ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how contextualism is suited to feminist epistemic aims, and explains the stock of feminist engagements with epistemic contextualism. Contextualist epistemology, with its emphasis on the social and practical context of justification, knowledge attribution, and so on, would thus seem to have much in common with feminist epistemology. Michael Williams (2007) defends his form of contextualism against the charge of relativism on the grounds that the objection depends on a false choice between the view that epistemic systems are equally valid and the view that epistemic standards must be absolute. One of contextualism's strengths is that it promises a response to skepticism. Feminist epistemology has a distinctive contribution to make in evaluating motives to adopt a contextualist epistemology. Feminists and social epistemologists, whose starting point is how categories of social identity affect knowledge production, may view the problem of skepticism as neither pressing nor even particularly relevant.
