2. Standpoint matters: A primer

Alongside feminist empiricism (e.g., Longino Reference Longino1990) and feminist postmodernism (e.g., Haraway Reference Haraway1988), feminist standpoint theory is one of the three major strands of feminist epistemology (Harding Reference Harding1986: 26ff.). Its key tenet is that features such as gender, race, or class that mainstream epistemology deems irrelevant are in fact vital for understanding what knowledge agents are able to produce, access, or share. Since knowledge is produced by and for agents whose identity shapes both the resources they have access to and the interpretive heuristics they can draw on, it is inexorably socially situated (e.g., Wylie Reference Wylie, Figueroa and Harding2003; Intemann Reference Intemann2010; Toole Reference Toole2021). Importantly, the unequal power agents hold by virtue of their social location influences both their resources for and their practices of knowledge production, leading to profoundly divergent understandings of reality (e.g., Collins Reference Collins1990; Rolin Reference Rolin2009).

The foregoing situated knowledge thesis is often combined with an inversion thesis: while it may seem obvious that unjust social structures systematically disadvantage the oppressed, standpoint epistemologists argue that it is precisely the socially powerless who can develop privileged standpoints that allow for “more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world” (Haraway Reference Haraway1988: 584). Especially on matters concerning the kind of oppression they are subjected to, or even in the moral domain in general (Dular Reference Dular2024), they may “know different things, or know some things better than those who are comparatively privileged (socially, politically), by virtue of what they typically experience and how they understand their experience” (Wylie Reference Wylie, Figueroa and Harding2003: 26). As a consequence, the marginalized can have an “epistemic advantage” over the dominant (e.g., Hartsock Reference Hartsock, Harding and Hintikka1983; Haraway Reference Haraway1988; Medina Reference Medina2013; Toole Reference Toole2022, Reference Toole2024). What may, for instance, seem like a clumsy flirt or harmless “locker-room talk” to “the Man” will stand out as sexual harassment for those for whom the need to navigate such impositions is a daily reality (see sect. 6). Crucially, the point is not merely “that things look different to different people,” but that the standpoints of the oppressed “warrant them to recognize different objective features of the world” (Kukla and Ruetsche Reference Kukla and Ruetsche2002: 402) and are thus “better than others as starting points for knowledge projects” (Harding Reference Harding, Alcoff and Potter1993: 56).

What precisely makes for the epistemic advantage of being oppressed is a contested issue. Marginalization may shape both what the oppressed perceive and how they respond to it, both their “access tools” and their “interpretive tools” (Woomer Reference Woomer2019: 77). As a result, they may be evidentially or cognitively superior to the dominant (Toole Reference Toole2024: 410). Evidential superiority is often, as said above, traced to the need to develop a dual “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1903: 3), which makes the marginalized, in Collins’s (Reference Collins1986, Reference Collins1990) terms, “outsiders within”: since they cannot afford to view the world only from their own perspective but must also adopt the oppressive perspective imposed on them, they are able to detect subtle power dynamics (e.g., Rolin Reference Rolin2009), spot anomalies (e.g., Collins Reference Collins1986), and identify a broader range of relevant empirical evidence, background assumptions, and auxiliary hypotheses (e.g., Intemann Reference Intemann2010). Cognitive superiority, in turn, has been attributed to the fact that the marginalized are more likely to develop certain habits of attention (e.g., Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2011), epistemic virtues such as humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness (e.g., Medina Reference Medina2013), motivation for inquiry (e.g., Alcoff Reference Alcoff, Sullivan and Tuana2007), and conceptual competence (e.g., Narayan Reference Narayan and Harding2004).

A last, but crucial, tenet is that “standpoints do not automatically arise from occupying a particular social location” (Intemann Reference Intemann2010: 785) – there is no generic knowledge that, by default, accompanies being a woman, Black, Indigenous, etc. Unlike a social location, “a standpoint is an achievement” (Harding Reference Harding2009: 195). It is “an epistemological device” (Hartsock Reference Hartsock, Harding and Hintikka1983: 284) that is “neither self-evident nor obvious” (ibid., 303). As Alison Wylie puts it, standpoints are “struggled for, achieved, by epistemic agents who are critically aware of the conditions under which knowledge is produced and authorized” (Reference Wylie, Figueroa and Harding2003: 31). Occupying a marginalized social location is therefore not sufficient for achieving a privileged standpoint. Whether it is necessary remains heavily contested (e.g., Dror Reference Dror2023; Toole Reference Toole2024; Hannon Reference Hannon2025). Some argue that marginalized standpoints are per se inaccessible to the dominant, so that “social location is a necessary […] criterion for whatever epistemic privilege derives from [a] standpoint” (Crasnow Reference Crasnow2008: 1093). Others, by contrast, argue that privileged standpoints are not exclusively available to the marginalized, just “much easier and therefore much more likely for them to achieve” (Dular Reference Dular2024: 1818). We return to this issue in Sections 4, 5, and 6, arguing that it is precisely the irreducibly affective nature of marginalized knowledge that is key to understanding these claims and adjudicating between them.

With these clarifications in place, let us turn to the central purpose of the paper. We do not aim to defend standpoint epistemology. We take it as given that, by and large, those in marginalized social locations can achieve standpoints that are, in some regard, epistemically privileged. What we want to question is that this claim can be adequately understood – and defended – when the advantage is portrayed as “purely” epistemic. Experiences of being oppressed do not solely affect who one is, how one is attuned to the world, and how one experiences one’s meaningful connectedness to others, but, thereby, also enrich one’s insights into the mechanisms and manifestations of structural subordination. In light of this, we argue, the marginalized possess an advantage that is, at root and crucially, also affective.

