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Blind Men and the Elephant, 2025. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This 19th century netsuke portrays a Japanese allegory about perception and interpretation. The miniature ivory sculpture depicts six blind men who each attempt to describe an elephant by touching local parts of the anima's body. No individual is able to fully describe the entire animal alone. This allegory is a helpful demonstration of how situated knowledge can afford epistemic advantage.
This 19th century netsuke portrays a Japanese allegory about perception and interpretation. The miniature ivory sculpture depicts six blind men who each attempt to describe an elephant by touching local parts of the anima's body. No individual is able to fully describe the entire animal alone. This allegory is a helpful demonstration of how situated knowledge can afford epistemic advantage.
This article was the recipient of the 2025 Nancy Hartsock Endowed Graduate Student Award, awarded by the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies & the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington.
Forthcoming in Hypatia.
Distinguishing Situated Knowledge and Standpoint Theory: Defending the Achievement Thesis
Distinguishing Situated Knowledge and Standpoint Theory: Defending the Achievement Thesis
Abstract: Original accounts of feminist standpoint theory emphasize its fundamentally critical stance toward situated knowledge. The function of a critical standpoint is not to carelessly accept the beliefs of marginalized people, but instead to interpret those beliefs in light of thoroughgoing and pervasive ideological distortions. Some formulations of standpoint theory capture this critical function in the achievement thesis. It claims that a standpoint is not obtained automatically but must be achieved through a struggle against a dominant ideology. Contrary to the standard acceptance of the achievement thesis, Liam Kofi Bright has recently argued that the requirement of achievement can warrant the dogmatic exclusion of some perspectives from becoming standpoints. In turn, he advances an account of standpoint theory which abandons the achievement thesis. Against Bright’s non-achievement account of standpoint theory, I argue that doing away with the achievement thesis abandons standpoint theory’s original aim of being critical of the social structures which construct and legitimize situated knowledge. Further, I argue that Bright’s concern with the possible dogmatism of the achievement thesis is better addressed by a commitment to the classic account of standpoint theory rather than a revision of it.
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