be understood as a process of critical reflection through which agents are capable of making improvements to their self-conceptions. As she writes, “a central task of moral inquiry is to encourage the sort of self-scrutiny which may lead one to see oneself, one’s relation to others, and one’s place in the world (broadly understood) in a different way” (Moody-Adams Reference Moody-Adams1997: 139). Indeed, Moody-Adams claims that “reflective confrontation with a moral theory will inevitably reorder the settled convictions that one brings to its contemplation and, in so doing, it will effect at least some change in the structure and content of self-understandings” (Moody-Adams Reference Moody-Adams1997: 141). Here, Moody-Adams highlights several features of the model of inquiry to which my account is appealing and the role of critical reflection within it. Inquiry is presented as the way through which agents are able to further develop the moral frameworks that they rely upon to understand themselves and their relations to others. Moreover, “reflective confrontation” with the alternative assumptions of another agent’s moral theory is what leads to changes in agents’ “settled convictions,” and this in turn allows them to make improvements to their self-understandings. My account takes this ability to perform such reflective confrontations to be a type of knowledge-how and aims to explain how agents can more reliably make the changes to their settled convictions that would lead to better assumptions within their conceptual frameworks.
Turning to the domain of scientific research, Helen Longino has also posited a role for critical reflection within scientific inquiry. As she writes,
if a person can generate a criticism of a hypothesis or assumption being entertained in one of her communities from the point of view of another (and make it relevant to the concerns of the first), she thereby introduces another test the hypothesis or assumption must pass. Furthermore, she can develop criticism of standards by exploiting the inevitable tensions within any given set. This, too, may be facilitated by her appreciation of standards operative in others of the communities in which she participates…Individuals can belong to more than one cognitive community, each of which as a consequence enables a critical perspective on the beliefs and standards of the others (Longino Reference Longino2002: 155).
Here, Longino points to the potential epistemic benefits of critically reflecting on the assumptions of one conceptual framework from the perspectives of the others. This allows one to increase the reliability of the assumptions of one’s conceptual frameworks by providing additional tests for evaluating them and by encouraging agents to modify those assumptions that do not pass such tests. My approach builds upon this notion that the criticism of the standards of one’s conceptual frameworks is crucial to their improvement and that this is “facilitated” by an agent’s “appreciation of standards operative in others of the communities in which she participates.” However, my view goes beyond Longino’s in positing that agents’ abilities to bring different conceptual frameworks into critical interaction are a type of knowledge-how that agents are able to obtain by regularly engaging in these forms of critical reflection. As such, my approach aims to explain the conditions under which agents can become better at performing such critical reflection; viz., when the agent has developed multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks and when the agent has developed the skills associated with moving between these conceptual frameworks to evaluate the assumptions of each.
Having considered some of the ways in which critical reflection can play an important role in improving the assumptions of one’s conceptual frameworks, I wish to more explicitly highlight how improving one’s performance in critical reflection is a scientifically relevant epistemic privilege. To do so, I wish to connect this discussion of critical reflection to the literature within the philosophy of science that argues for the value of dissent within scientific communities. For instance, describing the epistemic benefits of such scientific dissent, Kristina Rolin writes that
dissent can improve scientific knowledge by helping scientists identify and correct false assumptions. In addition to correcting false assumptions, dissent can lead scientists to pursue new lines of inquiry, search for new evidence, propose new hypotheses and theories, and develop new methods of inquiry. And even when dissent does not give scientists a reason to change their views, it can be epistemically valuable by forcing scientists to provide better arguments for their views or to communicate their views more efficiently. Thus, dissent can contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge by improving the reasons that have led scientists to accept consensus views. (Rolin Reference Rolin2017: 20910).
Here, Rolin highlights the ways in which engaging with dissent is important both for correcting false assumptions within scientists’ theories and for improving the reasons that have led scientists to accept the consensus view. For Rolin, the suggestion is that there are two primary values associated with scientific dissent: 1) Dissent can lead to the correction of false assumptions within scientists’ conceptual frameworks; and 2) Frequent dissent can give agents more confidence in – as well as an improved understanding of – the assumptions within their conceptual frameworks that have survived this process of intense critical scrutiny.