3. Affectivity and epistemology in the context of oppression

Before exploring the affective dimension of the advantage thesis, it is worth pausing to ask why one should pursue such a project in the first place. As indicated in Section 1, epistemic and affective processes are, in general, deeply entangled. But why should this make us take seriously the idea that this general entanglement runs so deep that the advantage identified by standpoint theorists may also deserve – even demand – to be regarded as distinctively affective? This section explores two reasons: one more suggestive and the other more substantial.

A quick reason for taking the idea of an affective advantage seriously departs from the observation that Fricker’s (Reference Fricker2007) groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice has prompted a growing body of research on the corollary idea of affective injustice. Fricker’s analysis of how asymmetries in social power can wrong marginalized individuals “in their capacity as knowers” (ibid., 20) has prompted others to argue, convincingly, that a comparable power dynamic is at play in our affective lives as well. When those at the center of power systematically dismiss those at the margins, they refuse to participate in the “uniquely affective cooperative behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an affective being” (Whitney Reference Whitney2023: 30), resulting in what Srinivasan (Reference Srinivasan2018) and Whitney (Reference Whitney2018) dubbed “affective injustice.” The study of affective injustice has since become a vibrant area of research that radiates into diverse areas of our social life (e.g., Pismenny et al. Reference Pismenny, Eickers and Prinz2024). This is not the place to delve into the debate (see Walter Reference Walter2026). But the very fact that so many scholars find it fruitful and important lends prima facie support to the idea that the advantage enjoyed by the marginalized may also be affective. Bluntly put: if the injustices they suffer are affective, it is only natural to wonder whether their advantage is affective as well.

A second reason is rooted in the observation that standpoint theorists themselves typically recognize that the advantage of the marginalized results by no means from detached reflection and ratiocination alone but is rooted in the felt texture of their lived experience:

Assuming that some of these experiences are undoubtedly affective, the question is: if the advantage of the marginalized is ultimately grounded in how they are affectively attuned to the world, is it not at least misleading to disguise this by framing it as decidedly “epistemic”?

In response, one might acknowledge that affective experience is a crucial source of knowledge, yet still argue that it serves merely as the origin or conduit for input, whereas it is reason that cultivates standpoints and therefore deserves the credit. We will return to this line of reasoning – and its problems – later. For present purposes, just note that such a view reinscribes the familiar caricature which casts emotions as inferior to reason and that it is precisely in the context of oppression that we should be wary of accepting such a view too uncritically. For too long, reason has been associated with dominance, while affect has been tied to the subjugated and weak. We’ve had it: men are rational and cold-blooded, women irrational and sentimental; boys roll up their sleeves and get the job done, while girls cry helpless rivers in their princess dresses; straight cis men and women marry and work hard to stay faithful and raise children for the good of society, while queers flit from bed to bed and contribute nothing but glitter and drama, etc. To acknowledge that the advantage of the marginalized is rooted in their affective experiences but then keep labeling it “epistemic” reinforces such harmful stereotypes and the standard lore that affectivity is “unworthy” of serious consideration and unduly skews “objectivity.” This is, patently, nothing standpoint epistemologists should wish to do. They, of all people, have every reason to reject “the ‘Dumb View’ of emotions” (Narayan Reference Narayan and Harding2004: 218) and instead take seriously “the inevitability of their presence and the importance of the contributions they are capable of making to our knowledge” (ibid., 214). In light of this, it is crucial to move beyond a passing recognition of affectivity and make explicit that and how it serves as an essential source of marginalized insight. This is what we turn to next.

4. Weak affective advantage

As seen in Section 2, marginalized standpoints have been said to be evidentially superior to the shallower gaze of the dominant when it comes to identifying power dynamics, spotting anomalies, and registering a broader range of empirical evidence, background assumptions, and auxiliary hypotheses; and they have been said to be cognitively superior when it comes to developing and cultivating beneficial habits of attention, epistemic virtues, motivation for inquiry, and conceptual competence. All of this is, typically, rooted in how the marginalized are affectively attuned to the world. By shaping what they see and how they make sense of it, their lived experience functions as an indispensable “orientation device” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006). There is perhaps no better illustration of this than what Jaggar (Reference Jaggar1989) calls “outlaw emotions”: recalcitrant yet fitting affective responses to situations of unequal social power that clash with the agent’s own detached judgments about what ought to be felt or what it is “normal” to feel that have been shaped by dominant narratives. For instance, women may respond to a sexist “compliment” with a vague but persistent sense of unease, even when their patriarchally instilled beliefs tell them they ought to feel flattered. Such dissonances between their internalized oppressive beliefs and their own embodied experience create a tension that discloses something their belief-based declarative system alone would fail to register: that something is “off” in the dominant narratives (e.g., Ahmed Reference Ahmed2017; Hemmings Reference Hemmings2012). Outlaw emotions thus have epistemic value: they act as “affective reasons” (Silva Reference Silva2025: 62ff.) that provide both an immediate justification for evaluative beliefs and the motivation to ask fruitful questions and develop the hermeneutical resources to name what is wrong (e.g., Silva Reference Silva2021). Among many other things, this puts the marginalized in a position to recognize “microaggressions” – such as telling a woman to “smile,” praising a Black person for how articulate they are, or asking an ethnically marked individual where they are really from – as what they truly are: not innocent compliments or harmless blunders, but manifestations of everyday misogyny, racism, and other forms of structural oppression (e.g., Sue Reference Sue2010). Importantly, this insight is again not driven by “quantification, objectification, and logic/rationality” (Sue Reference Sue2017: 171), but by “powerful emotions, subjective experiences, biases, values, and beliefs” (ibid.).

The advantage marginalized standpoints offer thus seems, at root, at least sometimes fueled by the characteristic affective attunement that those who cultivate such standpoints develop. In this sense, this advantage, even though undoubtedly epistemic, is therefore also clearly affective: far from “skewing” the epistemic perspective of the marginalized, it is precisely their unique affective orientation that allows them to register imbalanced power dynamics, their causes, manifestations, and consequences more objectively. The question remains, however, how best to understand this advantage.

