Abstract

There is a tension, allegedly, between traditional epistemology and standpoint epistemology. Traditional epistemologists, on the one hand, hold that knowledge is sensitive to epistemic features alone. By contrast, standpoint epistemologists argue that knowledge, in some cases, is sensitive to non-epistemic features related to the agent's social identity. My goal here is to vindicate this thesis. Though the thesis of standpoint epistemology is controversial, it plays an important role in illuminating a phenomenon that emerges in our epistemic practices - epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression occurs when an epistemic agent is excluded from the practices of knowledge production. If the aim of epistemology is to bring us closer to truth, then any practice that subverts this aim ought to be thoroughly investigated. However, as I will argue, our capacity to root out epistemic oppression is limited to the extent that we continue operating within the traditional epistemological framework. In this dissertation, I will argue that the traditional epistemologist can either acquiesce to the standpoint epistemologist's claim that knowledge is sensitive to non-epistemic features related to an agent's social identity, or consider social identity an epistemic feature. I further clarify the standpoint thesis, and examine why standpoint epistemology is able, where traditional epistemology fails, to understand epistemic oppression. I close by considering applications of the thesis to other questions in epistemology, with a particular eye towards issues in the peer disagreement literature.