My account agrees with Rolin’s analysis of the importance of scientific dissent, but also aims to offer an explanation of the knowledge-how that would promote agents raising particularly fruitful scientific dissent. I am claiming that the type of critical reflection I have discussed above – in which agents learn how to take up multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks and bring these into critical interaction with one another – involves two types of knowledge-how that contribute to producing more fruitful scientific dissent: 1) Agents’ ability to identify the assumptions of their conceptual frameworks that are most likely to be problematic; and 2) Agents’ ability to replace those assumptions with less problematic alternatives. While it might be possible that there is always some epistemic value that can be gained from raising any dissent against the scientific community’s settled convictions, there would appear to be significantly more value in dissenting against those assumptions that one has good reasons to doubt and to replace them with assumptions that one has good reasons to believe would be less problematic. This is why, for example, a scientist who raises considered doubts about the methodology through which the safety of a particular vaccine has been tested will tend to be much more valuable than the dissent of those who indiscriminately question the safety of all vaccines (without being aware of the ways in which these have been tested). My suggestion is that engaging in an ongoing process of critical reflection can make more reliable agents’ identifications of – and proposed replacements for – a given assumption that is widely held within the dominant conceptual framework of a scientific community. And, as a result, the scientific dissent arising from the insights of such critical reflection will tend to be much more fruitful.
In the following section, I argue that the insider-outsider members of scientific communities – i.e., the members of marginalized social groups participating within a scientific community – have certain epistemic advantages when it comes to developing these two types of knowledge-how that are associated with critical reflection.
3. Why insider-outsiders have the scientifically relevant epistemic advantages associated with critical reflection
If there are epistemic privileges associated with developing the “knowledge-how” of conducting critical reflection, and these epistemic privileges are scientifically relevant given the way that they contribute to the production of more fruitful scientific dissent, then the question remains why one should suspect that the members of oppressed social groups participating in scientific communities are likely to be in advantageous positions to develop such privileges. As we saw in the previous section, there are (at least) two kinds of “knowledge-how” associated with critical reflection: 1) The “knowledge-how” of being able to identify potentially problematic assumptions within a conceptual framework; and 2) The “knowledge-how” of being able to replace those assumptions deemed problematic with better-justified beliefs. In this section, I will be considering, in turn, the reasons for thinking that insider-outsider members of scientific communities are likely to have advantages over “insider” members of scientific communities relative to each of these kinds of epistemic privilege.
In order to do so, I want to highlight some of the arguments that standpoint theorists have used in support of their claim that, as Alison Wylie puts it, “those who are disadvantaged by structural conditions may well have epistemic resources that the comparatively privileged lack” (Wylie Reference Wylie2012: 63). In particular, these arguments have suggested that such epistemic resources include a type of “knowledge-how.” As such, I will consider some of these arguments and indicate why I believe that these provide support for thinking that the members of oppressed social groups participating in scientific communities are often in better positions to develop the two kinds of “knowledge-how” that are associated with critical reflection.
Let us first consider the “knowledge-how” of being able to identify potentially problematic assumptions within a scientific community’s dominant conceptual framework. Patricia Hill Collins emphasizes the greater potential for conflict between the dominant conceptual frameworks of academic fields such as sociology and the personal/cultural conceptual frameworks of members of marginalized social groups. However, far from seeing this tension as an obstacle that insider-outsiders must overcome, Collins points to some of the advantages of this type of tension, writing that
outsider within status is bound to generate tension, for people who become outsiders within are forever changed by their new status. Learning the subject matter of sociology stimulates a reexamination of one’s own personal and cultural experiences; and, yet, these same experiences paradoxically help to illuminate sociology’s anomalies. Outsiders within occupy a special place–they become different people, and their difference sensitizes them to patterns that may be more difficult for established sociological insiders to see (Collins Reference Collins1986: S29).
To put this in the terms of the knowledge-how of critical reflection discussed above, discovering conflicts between the conceptual framework of one’s scientific community and the conceptual framework of one’s social/cultural community can lead to identifying problematic assumptions in each. If an agent decides to give serious attention to these conflicts, then they will become more sensitive to patterns of argumentation that rely upon such potentially problematic assumptions, and this gives those agents reasons to reexamine why certain conclusions have been widely accepted within the community in question.
