ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the virtues, from a feminist point of view, of naturalized epistemology. The tension blossoms into paradox when critiques of the first sort are applied to the concepts of objectivity and impartiality themselves. The critiques of: "objectivity" and "impartiality" that give rise to this paradox represent the main source of feminist dissatisfaction with existing epistemological theories. The chapter explains in more detail the nature of the charges that have been raised by feminist critics against contemporary analytic epistemology. It argues that the most serious of these charges are basically misguided—that they depend on a misreading of the canonical figures of the Enlightenment as well as of contemporary epistemology. The chapter focuses on to the bias paradox and tries to show why a naturalized approach to the study of knowledge offers some chance of a solution. It discusses two problems: first, the mischaracterization of the tradition, and then the caricature of contemporary analytic epistemology.