On a modest reading, the advantage of being oppressed is merely “contingent”: by offering a more immediate or salient route to making sense of social reality from within lived subordination, the affective orientation of the marginalized makes it easier for them to acquire knowledge about oppressive power relations but does not provide any proprietary knowledge that is in principle inaccessible to the dominant. Accordingly, experiences of marginalization facilitate the cultivation of privileged standpoints, but those who lack this affective orientation could attain the same knowledge through detached reasoning. Such a “weak” advantage thesis is discernible in the following claims:

If the advantage of being oppressed is affective in this sense, it is “weak” in two – related – respects. First, the affective orientation of the marginalized is valuable not for its own sake, but only for its instrumental role in achieving epistemic ends. This hardly alleviates the concern that affect functions merely as reason’s handmaiden (see sect. 3). Second, whatever value the affective has on such a view, it eventually remains dispensable: one does not have to experience oppression in order to attain the marginalized’s privileged standpoint. The fact that the dominant lack the experiences that enable the marginalized to see through and incentivize them to question social injustices makes their road to knowledge about the workings of oppression less salient and more winding. Yet, they too can attain it “as long as they have consciousness-raised” (Toole Reference Toole2024: 420). Both concerns might be alleviated by a “strong” advantage thesis according to which the affective orientation of the oppressed is necessary because the knowledge it provides is “not something that a person outside one’s diminished social category can grasp simply by an act of ratiocination” (Thomas Reference Thomas and Willet1998: 368). Such a strong advantage thesis has had its advocates, but it is considerably more controversial. Currently, it is facing significant criticism from a number of authors (e.g., Dror Reference Dror2023; Tilton Reference Tilton2024; Toole Reference Toole2024; Hannon Reference Hannon2025; Tilton and Toole Reference Tilton, Toole, Sylvan, Dancy, Sosa and Steup2025). This is the topic of the remainder of this paper.

5. Strong affective advantage (I): Knowing “with” and “without” feeling

According to Brianna Toole, knowledge is situated in the sense that “one’s social identity and the material conditions of one’s life […] influence the sorts of experiences subjects are likely to have and, in turn, shape and limit what we know” (Reference Toole2024: 411; emphases added). This is surprisingly equivocal. That one’s social identity influences or shapes what one can know leaves it open whether those with a different identity can nevertheless attain the same knowledge. If, by contrast, one’s social identity limits what one can know, then it imposes boundaries that render some knowledge inaccessible to those outside. This is the idea underlying the view that occupying a marginalized social location is necessary for achieving a privileged standpoint (see sect. 2). It is discernible in claims such as:

When combined with the claim that the privilege that results from the inaccessibility of knowledge to those outside a social location is – for the reasons given in Section 4 – in part rooted in the affective orientation of those within, such a view amounts to a “strong” affective advantage thesis: so understood, the marginalized are epistemically privileged because some knowledge about the workings of marginalization is irreducibly affective and can, therefore, not be fully attained by the dominant who lack the social opportunity and necessity to make the experiences that would allow them to achieve the requisite standpoints. Such a view is, we think, not only more plausible than a weak advantage thesis but also offers the best support for the currently highly contested idea that the marginalized can possess knowledge that is in principle inaccessible to the dominant.

The strong advantage thesis is vividly suggested, for instance, by Julia Serano’s (Reference Serano2007) account of how her transition reshaped her understanding of patriarchal sexism. In an “anemic” sense of the term, she recounts, she already knew when still male-bodied that women are subjected to gendered discrimination. And yet, it was only after her transition – when she, now interacting with men as a woman, “experienced the enraged venom in their voices and fury in their faces” (ibid., 223) – that she fully came to understand what it is like to be on the receiving end. The distinctiveness of an affective grasp is also underscored by, among others, Laurence Thomas’ claim that it is not “possible for persons (who are not Holocaust survivors) to put themselves imaginatively in the mind of a Holocaust survivor” simply through “an act of ratiocination” (Reference Thomas and Willet1998: 360), and Toole’s (Reference Toole2022) example of two women who hear that a white police officer is accused of raping Black women from a poor neighborhood: Moira, who is herself Black and thus has access to a “de se mode of presentation to imaginatively represent the[ir] experiences” (ibid., 59), believes the victims; June, who is white, assumes they are lying. There are thus, Toole says, “certain propositions that, given features of their social identity, Moira is in a position to know but that June is not” (ibid., 53): “[a]s a black woman, Moira can know (where June cannot) that other black women might not report for fear of [not; sic!] being believed” (ibid., 61).

Whether their affective orientation indeed gives the marginalized such a general privilege is, however, currently a contested issue, with several critics arguing that the strong advantage thesis is implausibly restrictive (e.g., Dror Reference Dror2023; Tilton Reference Tilton2024; Toole Reference Toole2024; Hannon Reference Hannon2025; Tilton and Toole Reference Tilton, Toole, Sylvan, Dancy, Sosa and Steup2025). Lidal Dror, for instance, grants that “the socially marginalized better know what it feels like to be oppressed” (Reference Dror2023: 629), but claims that this “does not generally give better epistemic support to claims about the workings of social marginalization” (ibid.). Whatever advantage there may be to being oppressed, he says, it is at best contingent: it “doesn’t really come from being oppressed in itself” (ibid., 620), but stems from “the relevant evidence and motivation” (ibid., 624), both of which are “in principle also open to the non-oppressed” (ibid., 620; see also Hannon Reference Hannon2025). Accordingly, the critics hold, there are no grounds for thinking that the dominants’ “social positions doom them to ignorance” (Tilton Reference Tilton2024: 1), rendering the strong advantage thesis “straightforwardly implausible” (ibid., 8).

