Abstract

Disproportionate reliance on distinctively masculine social experience contributes a false plausibility to the shared assumptions of "naturalist" and "intentionalist" approaches to the philosophy of social science. This social bias leads these approaches to recommend purposes, contents, forms, methods and ethics of social inquiry which produce both insoluble problems for both approaches and also distorted accounts of social reality. The paper explores some of the reasons why men's experience has been granted this unjustifiable epistemological privilege.