However, one might wonder, are not there often conflicts between any personal/cultural conceptual framework and the conceptual frameworks of scientific communities? Or, put another way, why should we expect there to be a difference in the conflicts experienced by the members of oppressed social groups and the conflicts experienced by the privileged members of a society when engaging with scientific conceptual frameworks? The first part of the response to this is to appeal to the historical development of the dominant conceptual frameworks within scientific communities. As feminist philosophers of science have pointed out, regarding just about every scientific community within Western societies, the conceptual frameworks of scientific communities have been predominantly developed by white, upper-class, men.Footnote 14 And, as feminist philosophers of science have also pointed out, the unjustified assumptions within these white men’s conceptual frameworks have led to significant biases that have impacted (to greater and lesser extents) just about every area of scientific research.Footnote 15 In this way, on top of the various conflicts that may arise for any person engaging with scientific conceptual frameworks, there will be a number of conflicts between those assumptions that are commonly held across the conceptual frameworks of white men and the assumptions within personal/cultural conceptual frameworks of oppressed members of society that “insider” members will not experience.
The second part of the response to this is to suggest that these conflicts between conceptual frameworks will also often be more significant and more likely to motivate the members of oppressed groups to scrutinize the assumptions of their scientific communities. As Collins points out, discussing Black women’s participation in the field of sociology, “Black women may encounter much less of a fit between their personal and cultural experiences and [the] elements of sociological paradigms than that facing other sociologists” (Collins Reference Collins1986: S26). As she describes it, “Black women would have to accept certain fundamental and self-devaluing assumptions” such as “white males are more worthy of study because they are more fully human than everyone else” (Collins Reference Collins1986: S27). As Collins concludes, “in short, it may be extremely difficult for Black women to accept a worldview predicated upon Black female inferiority” (Collins Reference Collins1986: S27). That is to say, there is not only likely to be more conflicts between the conceptual frameworks of insider-outsider members of scientific communities, but these conflicts are also likely to be more significant. In some cases, accepting the assumptions of scientific communities unreflectively would require women and people of color to accept highly devaluing conceptions of themselves. This suggests that insider-outsider members will have significantly more motivation to scrutinize these types of assumptions within the conceptual frameworks of their scientific communities.
Again, these are meant to indicate epistemic advantages for the members of oppressed social groups because insider-outsider members will have more opportunities to recognize conflicting assumptions across the multiple conceptual frameworks that they are developing and more motivation to scrutinize the assumptions of their scientific community’s dominant conceptual framework when such conflicts occur. Of course, this does not guarantee that these members of oppressed social groups will develop the epistemic privileges of improving upon these assumptions within their scientific conceptual frameworks. For instance, if a member of an oppressed social group came to accept such claims about her own inferiority or the inferiority of the other members of social groups to which she belongs, then she might not experience these as significant enough conflicts to warrant further examination of the assumptions of the dominant conceptual framework of her scientific community. However, while there is always the possibility of some members of oppressed social groups internalizing their oppression in this way, there are numerous practical and normative reasons that lead members of oppressed social groups to tend to avoid doing so (not least of which being the psychological dissonance that can arise from accepting a conception of oneself that is devaluing) and this suggests that insider-outsiders will tend to be in a more advantageous position to develop these epistemic privileges arising from such critical reflection.