Below, we argue that such a “deflationary” perspective on what it means to achieve a standpoint rests on assumptions about the ways in which lived experience discloses empirical truths that are, at the very least, controversial. Part of our aim thereby is to bring standpoint theory into conversation with contemporary philosophy of emotions – which has, curiously, so far remained largely peripheral to discussions of the advantage thesis. Taking its insights seriously, we aspire to show, suggests that certain forms of understanding are accessible only through experiencing oppressive structures from within and cannot be fully attained from the outside through detached reasoning alone. In Section 6, we then argue that this indeed does afford the marginalized a principled epistemic advantage.

An especially vivid illustration of the current skepticism regarding the tenability of the strong advantage thesis is Dror’s (Reference Dror2023) variation of Frank Jackson’s famous “knowledge argument” featuring Mary, a brilliant scientist who knows virtually all there is to know about color vision from a scientific perspective, yet has never experienced seeing red (Jackson Reference Jackson1982). Despite Mary’s vast knowledge, Jackson argued, she does not know “what it is like” to see red. Dror’s version centers on Jane, a white activist who “knows practically all that anyone can know” (Reference Dror2023: 629) about anti-Black oppression based on academic, statistical, demographic, historical, etc. information: “Jane has all the descriptive facts about the workings of the marginalization of Blacks in the United States that are accessible without having the experience of being Black” (ibid.). While Jackson presses the intuition that Mary will gain novel (phenomenal) knowledge upon finally experiencing seeing red, Dror argues that Jane’s “epistemic prowess or position vis-a-vis the relevant workings of social marginalization” (ibid.) would not be significantly improved by equipping her with first-hand experiences of being Black.

Dror explicitly concedes that Jane “does not know important things about how it feels to be oppressed as a (particular) Black person” (Reference Dror2023: 629). Yet, he claims, this lack of first-hand experience is “of limited significance” (ibid., 639) and does not warrant thinking that “Jane must thereby be epistemically disadvantaged when it comes to understanding the operations of racism within the United States” (ibid., 629). In a similar vein, discussing Mills’ (Reference Mills, Sullivan and Tuana2007) work on white ignorance, Tilton (Reference Tilton2024) stresses that “he explicitly clarifies that ‘some people who are white will […] overcome [white ignorance] and have true beliefs on what their fellow whites get wrong’” (7). Despite the fact that they lack the experiences of Black people, they can, the critics claim, “step, even partially, into the lives of others” (Hannon Reference Hannon2025: 9) by, for instance, “reading works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which vividly portrays the horrors of slavery […] to better understand the nature of racial oppression” (ibid.), to an extent that “can sometimes rival the transformative impact of firsthand experience” (ibid.). Such a view is motivated by – as we would call it – an “objectivist” or “cognitivist” stance according to which “the vast majority of claims about oppression and social marginalization are not claims that are made true, even in part, by one’s own feelings” (Dror Reference Dror2023: 632), but by “objective features about the ways in which people are treated” (ibid.). As a consequence, Jane’s lack of first-hand experience of oppression does not disadvantage her relative to someone who is otherwise her cognitive “equal” (ibid., 629), but, on top of that, also experiences oppression. Indeed, those best positioned to understand social marginalization, Dror insists, are “social scientists and historians who are able to conduct systematic research” (ibid., 625) and do not “suffer from false consciousness” (ibid.) and “misleading […] experiences under oppression” (ibid.) as the marginalized do.

When you break it down like this, this seems to set discourse back several decades by blatantly disregarding the work of feminist epistemologists who have argued tirelessly that the idea(l) of a purportedly neutral, disembodied, and value-free “god trick” (Haraway Reference Haraway1988: 581) sort of “objectivity from nowhere” is itself part of oppressive structures (e.g., Hartsock Reference Hartsock, Harding and Hintikka1983; Harding Reference Harding, Alcoff and Potter1993). We won’t press this point further here, though. Our concern is with the critics’ more general claim that the dominant who, like Jane, do not experience marginalization could nonetheless occupy the same general epistemic position as those who do. In our view, this presupposes what Peter Goldie (Reference Goldie2000) calls the “add-on view” of emotions, viz., that affectivity is just contingently “tacked onto” our intentional relation to the world, so that we can account for what people know and do solely in terms of “feelingless beliefs and desires” (ibid., 82) and then “add on” the lived experience “as an afterthought” (ibid., 4).

Such an “add-on view” overlooks that our “affective intentionality” (e.g., Slaby and Stephan Reference Slaby and Stephan2008) – our affective directedness toward the world – is irreducible to the traditional inventory of beliefs, desires, perceptions, etc. It fails to acknowledge that affectivity provides a “sui generis type of world-directedness” (Slaby Reference Slaby2008: 429) in which intentionality and the felt quality of experience are so deeply intertwined that the latter affects the very content of our evaluative beliefs (e.g., Silva Reference Silva2025). When one is “thinking with feeling,” as Goldie (Reference Goldie2000: 58ff.) puts it, the feeling is not just “added on at the end of the story” (ibid., 82). Rather, it is an integral part of what one believes. Seen through the lens of an important strand in current emotion theory, therefore, the affective component of one’s lived experience cannot – as the critics of the strong advantage thesis assume – be subtracted without altering one’s epistemic prowess: content captured “from the personal point of view […] is essentially emotion-involving, so that there could not be content captured in that way without the person experiencing the emotion as he does” (Goldie Reference Goldie2000: 51).

