Feminist Prospective of Epistemology

The following passage, “Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the Voices,” is a chapter

taken from the influential Women’s Ways of Knowing, a book published in 1986 that

examined the epistemology, or “ways of knowing” of a diverse group of women,

focusing on the process of their intellectual and personal development. The basic

framework of the book is conceptually grounded in the work of William G. Perry

(1970) in intellectual development, and the developmental positions described in

their work overlap to a large degree with Perry’s cognitive developmental scheme.

With Perry’s “stages” or “positions” as a framework, the authors of Women’s Ways of

Knowing identified additional knowledge perspectives not observed in Perry’s study

and also explored gender-related influences on intellectual development in women.

We encountered the work of Perry in Chapter 1 in the section “Stages in

Critical Thinking” in which we described the process of becoming a critical thinker

as passing through various “stages’ that Perry conceived of as coherent interpretative

frameworks we use to make sense of the world and ourselves. We noted that the road

to becoming a critical thinker is a challenging journey which involves passing through

these different stages of critical thinking in order to achieve a complex and sophisticated

theory of knowledge and understanding of our world and ourselves. Perry originally

identified four basic stages:

Stage 1: Dualism Nicknamed by Perry “The Garden of Eden,” people in this

How do we determine what is right, what to believe? The “authorities” tell us. Just

like in the biblical Garden of Eden, knowledge is absolute, unchanging and in the sole

possession of authorities. Ordinary people can never determine the truth for themselves; they

must rely on the experts to tell them what to believe: their role

is to receive the knowledge.

However, given the right kind of intellectual guidance and experiences, people

in this Garden of Eden stage of thinking become dissatisfied when they realize that

they can’t simply rely on authorities to tell them what to think and believe because

in almost every arena—medicine, religion, economics, psychology, education, science,

law, child-rearing—authorities often disagree with each other! This phenomenon poses a

mortal threat to Stage 1 thinking because if the authorities disagree with each other,

then how do we figure out what (and whom) to believe?

Stage 2: Multiplicity Once one has rejected the dogmatic, authoritarian framework of

Stage 1, the temptation in

Stage 2 is to go to the opposite extreme and believe that “anything goes.” The reasoning

is something like this: If authorities are not infallible and we can’t trust their expertise, then no

one point of view is ultimately any better than any other.

rational way to resolve differences: everyone’s opinion is basically equal. Truth is relative to any

individual or situation, and there is no objective, universal standard we can use to decide which

beliefs make the most sense. We must accept that there is an infinite multiplicity of diverse

viewpoints, all of them more or less equal.

However, when people in Stage 2 are given the encouragement and guidance to think things

through, it becomes obvious that this level of thinking doesn’t work because it leads to absurd

conclusions that run counter to our deeply felt conviction that some beliefs are better than other

beliefs in many areas of life. So while Stage 2 may represent an important advance over Stage 1

in sophistication and complexity, it becomes clear to the discerning thinker that a further advance

to the next stage is necessary.

Stage 3: Relativism The two opposing perspectives of Stages 1 and 2 find their synthesis in

Stage 3. When people achieve this level of understanding, they recognize that some viewpoints

are better than other viewpoints, not simply because authorities say so but because there are

standards or criteria we can use to evaluate the accuracy of beliefs. What’s more, in striving to

ascertain “truth” and “knowledge,” we discover that context—the specific situation—matters.

The truth or reality of one situation may vary significantly depending on the specific context. In

addition to having clearly reasoned and defined views, Stage 3 thinkers are always willing to

listen to people with different points of future. In fact, Stage 3 thinkers actively seek out

opposing viewpoints.

Stage 4: Commitment In the fourth and final stage of development, the knower recognizes that

it’s not sufficient to develop ones intellect: we have to choose to commit ourselves to our

informed beliefs and accept responsibility for our conclusions. In this stage we recognize that we
can’t stay on the sideline watching others —we have to become personally involved in the

process of knowing and stake out positions based on our reflective analysis. Becoming a Stage 4

thinker is a worthy goal, and it is the only

way to adequately answer Socrates’s challenge to examine our lives thoughtfully and honestly.

To live a life of reflection and action; of open-mindedness and commitment; of purpose and

fulfillment; requires the full development of our intellectual abilities and positive traits of

characStage 1: The Garden of Eden Dualism

Stage 2: Anything Goes Multiplicity

Stage 3: Becoming a Critical Thinker Relativism, Commitment

The authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing added an earlier stage, that of “Silence.”

The other four stages they identify match up with Perry in the following way:

PERRY’S STAGES

Stage 1: Silence
Stage 2: Received Knowledge: Listening to Dualism (“The Garden of Eden”)

the voices of others

voice
Stage 4: Procedural Knowledge: Separate & Relativism

connected knowing
Stage5: Constructed Knowledge: Integrating Commitment

the voicester.
Silence: This stage describes women who felt disconnected from knowledge,

the sources of knowledge and their relationship to knowledge. While relatively rare,

women in this stage were notable for their extreme sense of isolation, their fragile sense

of self, and feelings of being “deaf and dumb”—that is, having no independent voice.

Received knowledge: This stage describes the epistemological position in which

women in the study perceived knowledge as a set of absolute truths received from

infallible authorities, as in Perry’s “The Garden of Eden.” The process of learning, as

understood by received knowers, involves receiving and repeating the knowledge and

words of authorities.

Subjective knowledge: This stage is characterized by the recognition of the self

as an authority. Subjective knowers rely on their own subjective thoughts, feelings and

experiences for knowledge and truth—the “infallible gut”—which allow them to

make their own claims to truth and knowledge.

Procedural knowledge: This stage reflects the recognition that multiple sources of

knowledge exist, and that procedures are necessary for evaluating the relative merit of

these sources. Procedural knowers focus on methods and techniques for evaluating the

accuracy of external truth and the relative worth of authority.

interrelatedness of knowledge, knowing and the knower. Women with this perspective

consider all knowledge as constructed, and understand that knowledge is inherently

mutable, subject to time, experience, and context. Based on intense selfreflection,

women in this stage view knowledge as a constant process of construction,

deconstruction and reconstruction, often in concert with others.

The authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing explicitly recognize that much of their work applies

also to men’s experience, just as Perry assumed that his framework was not gender-specific. At

the same time, these authors believe that there are unique features to women’s experience that

deserve special attention. Perry’s study focused mainly on male students at Harvard. Later, when

Perry assessed the women’s development with the aid of his map, women were found to conform

with the patterns that had been observed in the male data. According to the authors of Women’s

Ways of Knowing, “While this strategy enabled the researchers to see what women might have in

common with men, it was poorly designed to uncover those themes that might be more

prominent among women. Our work focuses on what else women might have to say about the

development of their minds and on alternative routes that are sketchy or missing in Perry’s

version.”