There are also corresponding epistemic disadvantages for privileged members of a society regarding the development of this first kind of knowledge-how that is associated with critical reflection. These arise, at least in part, from the asymmetry between insider-outsiders’ motivation to engage with dominant conceptual frameworks and “insider” scientists’ motivation to engage with the conceptual frameworks of marginalized social groups. This is because insider-outsiders must engage with dominant conceptual frameworks in order to function as scientists, while “insider” scientists end up having few practical incentives – and sometimes significant practical disincentives – to engage with the conceptual frameworks of marginalized social groups. This leads to “insider” scientists having fewer experiences of the conflicts between conceptual schemes that would be likely to prompt critical reflection upon the assumptions of the dominant conceptual framework of their scientific community. As Nancy Campbell notes, “privilege is hard to discern when you operate from social locations where the world appears to be well set up” (Campbell Reference Campbell2009: 19). If one is not in a particularly good position to recognize the harms to oppressed members of one’s society – and one is in a much better position to perceive the benefits to the privileged – that occur when people act on certain assumptions, then one is going to be less likely to critically examine the reasons for accepting those assumptions. Moreover, the privileged members of a society will have fewer motivations to engage in critical reflection on these assumptions in dominant conceptual frameworks. Indeed, Moody-Adams’ work on affected ignorance provides reasons for thinking that “insider” scientists would have some significant motivations to not question certain assumptions within the dominant conceptual frameworks of their scientific communities (Moody-Adams Reference Moody-Adams1994). As Moody-Adams points out, people are more likely to be uncritically committed to a way of life when this provides them with significant social/economic benefits (Moody-Adams Reference Moody-Adams1994). In other words, the social and economic privileges that “insider” members of scientific communities gain from these assumptions being retained within the dominant conceptual frameworks across the majority of institutions within their society give scientists from privileged social groups some significant (subconscious or otherwise) motivations to not critically reflect on those assumptions.
Finally, taking the ability to identify problematic assumptions of one’s conceptual framework to be a form of “knowledge-how” that one develops through practice can help to explain why insider-outsiders can end up developing a fairly significant epistemic privilege in this regard. Since the dominant conceptual frameworks of most institutions within Western societies are likely to have some important overlap in their problematic assumptions – due to having participated in shared practices of marginalizing the viewpoints of women and people of color within their historical developmentsFootnote 16 – it is unlikely that members of oppressed social groups would only be encountering these problematic assumptions within their scientific communities. As a result, insider-outsiders will have more opportunities to identify the particular assumptions in their scientific communities that have proven to be problematic within the dominant conceptual frameworks that they have encountered in numerous other social institutions throughout their lives.
One particularly clear example of the problems that can arise when such assumptions remain ingrained within currently accepted scientific frameworks can be found in Elisabeth Lloyd’s discussion of scientists’ efforts to provide evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm (Lloyd Reference Lloyd2005). In the final chapter of The Case of the Female Orgasm, Lloyd identifies eight problematic assumptions within the widely accepted account that claimed that female orgasms are the product of adaptation. Among these were “the assumption that sexual intercourse evokes the same response in men and women” and “the assumption that female sexual response is like male sexual response, more generally” (Lloyd Reference Lloyd2005: 224–5). That is to say, Lloyd was able to identify as problematic these assumptions that took for granted the idea that male sexual response is appropriately representative of all human sexual experience, and this allowed her to develop an alternative explanation that appealed to female orgasms being a “byproduct” of the adaptive pressures on men to develop this trait. Interestingly, Lloyd notes that this type of “byproduct” explanation has been widely accepted for the trait of the male nipple in mammals; i.e., male nipples are understood to be a “byproduct” of the adaptive pressures on women to develop the trait. This highlights the way in which evolutionary biologists had no comparable assumption that the clear adaptive pressures that are capable of explaining the development of the trait in women would make this an appropriate model for how to understand the development of the trait in men (Lloyd Reference Lloyd2005: 13–4). By calling into question assumptions such as the assumption that the development of the male orgasm is an appropriate model for understanding the development of the female orgasm and replacing these with much less problematic types of assumptions (such as the assumption that female sexual response could diverge in important enough respects from male sexual response to require a distinct evolutionary explanation), Lloyd is able to highlight empirical deficiencies in the adaptive explanations of the female orgasm and provide a non-adaptive alternative that fits better with existing evidence.
