Situated Knowledge, Purity, and Moral Panic
A great deal of contemporary epistemology is driven by a kind of moral panic over the worry that there are no “pure” epistemic practices, perspectives, or standards detachable from the social situation of knowers. Kukla argues that we cannot do epistemology without fundamental, central attention to social identities, power relations, and the social institutions and structures within which epistemic practices happen. But this result is of no threat to our usable notions of objectivity, justification, and the like. The quest for purity is unnecessary. We should recognize it as a product of ideology and become comfortable with situatedness as an everyday phenomenon. Kukla ends by arguing that a proper naturalized, non-ideal epistemology—one more continuous with the empirical sciences—will treat situatedness not as something spooky or epistemologically threatening, but just as an empirical fact about our epistemic practices.