Goldie’s favorite example is that of a person who, based on their declarative knowledge about the temperature, the thickness of the ice, and other relevant facts, thinks that the ice on a frozen lake is dangerous, but then, after slipping and hearing it crack, comes to think of the ice’s dangerousness with fear. The difference, Goldie stresses, is not that the slipping adds affectivity to the initial epistemic state. Coming to think of the ice’s dangerousness “with fear” is not just continuing to think that it is dangerous plus some feeling on top:

Although affective and non-affective forms of knowledge both allow access to the truth that the ice is dangerous, non-affective understanding remains incomplete. Above all, it lacks the motivational force that evaluative beliefs draw from being affectively felt. This point is further underscored by Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, who discuss an agent who is, somewhat like Jane, “deprived of emotions” (Reference Deonna and Teroni2025: 109), yet “has been able to get a handle on our evaluative practices because, say, she has learned to recognise the responses of others” (ibid., 109f.). This agent possesses a non-affective understanding of value, but, Deonna and Teroni argue, is unable to convert it into reasons that genuinely motivate action:

Lacking emotions that endow her life with existential sense, this android-like agent, despite their third-person mastery of our evaluative practices, doesn’t really (as John Haugeland would put it) “give a damn.” Their access to evaluative truths amounts to what Goldie calls “knowing-but-not-knowing” (Reference Goldie, Brun, Doğuoğlu and Kuenzle2008: 159) – a knowledge that leaves us unaffected, as in those moments “when we say, as we so often do, how terrible is the genocide reported on the latest news, and then press on to worry only about the single murder in our own home town” (ibid.).

Deonna and Teroni’s point is echoed by Imke von Maur who draws on a situated approach to affectivity that emphasizes the embodied and socially embedded character of emotions to argue that they “do not track single features of the objects they are directed towards, but rather disclose a complex and encompassing meaningful Gestalt” (Reference von Maur2022: 860). This Gestalt is construed by agents relative to their individual socially learned and bodily ingrained normative patterns – their, as von Maur (Reference von Maur2021) calls it, “affective biography” – through which they make sense of their worlds. Just as Gestalts are visually disclosed as meaningful wholes rather than mere arrangements of parts, emotional content is not “reducible to single evaluative properties like ‘amusing’ or ‘disgusting’ but includes the concerns of the individual against the background of their socio-culturally specific situatedness” (Reference von Maur2022: 860). Someone, for instance, who collects extensive structural information about the refugee crisis may therefore, on the basis of detached analyses, come to think that it is horrifying. Yet, unless this declarative assessment is affectively felt, von Maur argues, the horror is not fully understood. Those who know the numbers, but are not concerned by the horror, will at best be like Serano before her transition: “A person may understand that ‘it is bad’ for refugees to leave their families and homes and to lose their whole lives, but if that does not affect them […], they do not disclose the phenomenon as a meaningful Gestalt” (von Maur Reference von Maur2022: 867). The same, we venture, holds for those who, like Jane, struggle to attain the knowledge that is available from a marginalized standpoint without first-hand experiences of oppression.

We lack the space here for a fuller discussion or defense of these insights from contemporary philosophy of emotions. Still, we hope to have shown that, from such a perspective, affectivity provides us with a sui generis knowledge whose content is not equally accessible “without feeling.” Accordingly, “objectivity” is not achieved by ignoring the affective, but by explicitly taking it into account. Given that standpoint theorists typically do trace the advantage of the marginalized to their lived experience, this alone makes it worth considering how this insight could, quite generally, be more explicitly reflected in their work.

Concerning specifically the question of whether the advantage of being oppressed is in principle also open to the dominant, and thus the viability of the strong advantage thesis, the considerations in this section are, however, not conclusive. First, even if affective knowledge is irreducible to non-affective knowledge, this alone does not show that it is superior. Second, the mere fact that emotions are necessary to access the relevant evidence and muster the requisite motivation does not by itself disadvantage the dominant: Jane may not be able to gain the same affective knowledge as her Black equal, but she certainly can have emotions and may be moved by them to unravel evidence and take action. Third, the idea that the dominant are restricted to non-affective knowledge presupposes that affective knowledge can be acquired only through first-hand experiences, and it is not clear that only those who are oppressed can make the requisite experiences. We discuss these and related concerns in the next section.

6. Strong affective advantage (II): Grasping from the outside?

As seen, the critics of the strong advantage thesis acknowledge that the marginalized know better than the dominant what it feels like to be oppressed. What they deny is that this affords them a principled epistemic advantage regarding the workings of social marginalization. Even if non-affective knowledge can never truly equal affective knowledge, therefore, the question remains whether this affords the marginalized any significant advantage at a more general scale (Hannon Reference Hannon2025). In this section, we first reject the critics’ reasons for denying that it does so and then outline what we take the affective advantage of the marginalized to consist in.

Dror’s argument against the claim that the marginalized enjoy any significant advantage rests on his assertion that “the vast majority of claims about oppression and social marginalization are not claims that are made true, even in part, by one’s own feelings” (Reference Dror2023: 632). Rather, he claims, they are “objectively analyzable claims about certain structural relations” (ibid.). There is a sense in which this is undeniably correct: just because someone feels oppressed, they not automatically are oppressed.Footnote ² But this is not the point here. What is at issue here is whether the normative content of statements about oppression is solely determined by “objective” facts, or whether certain social arrangements are oppressive in part only in virtue of how they are experienced. Consider sexual harassment. What counts as sexual harassment is not “objectively analyzable”: the very same comment, touch, or look may be a sexual harassment or a flirtation, depending on how it is experienced by the target. According to the European Union, for instance, behavior of a sexual nature does not qualify as harassment if it is not “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive” (European Parliament and Council 2006) – and whether it is so is partially a matter of how it is, or can be, experienced. Accordingly, any attempt at an “objective” analysis would miss precisely the very feature that makes sexual harassment what it is. The same holds for myriad other concepts that are indispensable for identifying and describing manifestations of oppression and the structural injustices underlying them: concepts such as exclusion, silencing, erasure, and dismissal are all response-dependent in that their application conditions reflect how a certain behavior can be experienced. This not only calls into doubt Dror’s specific claim that statements about marginalization are “objectively analyzable” (Reference Dror2023: 632), but also quite generally the critics’ suggestion that the dominant can attain a marginalized standpoint through ratiocination alone if only they try hard enough (e.g., Tilton Reference Tilton2024; Toole Reference Toole2024; Hannon Reference Hannon2025).