In regard to the second form of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection, this ability to replace the assumptions of one’s conceptual frameworks with better-justified beliefs has generally been overlooked in the literature. I believe that this is, in part, due to the way that agents’ conceptual frameworks have been represented as relatively static. That is to say, there has typically been little attention drawn to the way that agents are continuously engaging in processes of inquiry through which they make adjustments to the assumptions of their conceptual frameworks. However, once one acknowledges that there is a knowledge-how to identifying problematic assumptions within conceptual frameworks, this second form of knowledge-how would appear to naturally follow from the first. This is because, once an assumption has been identified as problematic, agents will have significantly more reason to engage in efforts to modify or replace that assumption within their conceptual frameworks (when compared to agents who have not identified that assumption as problematic). As such, having a heightened ability to scrutinize the assumptions of conceptual frameworks increases the likelihood of an agent taking up the practice of attempting to replace those assumptions with better alternatives. By treating the ability to replace the assumptions of one’s conceptual frameworks with better-justified assumptions as a form of knowledge-how, one can better see why having the additional opportunities to practice doing so would constitute an epistemic advantage. To use a clarificatory analogy, though a person having played thousands of games of chess will not guarantee that this person will know more than a beginning player about what is the best move to make in a number of particular positions, this additional practice would put that person in an advantageous position to have developed more of these epistemic privileges relative to those people who have had significantly less experience playing chess. Similarly, those who have spent much more time making efforts to replace the problematic assumptions of their conceptual frameworks will be in advantageous positions to know more about how to appropriately do so.
Aside from having the additional motivation and practice at replacing problematic assumptions in their conceptual frameworks, there is an additional epistemic resource for finding improvements to the assumptions of their scientific community’s conceptual frameworks that will tend to be more readily accessible to insider-outsiders. Namely, insider-outsider members will have access to the assumptions of their personal/cultural conceptual frameworks that they can draw upon when making corrections to the problematic assumptions they have identified within the dominant conceptual frameworks of their scientific communities. In this way, even when “insider” members do develop the first kind of “knowledge-how” – such that they are able to identify problematic assumptions in the dominant conceptual frameworks of their scientific communities – they will still tend to be more unaware of the possible alternatives with which they could replace those problematic assumptions. That is to say, if all of the conceptual frameworks with which “insider” members are familiar hold the same problematic assumptions, then they will have to do significantly more imaginative work to develop appropriate replacements for those assumptions. In contrast, insider-outsider members will often have access to the alternative assumptions from their personal/cultural conceptual frameworks, from which they can draw upon in this process of replacing the problematic assumptions that they have identified within their scientific community’s dominant conceptual framework.
So, how do these epistemic advantages in performing critical reflection correspond to the development of scientifically relevant epistemic privileges? First and foremost, these provide insider-outsider members with advantages for improving upon the problematic assumptions of the dominant conceptual frameworks in their scientific communities. Depending on how deeply an assumption has become ingrained in understanding the phenomena within a given field, the ability to focus criticisms on the unreflective acceptance of such an assumption could lead to the correction of a vast number of mistaken inferences that have become settled convictions within the conceptual frameworks held by most members of a scientific community. By identifying and replacing problematic assumptions that are widely held by members of their scientific communities, insider-outsiders will be more likely to hold scientific conceptual frameworks whose assumptions have been improved in these areas.
To better see this, it may be helpful to consider the work of Barbara McClintock. Being a woman in the male-dominated scientific community of American geneticists from the 1930s-70s, McClintock has come to be seen as a paradigmatic example of an insider-outsider within a scientific community. As Evelyn Fox Keller writes, McClintock’s work challenged a central dogma of the predominant conceptual framework of her scientific community at the time, which held that “once ‘information’ has passed into protein it cannot get out again… Crucial to this thesis was that information originated in the DNA and that it was not then subject to modification” (Fox Keller Reference Keller1983: 6). Importantly, this dogma “offered no way to account for the fact that the specific kinds of proteins produced by the cell seemed to vary with the cell’s chemical environment” (Fox Keller Reference Keller1983: 7). McClintock’s examination of how the organization of the parts of the chromosomes in maize corresponded to the expression of certain physical traits challenged this dogma as early as 1950. That is to say, McClintock’s work demonstrated the knowledge-how of identifying a problematic assumption that had been widely accepted by the community of geneticists at the time, and she proved capable of identifying this well before her male counterparts. Indeed, the view of “information” being fixed within DNA continued to be widely held by geneticists until two male researchers – Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob – found further exceptions to it in 1960. They went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1965.
