Feminist Metaphysics and Philosophical Methodology

Abstract

Over the past few decades, feminist philosophy has become recognised as a philosophical sub‐discipline in its own right. Among the ‘core’ areas of philosophy, metaphysics has nonetheless until relatively recently remained largely dismissive of it. Metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality and its nature. It examines reality's putative building blocks and inherent structure supposedly ‘out there’ with the view to uncovering and elucidating that structure. For this task, feminist insights appear simply irrelevant. Moreover, the value‐neutrality of metaphysics seems prima facie incompatible with feminism's explicitly normative stance in that feminist philosophy involves advocacy: speaking on behalf of some group on political grounds. The prospects of feminist metaphysics thus look grim. Nonetheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. The basic ideas behind such investigations can be summed up as follows: feminist metaphysics is about negotiating the natural and going beyond the fundamental. In so doing, feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics. Further, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. With this in mind, the article considers the following questions: when thinking about philosophical methodology, how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to ‘mainstream’ metaphysics? More specifically, is feminism's political advocacy inconsistent with apparent objectivity that some prominent contemporary versions of metaphysics are committed to?

On Haslanger’s Meta-Metaphysics: Social Structures and Metaphysical Deflationism

“…For example, there are descriptions of reality that include a predicate for the property of being either my nose or my left toe or the Eiffel Tower, and descriptions that do not include such predicate, but they can all describe reality accurately. Hilary Putnam (1981) has made a similar point using the following example (as explained in Boghossian 2006 andMikkola 2016): let us consider a picture with three black dots. If we are asked how many objects there are in the picture, there are at least two different (but equally correct) ways of answering the question, depending on which concept of object we are using: we could answer '3' (in the sense of three non-overlapping objects), or '7' (including those three, plus the three different combinations of two dots each, plus the combination of the three dots).…”

Real Kinds in Real Time: On Responsible Social Modeling

“…Based on discussions provided by supporters of ameliorative stipulation, the answer seems to be: weakly and vaguely. Proponents of the ameliorative strategy typically address the empirical constraint by appealing to Elizabeth Anderson's (1995) essay "Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology"see especially Mikkola (Mikkola 2015(Mikkola , 2016a(Mikkola , 2016b and Haslanger (2012). The relevant idea from Anderson's essay can be summarized as follows.…”

Critical social ontology

“…Witt (2011),Haslanger (2012) andMikkola (2015Mikkola ( , 2016.11 SeeBettcher (2013) andDembroff (2018) for further discussion of oppressive gender kinds.…”