Yet, one might object, the mere fact that, for instance, Sam’s being harassed is partly determined by how they experience others’ behavior certainly does not entail that someone without their first-hand experience cannot know that Sam is being harassed. If, for instance, being groped by strangers on crowded public transport is generally known to be typically experienced as intimidating, offensive, etc., then observing such behavior can be a reliable “marker” even for someone who has never experienced harassment themselves. True. But if the argument in Section 5 is correct, such knowledge “without feeling” will not have the exact same content as the corresponding knowledge “with feeling,” although it may still do for (at least some) practical purposes – after all, reasoning or being told that the ice is dangerous can keep you off the lake, even if you have never experienced its dangerousness “with fear.” Could, then, Jane not similarly come to identify, say, being disproportionately singled out for “random” security checks as a manifestation of anti-Black oppression – and as a consequence be as motivated as any Black activist to fight it? As Michael Hannon phrases this objection based on a similar example: “Testimony thus provides a clear pathway for non-marginalized individuals to acquire moral knowledge about harms and injustices, undermining the strong thesis’s claim of exclusivity” (Reference Hannon2025: 11). As a general objection against the strong advantage thesis, however, this is a non-sequitur. Of course, the dominant can acquire some knowledge from the marginalized via testimony. But that does not undermine the strong advantage thesis, which need not claim that the dominant cannot know anything the marginalized can know, only that they cannot know everything the marginalized can know. The same holds for the related concern that the strong advantage thesis entails that “the socially dominant [have to] systematically farm out the work of ‘getting things’ right [sic!] to the socially marginalized” (Tilton and Toole Reference Tilton, Toole, Sylvan, Dancy, Sosa and Steup2025: 590; see also Hannon Reference Hannon2025: 17–19), thereby exacerbating the latter’s epistemic exploitation. The strong advantage thesis allows that the dominant “get some things right” – just as someone can, based on their declarative knowledge about the temperature, the thickness of the ice, and other relevant facts, come to believe that the ice is dangerous. All it denies is that this provides them with all the knowledge someone with first-hand experience can have. Let us elaborate on what we take to be one central (if likely not the only; see footnote 5) aspect of the knowledge about oppression that is disclosed from marginalized standpoints but remains inaccessible to those who are not similarly situated, testimony notwithstanding.

Grasping a concept requires mastering (albeit not necessarily perfectly) its application conditions. Grasping the concept of an apology, for instance, requires recognizing both that superficially different behaviors – saying “I’m sorry,” offering a conciliatory gesture, or making amends through action – are all ways of expressing an apology, while superficially similar behaviors do, depending on the context, not express genuine remorse but merely serve to deflect blame. The same holds for, say, sexual harassment: grasping that concept requires being able to recognize which of a wide range of behaviors constitute sexual harassment, while others, though overtly very similar, do not. Their habituated affective biography that attunes them to a world structured by the dominant allows the marginalized to “track” relevant behaviors. For them, subjecting a woman to the “male gaze,” sharing unsolicited pictures of private body parts, or engaging in inappropriate sex-related name-calling all create a distinct “affective atmosphere” that stands out as a meaningful Gestalt (see sect. 5). This holistic Gestalt makes the individual acts in question recognizable as sexual harassment,Footnote ³ even if the same behavior could easily be construed as, and actually be, say, flirtatious in a different context.

Without the experiences that constitute the oppressive Gestalt, the dominant are considerably worse off. There is no homogenous set of “objectively analyzable” characteristics common to all and only instances of sexual harassment. Like all evaluative categories, sexual harassment is not a natural kind with a projectible essence. Sexual harassment is multiply realizable, and radically so. As a consequence, any “objective” description will be disjunctive and wildly heterogeneous. As such, it will be ill-suited as a basis for reliably projecting the concept to novel cases. Consider someone who has never experienced sexual harassment, but has, like Jane, learned through testimony that groping, catcalling and repeatedly standing too close are, despite their surface differences, all typically manifestations of sexual harassment. How are they – on the basis of that and similar information alone – supposed to determine whether, say, a man’s lingering on a woman’s chest for just that one moment too long counts as sexual harassment if they are not experientially sensitive to the subtle affective details that lend the encounter its Gestalt as sexual harassment in the first place, including, say, the charged silence, the flicker of discomfort, or the sudden stillness in the woman’s gestures? Testimony alone will not solve the problem.Footnote ⁴ For as soon as they add this behavior and its overt “markers” to their “objective” mental “checklist” of what counts as sexual harassment, they overhear a man telling a woman “You have such a nice smile, you should use it more often!,” wondering (or more likely not, as comparable episodes will be virtually countless) whether this, too, crosses the line. Moreover, there are not only countless behaviors that are experienced as intimidating, etc., but also countless ways of expressing intimidation. The man’s remark might not, as the intrusive gaze, be met with silence, discomfort, or stillness, but with a forced smile, an averted gaze, or a faint falter in the voice (which might in other contexts not indicate intimidation, but, say, shyness …). The intimidation need not even be overtly expressed at all: suppose at a team lunch a day later, our eager learner sees a senior woman putting her hand on a female junior colleague’s arm, saying, half-jokingly but just loud enough for others to hear, “You know, with lips like yours, you could get away with anything around here.” No one flinches. No one laughs. No one reports it. How, again, is our eager learner to say whether this is a compliment, a moment of female bonding, perhaps even a sign of empowerment, or rather a poorly veiled overture from a superior or the equally poorly disguised message that what counts in this company is how one looks, not what one can do, if equipped only with their prior “checklist,” but insensitive to an affective atmosphere that is not part of their personal experiential biography? And so on …

The crucial point of the foregoing considerations is not solely that the dominant fail to know “‘how it feels’ to inhabit certain social locations” (Hannon Reference Hannon2025: 8). The point is that the marginalized, in virtue of their affective repertoire, have a grasp of concepts like “sexual harassment” that the dominant lack, and that this has broader epistemic and motivational implications: without the immediate affective sensitivity that enables the marginalized to detect subtle cues of power and entitlement that help identify a behavior as an unwanted intrusion rather than a welcome advance (even when this conflicts with consciously held beliefs, as in cases of “outlaw emotions”; see sect. 4), the dominant must resort to indirect inferences and testimony. This not just renders their grasp more tentative, error-prone, and slow, but, importantly, also incomplete.

