ABSTRACT

In a 1986 Essay, I Contend that stories “convey something about cognitive and moral experiences… that slips through the formalist nets of moral principles and duties, or standards of evidence and justification.” I continue: “The modest proposal urged here is that perhaps, by taking stories into account, theorists will be able to repair some of the rifts in continuity… between moral theory and moral experiences, and theory of knowledge and cognitive experiences.” 1 A student in my 1992 Philosophy and Feminism course has prompted me to take this passage as my point of departure here. Why, he asked, do I cast as a modest proposal this challenge to the founding assumptions of twentieth-century epistemology and moral theory? In this essay, I grant his point: the proposal asks radical questions of epistemologists and moral theorists alike. Its appeals to experience are contestable in ways that I do not address in 1986; yet it can be opened out to engage many of the issues central to feminist critical and revisionary epistemological projects. Here I explain how such an amplification could work.