ABSTRACT
The principal, standard-setting epistemologies of Anglo-American professional philosophy and the theories and practices of cognitive developmental psychology echo and sustain one another across a range of methodological assumptions and substantive issues. Enactments of the central tenets of mainstream epistemology are in evidence throughout the practices of developmental psychology, which exemplify the effects of epistemology's normative claims and expose their limitations. And mainstream developmental psychologists find their established practices vindicated in the equally well established theories of knowledge that govern scientific and social scientific practice and “knowledge in general,” while their practices confirm the viability and the hegemonic status of those very theories. Even if developmental psychologists rarely read epistemology, even if philosophers rarely read developmental psychology, these reciprocal effects are instructive. In this essay I engage in an exploratory investigation of this relationship, informed by a critical feminist consciousness. My analysis endeavors to show how dominant conceptions of knowledge and subjectivity, common to both domains, are complicit in sustaining patriarchal and other asymmetrical distributions of power and privilege. It points toward ways of developing revisionary, emancipatory, and socially-politically transformative successor epistemologies and developmental theories.