To further illustrate what the dominant fail to grasp, consider Daniel Dennett’s (Reference Dennett1991a) notion of “real patterns.” Real patterns are informational regularities that, although they do not correspond to any fundamental “objective” structures, are nonetheless not merely subjective because they enable reliable and explanatory predictions. The marginalized can “track” real patterns of systematic domination – patterns of recurring condescension, boundary violations, microaggressions, and the like. The dominant will fail to recognize relevant elements of these patterns and thus only achieve a fragmented grasp of them, unable to disclose them as a unified meaningful Gestalt. Without such a unifying affective lens, they can only incrementally assemble a patchy and retrospective concept, case by case, through testimony and detached reflection. No matter how exhaustive their conceptual “checklist” becomes, however, new permutations can always arise that do not obviously fit unless one intuits the Gestalt from within, so that the dominant are doomed to miss or misjudge instances of oppression. This, we venture, is one central aspect of the advantage often attributed to the marginalized. While we cannot pursue the details here, the key point should be clear enough.Footnote ⁵

As a consequence, the dominant are, first, prone to overlook evidence: as their mental “checklist” is inevitably incomplete, they fail to recognize, for instance, some (non-obvious) gendered, ableist, and racial microaggressions for the violations they are – believing that telling a transgender person they “don’t look transgender” is a compliment, that grabbing a blind person’s arm without consent is helpful, or that mistaking the Black chef for the waiter is a harmless blunder. Second, the dominant are prone to not be motivated to take action – not in the sense that they cannot be committed to opposing injustice, but in the more immediate sense that they fail to recognize a particular situation as one that calls for action. As mentioned at the end of Section 5, Jane is not – unlike Deonna and Teroni’s (Reference Deonna and Teroni2025) hypothetical agent – completely without emotions. Feelings of indignation, compassion, shame, guilt, and the like, may, as a result, fuel a fervent commitment to get past her own white perspective. But if she does not recognize anti-Black discrimination when it occurs, her otherwise commendable motivation is ineffective. So long as her affective repertoire does not allow her to construe a situation as a meaningful Gestalt that demands intervention, she may be strongly disposed to act if needed, and yet will fail to act when needed. Third, the dominant are prone to lack conceptual competence: unable to “track” the recurring subtle cues of oppression through lived experience, they lack the experiential resources needed to draw, appreciate, and fully grasp the fine-grained conceptual distinctions of the marginalized.

There are further complications, though. First of all, the critics acknowledge that the dominant have to defer to the marginalized but do not find this especially problematic (see sect. 7). At most, they argue, the dominant are disadvantaged “before the socially marginalized person shares their emotive response” (Dror Reference Dror2023: 633). As soon as the marginalized report “feeling hurt or excluded,” however, “their feelings become shared evidence” (ibid.), and this enables the dominant “to understand the import of the feelings for assessing claims about the workings of social marginalization” (ibid.). Again, we do not think this nonchalance solves the problem. Quite the contrary: the very indispensability of testimony shows why the advantage of the marginalized is not just contingent, but principled.

Note first that if (see footnote 8) the marginalized must indeed articulate and explain their feelings in order for the dominant to build up their own incremental understanding, this places a morally problematic “double burden” (Pismenny et al. Reference Pismenny, Eickers and Prinz2024: 164) on them: it is not just that they have to endure marginalization, they also have to take on the coerced labor of educating the dominant, repeatedly and at considerable emotional costs, including the strain of reliving painful experiences while facing the risk of being disbelieved, dismissed, or worse (e.g., Berenstain Reference Berenstain2016). Setting these considerations aside, however, there is a more pressing concern.

Recall that what is at issue is whether it is just “easier” or “more likely” for the marginalized to acquire knowledge about the workings of marginalization, or whether they are privileged “in principle.” If the dominant must indeed acquire their knowledge by reading “autobiographies, stories and personal letters with emotional accounts of the suffering of Blacks” (Dror Reference Dror2023: 629) to open “a window into lives shaped by oppression, suffering, and resilience” (Hannon Reference Hannon2025: 9), this very indispensability underscores that their disadvantage is not merely pragmatic. Unless the marginalized are willing (and able) to share their knowledge, the dominants’ understanding will remain in principle incomplete. If, say, mathematicians stop sharing their knowledge, it might become “less easy” for Jane to deepen her mathematical understanding, but she is not epistemically hampered in principle: she can work it out on her own through detached ratiocination. If all those who have experienced the ice on a frozen lake crack stop sharing their knowledge with Jane, she might be “less likely” to deepen her understanding of what it means for the ice to be dangerous, but she is not hampered in principle: she can work it out on her own by undergoing the relevant experience herself. In contrast, if Black people stop sharing their affective knowledge with Jane, she is hampered in principle: thinking hard will not make up for what is missing, and experiencing the world as a Black person is not an option. As a consequence, any information regarding the application conditions of oppressive concepts that are not already included in the mental “checklist” she has assembled will henceforth remain inaccessible: she will not recognize hitherto unwitnessed manifestations of anti-Black oppression as such. This brings us to a final issue.