McClintock also demonstrated the knowledge-how of being able to replace the problematic assumptions of her scientific community with others that were able to better explain how the controlling elements on the chromosome could change location. Even after the problematic assumption that the “information” in DNA always remains fixed became widely rejected within her scientific community, McClintock’s theory still went beyond that of Jacob and Monod in positing that “the controlling elements did not correspond to stable loci on the chromosome–they moved” (Fox Keller Reference Keller1983: 8–9). Attributing the ability to change positions to the controlling elements of the chromosome, which McClintock called “transposition,” “made her phenomenon a more complex one, and, in the minds of her contemporaries, less acceptable” (Fox Keller Reference Keller1983: 9). As such, this explanation of how the parts of the chromosome could change location was not accepted by the broader community of geneticists until the 1970s following “the startling discovery of elements of the bacterial genome that appeared to ‘jump around.’ These were variously called ‘jumping genes,’ transposons,’ or ‘insertion elements” (Fox Keller Reference Keller1983: 10). As Fox Keller concludes, “transposons have been observed to have regulatory properties that closely parallel those observed twenty years earlier by McClintock” (Fox Keller Reference Keller1983: 10). Thus, McClintock demonstrated a knowledge-how through which she was able to use her rejection of certain widely held assumptions to develop an alternative conceptual framework that included elements closely resembling those that would later be called “transposons” or “jumping genes” and did so two decades before comparable adjustments were made to the predominant conceptual framework of the scientific community to which she belonged. My claim is that these types of knowledge-how that are associated with critical reflection would constitute significant epistemic advantages for insider-outsiders that go beyond the knowledge-how of responding to oppressive mechanisms, and McClintock’s work gives a particularly clear indication of how these abilities are relevant to the advancement of scientific research.
In this way, insider-outsiders will be in better positions to raise fruitful forms of scientific dissent. By more reliably identifying particular problematic assumptions that are widely held within the conceptual frameworks of their scientific communities, they are able to draw other scientists’ attention to areas of these theories that are rooted in assumptions that have been unreflectively accepted. Moreover, insider-outsiders – having often already made improvements to these parts of their own scientific conceptual frameworks – will often be in a position to not just raise negative criticisms of existing assumptions, but to also offer positive alternatives for making corrections to the problematic assumptions in the predominant conceptual framework of their scientific community.
Thus, insider-outsiders would appear to have some fairly significant epistemic advantages that are scientifically relevant. The higher number of significant conflicts between their conceptual frameworks provides epistemic advantages in insider-outsiders’ development of the knowledge-how of identifying the problematic assumptions within predominant conceptual frameworks. And, closely connected to this heightened ability to identify problematic assumptions, insider-outsiders will also tend to be in a better position to develop the knowledge-how of replacing those problematic assumptions with better-justified alternatives.
4. Benefits of focusing on the knowledge-how of critical reflection
I would now like to highlight the areas of agreement and divergence between my account and some other accounts of the epistemic advantages of members of oppressed social groups. My hope is to make clearer the benefits of my account, especially its ability to posit more substantial scientifically relevant epistemic advantages to insider-outsiders. In contrast, recent accounts of the epistemic advantages to being oppressed have tended to be more deflationary regarding such scientifically relevant epistemic advantages.Footnote 17 That is to say, the kinds of knowledge-how that these approaches have attributed to members of marginalized social groups have tended to be much narrower than the epistemic advantages discussed in the previous section and the extent of these advantages – particularly those that would be relevant within scientific contexts – have subsequently been diminished.
To be clear, there are some important aspects of these recent accounts of the epistemic advantages of being oppressed with which I am in agreement. I agree with the claim that having these epistemic advantages does not guarantee that members of oppressed social groups will obtain the relevant epistemic privileges. I am also not attempting here to claim that the epistemic advantages of critical reflection inevitably amount to all-things-considered epistemic advantages such that having an advantage in critical reflection will always put one in a better position for obtaining more scientifically relevant epistemic privileges overall. Being oppressed will often be accompanied by at least some epistemic disadvantages – such as less access to educational resources/opportunities or fewer experiences of being treated as an epistemic equal by one’s colleagues – and I do not wish to claim that these epistemic advantages in critical reflection will always outweigh such epistemic disadvantages.
