Minding the Campus today features an excellent essay by Prof. Daphne Patai, in which she takes a critical look at “standpoint theory” — the notion that some groups of people have distinctive and superior “ways of knowing.” It’s inspired by the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. As almost everyone knows by now, she asserts that as a Latina, she has different and better insight into legal disputes than do members of other groups.
This is an idea we frequently encounter in higher education, particularly in the various identity courses. The fact that it survives in college (much less in the federal judiciary) is a poor advertisement for the ability of colleges to instill “critical thinking” in their students. The assertion that there is a feminist epistemology (or an African-American epistemology or a working class epistemology or anything else along this line) is divisive nonsense, but few dare to say so.
One who did so long ago, by the way, was Ludwig von Mises, who attacked the idea of polylogism back in the 1940s. Back then the claim was that there was an Aryan “way of knowing” that was superior to “the bourgeois, Jewish way of knowing.” Mises denied that there was any validity to polylogism. Exactly what argument can an advocate of the superiority of one group’s epistemology make when confronted by a similar claim by someone of a different group? At that point, logic departs and the weapons come out.
Patai sees the danger in this silly intellectual fad: “Without such overarching principles, what we can expect is precisely what one finds in the world of identity politics: an endless divsion of groups into smaller and smaller identity units, dependong on a few shared characteristics that are always in danger of dissolving.” It’s a socially destructive idea, but one that Obama and many other politicians are glad to exploit for short-run advantages.