We have said that the dominant cannot acquire affective knowledge of oppression, be it through hard thinking or through making the relevant experiences first-hand. But is this true? Returning once more to the knowledge argument, Dennett has famously reminded us that we should not mistake a “failure of imagination for an insight into necessity” (Reference Dennett1991b: 48). It is hard to imagine, he admits, that before her first experience of seeing red “Mary puts all her scientific knowledge of color to use and figures out exactly what it is like to see red” (Reference Dennett, Alter and Walter2007: 25). Yet, he insists, this does not mean such a feat is impossible. Could something similar hold for the dominant?

The critics seem to tinker with the possibility that the dominant might gain access to the relevant experiences almost as easily as it would be for them to step on a frozen lake and experience the ice’s dangerousness first-hand. Having discussed “workers’ experiences of the picket line, women’s experiences of the threat of rape, and Blacks’ experiences of the police as examples of ‘an evidential base’ that grants these marginalized groups […] an epistemic advantage” (Reference Dror2023: 622), for instance, Dror goes on to suggest that the dominant “aren’t in principle excluded from being relevantly acquainted with these kind of informative experiences” (ibid.). They could, he suggests, “join picket lines in solidarity, volunteer in organizations that help vulnerable women, or work as an activist for racial justice” (ibid.). In a similar vein, Tilton (Reference Tilton2024) suggests that “engaging with real, ‘flesh and blood’ members of marginalized groups, rather than just theoretical representations of them […] provides an opportunity for the socially dominant to check and question their evolving conceptions of marginalized people and the oppression they face […] that isn’t possible through reading alone” (ibid., 16). No doubt, more than one social scientist has attempted to gain a sense of what it is like to be part of the proletariat by spending time on the assembly line – perhaps even with some success. But for men who want to understand what it is like for women to live with the constant threat of unwanted sexual advances, or for white people who want to understand what it is like for Black people to live with the constant threat of police violence for “driving while Black,” the matter is far less straightforward. Volunteering at domestic-abuse shelters and rape-crisis hotlines or moving in with Black Lives Matter activists will not suffice: no matter how enlightening such solidarity efforts are, they will eventually deliver only what Goldie calls “knowing-but-not-knowing,” given that the dominants’ social position shields them from even remotely comparable existential conditions of vulnerability (e.g., Goldie Reference Goldie, Coplan and Goldie2011; Paul Reference Paul2014). Even Serano, who always felt feminine and was perfectly aware of male acts of sexual harassment when still male-bodied, admits that she “never fully appreciated what it meant to be sexualized” (Reference Serano2007: 253) and instead “assumed that the men who committed such acts were simply expressing a form of sexual interest, albeit in a rude and adolescent manner” (ibid.). One cannot make the experiences of women and Black individuals without being (or at least “passing” as) a woman or Black – in which case one will no longer make experiences-as-if-oppressed from the outside, but experience oppression from the inside.

Martina Fürst (Reference Fürst, Vendrell Ferran and Werner2025) takes a different line, exploring whether it is possible to attain imaginative knowledge of the experiences of members of other social groups even if one is personally unable to have them. Drawing on a distinction by Cath (Reference Cath2019), Fürst argues that achieving “Gold Standard knowledge” requires “having (had) the target experience oneself” (Reference Fürst, Vendrell Ferran and Werner2025: 177), while “Silver Standard knowledge” requires only having (had) “experiences sufficiently similar” (ibid.). Accordingly, she says, one may achieve at least Silver Standard imaginative knowledge of other people’s experiences of oppression by extrapolating from one’s own structurally similar experiences. For example, “a women might take her experience of not being believed qua being a woman as an imaginative resource for figuring out what the specific group perspectival aspect of not being believed qua being an asylum seeker is like” (ibid., 186), and a Black man may use “his experience of the White gaze […] – i.e., being looked at in a particular way qua being Black – to imagine what it would be like to suffer the male gaze, i.e., being looked at in a particular way qua being a woman” (ibid.).

First of all, however, note that the protagonists in both examples attempt to gain imaginative knowledge of others’ experiences of oppression by drawing on their own experiences of oppression. Even if they succeed, it is unclear that those in prototypically dominant positions – such as white, able-bodied, middle-class, heterosexual cis men – can do the same, precisely because they have never had structurally similar experiences.Footnote ⁶ Second, Fürst’s suggestion seems to presuppose that gender, race, class, etc., are like separate building blocks of one’s identity whose felt significance is uninfluenced by the others, so that they can be recombined like independent Lego bricks (Spelman Reference Spelman1988: 136). Yet, experiences of oppression are shaped by intersecting forms of racialization, economic precarity, and cultural and social marginalization. As a consequence, a Black woman’s experience of oppression is not the mere sum of a white woman’s experience of oppression qua woman and a Black man’s experience of oppression qua Black (e.g., Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989). The considerations above show that this is not due to some mystical ineffability but to the fact that this experience involves complex affective patterns that outsiders, lacking the requisite affective biography and repertoire, cannot fully track – it is its very own distinct and holistic experiential Gestalt and can, as such, not be reduced to aggregations of individual characteristics (see sect. 5). Accordingly, although a Black man and his wife might both be subjected to the “White gaze,” the man cannot use his experiential knowledge about what it is like to be subjected to the White gaze to understand what it is like for his spouse to be subjected to the “Male gaze” – at least not in a way that enables him to recognize the complete “pattern” in its full reality (see above and sect. 7).

If the line of thought in this section is broadly correct, the advantage of the marginalized that is fundamentally rooted in their affective orientation and allows them to achieve privileged standpoints is epistemically relevant beyond mere pragmatical usefulness. Their affective attunement does indeed endow them with a principled advantage. In the concluding section, we briefly address remaining objections and some of the normative implications of the debate.