In addition, I agree with the more deflationary accounts of the epistemic advantages of being oppressed about the fact that these advantages are in some sense contingent, such that the corresponding epistemic privileges are in principle obtainable by members of privileged social groups. In particular, members of privileged social groups have the ability to learn from members of oppressed social groups – either directly through discussion or by reading their published works – about which assumptions of their conceptual frameworks are potentially problematic and/or may have been unreflectively accepted. Since the privileged members of a society will have fewer occasions of the conflict across conceptual frameworks that prompt critical reflection – and they will often have significant social/economic incentives to avoid performing such critical reflection even when prompted – they are in less advantageous positions to develop these epistemic privileges. Yet, this does not mean that they are incapable of doing so. Indeed, it will, in most cases, make sense – particularly for those privileged members who have other extensive social/economic resources – to hold them responsible for failing to do so.
With this said, my approach does diverge from recent approaches in its positing of broad and scientifically relevant forms of epistemic advantages that arise from being oppressed. By focusing on the kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection, my approach posits advantages to members of oppressed social groups in developing a generalizable skill that is relevant to the development of all of their conceptual frameworks. This importantly includes the development of their scientific communities’ dominant conceptual frameworks.
This diverges from an approach such as that of Lidal Dror who considers two kinds of knowledge-how that could be attributed to members of oppressed social groups: 1) A type of knowledge-how such as “how (especially working-class) Black people have to learn how to minimize the risk of suffering police violence” (Dror Reference Dror2022: 635); and 2) A type of “know-how pertaining to making better inferences concerning the workings of social marginalization” (Dror Reference Dror2022: 636). While the second type of knowledge-how considered by Dror is more closely related to the knowledge-how associated with critical reflection that I have highlighted – because improving the assumptions of one’s conceptual frameworks is likely to be a major contributor to agents’ abilities to make such better inferences – he is still positing a relatively narrow advantage that remains limited to inferences about the workings of social marginalization within a society. However, if one takes the source of insider-outsiders’ capacity to better make certain kinds of inferences as resulting from heightened abilities in identifying and replacing problematic assumptions in their conceptual frameworks, then one need not limit this ability to make better inferences to only the workings of social marginalization. Instead, developing these kinds of knowledge-how would contribute to members of oppressed social groups being better at drawing inferences in any lines of reasoning that involve the problematic assumptions of dominant conceptual frameworks, and this would extend to many more of the inferences made within scientific contexts.
Moreover, while I do ultimately think that Dror’s claim that “one comes to have good knowledge-how in this respect by practice, and this type of practice is inherently open to both marginalized and non-marginalized people” (Dror Reference Dror2022: 636) is applicable to the kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection, my account wants to differentiate between these practices of critical reflection being immediately open to most non-marginalized members of society and these practices of critical reflection being open to them only after they develop conflicting conceptual frameworks. That is to say, the two kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection that I have discussed rely upon agents developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks. Without having developed multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks, “insider” scientists would not be in a position to reconsider many of the assumptions of dominant conceptual frameworks from another framework that does not hold to those assumptions. In this way, the kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection turn out to be higher-order kinds of knowledge-how in the sense that they depend on the agent having already developed another kind of knowledge-how, viz., knowing how to develop multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks. Thus, on the one hand, since I do not think that the knowledge-how of developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks is something unavailable to non-marginalized members of society in principle, I do ultimately believe that these forms of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection are “inherently open to both marginalized and non-marginalized people.” On the other hand, by acknowledging that there is an intermediary type of knowledge-how that would first need to be acquired before an agent could develop these kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection, it becomes clearer how insider-outsiders would be in a position to develop fairly substantial epistemic privileges when regularly practicing such critical reflection over time.
