Code

Works

Two books carry the positions relevant here.

• Epistemic Responsibility (1987) argues that knowing well is a matter of intellectual character and practice rather than of a proposition meeting a justification condition.
• What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (1991) puts the question of whether the sex of the knower is epistemologically significant, and answers that the situation of the knower always is.
• Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (1995) develops the idea that where and to whom something is said governs whether it can be heard as knowledge at all.

Central ideas

Her positions relocate epistemology from propositions to knowers and their settings.

• The knower is situated. Mainstream epistemology's ideal of an interchangeable rational subject is not neutral but a particular position presented as no position at all.
• Epistemic responsibility: knowing well is a practice with virtues and failures — attentiveness, willingness to revise, refusal of convenient conclusions — rather than a state a belief is in.
• Rhetorical spaces are the settings that determine whether an utterance can count as a knowledge claim. The same statement in one space is testimony and in another is noise.
• Second-person knowing: knowing another person is a paradigm case epistemology has largely ignored in favour of knowing objects, and it has different conditions.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms carry specific arguments.

• Epistemic responsibility: a virtue-theoretic standard for how a knower conducts inquiry, not accountability for having been wrong.
• Rhetorical space: the structured setting governing whether a claim is receivable, not rhetoric in the persuasive sense.
• Situated knowledge: knowledge whose conditions include the knower's position; not a claim that all knowledge is merely opinion.

Debates and disagreements

The arguments concern whether situating knowledge costs it its objectivity.

• Against traditional epistemology, whether attending to the knower's identity introduces relativism; Code's answer is that the unsituated ideal was itself a concealed situation.
• Within feminist epistemology, how her position relates to Sandra Harding's standpoint theory and Donna Haraway's situated knowledges — overlapping but not identical programmes.
• Whether second-person knowing can be given the same rigour as propositional knowledge or whether it names something epistemology should hand to ethics.

Intellectual relationships

She belongs to feminist epistemology and argues with the analytic mainstream.

• Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway are the adjacent figures on standpoint and situated knowledge.
• Miránda Fricker's later work on epistemic injustice develops the same territory into testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.
• The analytic epistemology of justification, and its ideal of the interchangeable knower, is the position her work is written against.

How it changes this reading

Code is named in the lineage of the Epistemological lens and supplies its account of the knower.

• The lens asks what makes a reading trustworthy; Code supplies epistemic responsibility as the answer that locates trustworthiness in how inquiry is conducted rather than only in the evidence produced.
• Rhetorical spaces bear on this work directly: whether a person's account is receivable as knowledge depends on the setting it is offered in, which is the same concern that makes declared experience have standing here.
• It is not evidence about anyone's epistemic conduct.

Useful comparisons

The lens names four theorists working on different aspects of warrant.

• Code works on the knower — situation, responsibility, and the settings that make claims receivable.
• Michael Polanyi works on tacit knowing, the dimension of skill that cannot be fully articulated.
• W. V. O. Quine works on holism and the web of belief, where no statement faces experience alone.
• Hilary Putnam works across realism and its revisions, including the division of linguistic labour.

Where the ideas meet

All four reject the same picture of knowledge.

• None treats knowledge as isolated propositions verified one at a time against neutral experience.
• All four hold that something beyond the proposition — skill, a web of belief, a linguistic community, a knower's situation — is doing necessary work.
• Each therefore treats the conditions of knowing as part of epistemology rather than as psychology.

Where they part

The political dimension separates Code from the other three.

• Code's situating of the knower carries a critique of whose position was generalised as universal; Quine's and Putnam's holism carries no such critique and does not entail it.
• Polanyi's tacit dimension concerns individual skill rather than social location, so the two accounts of what exceeds explicit justification are not the same account.
• A reading drawing on all four must say whether it is making an epistemological claim or a political one, because Code's work joins them and the others do not.

Limits

• An account of what makes inquiry responsible is not a measure of whether any particular inquiry was.
• Rhetorical space describes conditions of receivability and cannot establish how any actual claim was received.

Criticisms

The objections are those raised across situated epistemology.

• The relativism charge: critics argue that situating knowledge undermines the possibility of adjudicating between accounts, which she denies but which remains contested.
• Epistemic responsibility is difficult to specify precisely enough to apply, being a virtue standard rather than a criterion.
• Some hold that her critique applies to a caricature of analytic epistemology rather than to its working practice.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Reading situated knowledge as the claim that all knowledge is opinion or that no account is better than another.
• Using epistemic responsibility to assign blame for having been wrong, when it describes the conduct of inquiry rather than its outcome.
• Treating rhetorical space as a claim about persuasion rather than about receivability.
• Attributing epistemic virtue or vice to a person from documents, which the concept does not support.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish that any person conducted inquiry responsibly or otherwise.
• It cannot convert an account of knowing into evidence about a knower.