Dissertation Defense: Madeline Ward
Candidate: Madeline Ward
Major: Philosophy
Advisor: Quill R. Kukla, Ph.D.
Title: With All Due Deference: Marginalized Epistemic Agents and What They’re Owed
Feminist standpoint epistemology claims that social position and identity affects knowledge production. My dissertation expands standpoint epistemology to discuss how social location and identity affect nonknowledge epistemic goods such as intuitions, understandings, and attunements to the world. Some marginalized people have privileged epistemic access to these epistemic goods; among those marginalized people are experts with respect to things like survival strategies, community-based knowledge, and social scripts.
The second half of my dissertation argues for the claim that these marginalized people constitute experts with respect to the domain of knowledge covering their marginalizing circumstances, and that this expertise suggests others in conversation with these experts ought to defer to them—like how one would defer to medical or professional experts. So, in conversations about, e.g., advocacy or policy that
affects members of some marginalized group, we have reasons to listen and give uptake to testimony from members of that group. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of how standpoint epistemology should look beyond deference to advancing materially-significant victories for marginalized liberation.