ABSTRACT
Feminist empiricism originated with concerns about the biases present in scientific inquiry and ultimately seeks to propose a route to preventing idiosyncratic (and oppressive) biases from shaping knowledge. This project arises not only because the results of scientific investigations may be (and historically have often been) biased but also because the methods of the sciences themselves require feminist scrutiny, as do the traditional epistemic concepts of objectivity, evidence, rationality, justification, and knowledge. Feminist empiricist epistemologies aren’t just a match of subject matter (oppression) and method (scientific); they are full-fledged theories of knowledge in their own right. They offer not only critiques of what’s gone wrong in the sciences but also constructive accounts of how scientific communities might do better in their pursuit of knowledge.