Another approach similar to my own can be found in Briana Toole’s account of members of oppressed social groups developing conceptual resources that the members of privileged groups appear to lack. As Toole writes, building on the approaches of Gaile Pohlhaus and Miranda Fricker,Footnote 18 “conceptual resources play an important epistemic role in directing our attention, in organizing our thought, and in structuring our reasoning” (Toole Reference Toole2019: 604). In this way, Toole’s account posits conceptual resources that amount to highly significant epistemic advantages arising from agents’ experiences of being oppressed. With this said, Toole also limits her discussion of these resources to developing concepts for explaining the complex forms of oppression and marginalization that these agents are experiencing within their societies. For instance, Toole focuses on the development of the concept of “colorism,” following a similar line of argumentation to that of Susan Brownmiller’s account of the development of the concept of “sexual harassment.”Footnote 19 To be clear, I agree with these accounts that such conceptual resources provide agents with significant epistemic advantages. However, where my account diverges from these views is in its emphasis on the fact that there are important kinds of knowledge-how that coincide with the development of these conceptual resources for describing the systems of oppression within one’s society. That is to say, the kinds of knowledge-how that are associated with critical reflection – which are likely to be further developed through these processes of articulating concepts such as “colorism” and “sexual harassment” – are themselves important epistemic resources that are broadly applicable to agents’ development of their conceptual frameworks. My claim is that this is a much broader epistemic advantage – one that has tended to be overlooked by previous approaches – that my account of the kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection is able to pinpoint.
Importantly, then, my approach attributes to insider-outsider scientists some substantial advantages related to their abilities to develop scientific conceptual frameworks and to raise fruitful scientific dissent. Of course, previous approaches’ acknowledgment of insider-outsiders having developed additional concepts that provide them with a better understanding of their social experiences would still support claims about insider-outsiders having some scientifically relevant epistemic advantages; viz., epistemic advantages in scientific research that is directly related to the phenomena captured by these newly introduced conceptions of the processes of social marginalization. Still, these would be relatively narrow epistemic advantages compared to those associated with insider-outsiders having a more developed knowledge-how regarding the identification and replacement of problematic assumptions within their conceptual frameworks. The former would still allow for insider-outsiders having advantages in their abilities to raise scientific dissent to research that relies upon inadequate conceptions of social marginalization, but the latter would extend these advantages to any scientific dissent that is related to the assumptions within the insider-outsider’s scientific community that she has identified as problematic. Thus, my approach significantly expands the scientifically relevant epistemic advantages that could be attributed to insider-outsider members of scientific communities.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, I highlighted two kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection that would provide agents with epistemic advantages in the development of their conceptual frameworks. These are: 1) The knowledge-how of identifying potentially problematic assumptions within one’s conceptual frameworks; and 2) The knowledge-how of replacing those problematic assumptions with better-justified beliefs.
I then demonstrated how insider-outsiders are in more advantageous positions to develop these two kinds of knowledge-how. Insider-outsider members of scientific communities will be in more advantageous positions to develop the first kind of knowledge-how because they will tend to have more experience developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks. And, as I argued, having access to multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks is crucial for the identification of potentially problematic assumptions in each of these frameworks. I also showed why insider-outsiders will tend to have more incentives to engage in critical reflection when they are questioning certain assumptions of their scientific community’s dominant conceptual framework that have been unreflectively accepted. For the second kind of knowledge-how, insider-outsider members of scientific communities will tend to have more motivation to adjust the assumptions of their conceptual frameworks once they have identified these as potentially problematic. Insider-outsiders will also tend to have more access to the alternative assumptions of their personal/cultural conceptual frameworks. While these are not advantages that guarantee that members of oppressed social groups will develop the associated epistemic privileges, they do provide strong reasons for claiming that insider-outsiders are in better positions to develop the kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection.
The reason for focusing on the kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection is that these can help capture some of the broader epistemic advantages of insider-outsiders that have tended to be overlooked. While I agree with more recent approaches that these epistemic advantages are ultimately contingent in an important sense, I have also suggested that the kinds of knowledge-how associated with critical reflection are epistemic privileges that are capable of extending well beyond knowledge that is directly related to the processes of oppression and social marginalization within one’s society. Instead, my approach focuses on kinds of knowledge-how that are relevant to agents’ development of their conceptual frameworks and which play a crucial role in enabling agents to raise more fruitful dissent to the assumptions of dominant conceptual frameworks. I have argued that such knowledge-how is widely applicable across agents’ different kinds of inquiries and that insider-outsiders being in better positions to obtain these epistemic privileges constitute significant, scientifically relevant epistemic advantages for them.
Competing interests
The author has no competing interests related to this article.
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