Feminsit Epistemology

``Feminist epistemologists often embrace the idea of social epistemology. However, many of them strongly criticize traditional epistemology and view it as a poor model for feminist epistemology. At least a few feminist epistemologists, however, take a fundamentally truth-oriented position. Elizabeth Anderson explicitly views feminist epistemology as a branch of social epistemology (1995: 54). Furthermore, when she proceeds to explain the aim of social epistemology, she identifies it as the aim of promoting our reliable, i.e., truth-conducive, processes of belief formation and checking or canceling out our unreliable belief-forming processes (1995: 55). Thus, the fundamental aim is the classical one of seeking true beliefs and avoiding false ones. Miranda Fricker (1998) also adopts an approach to social epistemology with classical roots. She takes her lead from Edward Craig (1990), who stresses the fact that human beings have a fundamental need to acquire truth beliefs and hence a derived need to seek out "good informants," people who will tell us the truth as to whether p. Fricker then points out that norms of credibility arise in society to pick out the class of good informants, people alleged to be competent about the truth as well as sincere. Unfortunately, societal norms of credibility tend to assign more credibility to the powerful than they deserve and to deny credibility to the powerless. The latter is a phenomenon of epistemic injustice. This phenomenon is one that social epistemology should be concerned with, which has "politicizing" implications for the field. Such politicizing implications may be foreign to epistemology in the classical mold, but Fricker derives them from a classical epistemological perspective in which truth-seeking is the basic epistemic activity. ''

Taken from SEP.

In Mexico a group of Mathematics Education scientists have taken the discipline of Social Epistemology as a better theoretical framework to investigate how to learn and teach mathematics in Mexico, than other approaches available when they did chose this path.

Other minorities, as the feminists of this note, made a similar decision.