Susan Strickland

Objectivity, Perspectivity and Difference Susan Strickland

Knowledge is situated, perspectival (and political). The conventional concepts of objectivity are inadequate and misleading, but the related concepts of subjectivism and relativism are even more unacceptable; especially if you are concerned with investigating, comparing and judging claims from other positions in order to reach relevant and closer ?truth/s?. This book, written in 1993, is a discussion of these issues, and largely supportive of aspects of Marxist and feminist standpoint theory, dialectics and hermeneutics; both as descriptions of how understanding and knowledge actually come about; and as how conscious acknowledgement of situatedness can be used to approach a kind of objectivity that does not pretend to be a ?view from nowhere, or everywhere? but a view from a specific somewhere that can be critiqued, enlarged and modified by views from other locations. Among the many theorists discussed are Thomas Nagel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Peter Winch, Hans Georg Gadamer, as well as feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins.