I imagine a common question people might have about social sciences is: why is there so much focus on social categories (like race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and social class), as is evident from even a cursory review of something like the current issue of the American Sociological Review?

There are multiple answers to that question, some of which are more methodological and some of which are more closely connected to what I'm going to call the ethos of most professional social science organizations -- methodological motivations being more closely connected to traditional goals of scientific inquiry, and ethical considerations tied more closely to the goal of promoting values of equality and inclusion. The relationship between ethics and methodology is something that is explored in depth in a branch of feminist thought called Standpoint Theory, but before I get to that I want to talk about the methodological importance of social location.

What is Social Location

By social location I mean the nexus of characteristics like ethnicity, gender, age, religion (and so on) which sociologists often measure and try to relate to various social phenomena. You may notice that social scientists seem to care more about some demographic characteristics than others, e.g. we pay more attention to ethnicity and gender than to height and hair color. The fundamental reason for this is straightforward: "social location" is an attempt to account for characteristics which are salient within the social world inhabited by any given individual, characteristics which shape an individual's experiences in life in highly significant ways, which contribute to the individual's sense of identity and which shape how others perceive that individual as well. For example, the gender you are ascribed at birth will be profoundly important to the way others relate to you, how you come to relate to yourself, how you are socialized to behave, and what social experiences you will have. Far more so than most other characteristics.

In theory, just about any of the innumerable differences between individuals could become socially salient in some culture: one can imagine a society in which only people with large earlobes can attain high-status positions. In such a society, sociologists would probably be publishing articles looking for correlations between earlobe size and socioeconomic outcomes. The set of demographic characteristics which social scientists tend to focus on are thus historically and culturally contingent. An important corollary to this point is that the cultural content (beliefs, norms, attitudes, ...) associated with a social category has a reality which extends far beyond actual physical differences between individuals. social norms concerning gender do not reduce to physical differences in sex characteristics. It is not genes which dictate the outcome that women do more housework than men in the US, for example. The social salience of race (in terms of stereotypes and other beliefs) is tied to popularly construed racial categories, and not to population genetics.

From an historical perspective then, I think the focus on certain social categories over others should seem unsurprising. It should also be unsurprising that many of the demographic characteristics of interest to social scientists are closely relevant to politically charged issues. The recent history of modern western societies is one of dramatic social change in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and religion in particular. It is also undoubtedly true that the ethical obligation most social science professional organizations recognize towards equality has arisen in the context of that process of social change, where the kinds of research social scientists do is so relevant.

Marginal and Hegemonic Culture

One of the fundamental ways that social location works to shape individuals lives involves recognizing that some social locations predominate in a society (the majority share many relevant characteristics) and others are more marginal. The term "hegemonic culture", which points to the dominant culture in a society, is a term of Marxist origin, and Marx (influenced by Hegel) is probably the earliest and most famous theorist to focus so much on the relationships between social locations as relationships of differential power. He, of course, was primarily concerned with economic relationships and social class. I am not here intending to advance a particularly "Marxist" theory of social location, but Marx's idea that we ought to pay attention in particular to relationships of differing power is an enduring and important one, so it deserves a nod at least.

But the reason I want to draw this distinction between marginal and hegemonic social locations relates back to the first question about sociological focus on certain social categories. The concept of social location explains why social scientists should pay attention to race and gender. The next question may be: why is there so much focus on traditionally marginalized groups, e.g. research not just on the role of race but on the consequences of race for minority groups in particular, or the consequences of gender for women in particular? There is no doubt that a partial answer lies in the previously mentioned ethical considerations and goals. But there are also methodological reasons why this is useful.

Those reasons begin with an observation from the sociology of knowledge (e.g. Berger and Luckmann). Social science is concerned with producing scientifically reliable knowledge, but of course we recognize that the production of knowledge within a society is not limited to science. There are many things one knows about one's own culture without having to do any research. We know how to use utensils properly when eating, which way to face in the elevator, what kind of dress is appropriate to different situations, and so on. There is a great body of what we may call "common knowledge" (and here "knowledge" includes beliefs, attitudes, norms, and so on) within a given culture. If we apply the concept of social location here, however, it becomes clear that not all "common knowledge" is actually completely common to every member of a society. People occupying different social locations have differing bodies of knowledge, both through differences in their own experiences but also through different socialization. One common form of social research involves simply mapping differences in belief (on average) between people in different social locations (e.g. perceptions of gender discrimination, or trust in the police, or religiosity).

The concept of "hegemonic culture" suggests that much of the "common knowledge" within a culture will be "common" from the perspective of dominant social locations. One of the most fundamental feminist critiques of science as a social enterprise involves the observation that researchers are most often not themselves distant and neutral observers, but also participants in the same society they study, who also occupy a social location. Historically that location was nearly always the hegemonic social location. No less than other individuals, scientists also bring their background knowledge and beliefs into their work, and this colors the hypotheses they form, the research questions they ask, and so on.

One methodological benefit of starting research from the perspective of a marginalized social location is that it provides opportunities to bring the often unobserved assumptions from hegemonic culture into sharper relief, allowing more critical and conscious engagement with those assumptions and their impact on how data is collected, analyzed, and how analytical categories are constructed. This is one of the core arguments of feminist standpoint theory (on which, more later).

I am on phone so I apologize this response is more brief and forward than I would like or the subject probably deserves.

You say that genes don’t dictate that women do more housework tHan men in the US.

However, when one takes into account that women have done more housework than men in every society that has existed for the last 10,000+ years (probably closer to 1 million years) of human existence, I don’t see how that argument stands up.

When a trait is virtually universal in a species (especially considering most populations were geographically isolated for most of that time) how can there not be a strong genetic component for the rationale?

This is a big stumbling block I find in many sociological arguments that specifically criticize American culture for sociological features that are universal constants in the species, in some caress universal constants predating civilization itself by tens of thousands of years.

It seems obviously correct that studying hegemonic culture from a marginalized perspective can bring different assumptions about that culture into view and so allow for new ways of understanding it. However, standpoint theory typically resists attempts to study marginalized culture from the perspective of hegemonic culture as inaccurate or illegitimate. Wouldn't a similar argument apply? Or am I wrong that this is viewed as illegitimate or inaccurate? Or should the perspective of hegemonic culture be taken as most able to explain or interrogate hegemonic culture?

I'm not interested in getting into a very long argument on this particular topic, but it seems to me that this is a very strong claim and I doubt that there exists enough evidence to support it, especially on time scales like a million years. Does the concept of "housework" even make sense in the context of a hunter-gatherer group 13,000 years ago? What evidence do we even have on this for humans 100,000 years ago?

I think perhaps there is a better argument that -- in one way or another -- gendered division of labor is nearly universal, at least as the scale of societies grows larger. I think that's closer to being true. But I also believe it is generally accepted by anthropologists that hunter-gatherer groups tend to be more egalitarian. More organized divisions of labor are a feature of larger-scale societies in general, beyond gender. There's an interesting argument which can be made here about the cognitive processes involved in inventing those more complex divisions of labor and how sex, merely by being obvious and universal, provides a ready-at-hand way of dividing people into groups for the purposes of organizing labor. That is still a structural argument though, and not a reduction to biology.

In any case, my point is also that the details of the division of labor are quite varied from culture to culture, and I would say it's clearly foolish to think most of those details can be explained by reducing social organization to a deterministic function of biology.

More egalitarian does not equal egalitarian. Environment does matter. But so does biology.

Anyways, I am not arguing it is a universal truth that females have to be in the domestic sphere and males the public sphere because biology demands it.

I am just noting there is a reason things are the way they are, and the premise of feminism is faulty IMO for not acknowledging this adequately.

I would have no problem with feminism if the argument was something along the lines of, “there is a strong biological reason for universal, traditional gender roles. But we have created societies where we can transcend our biology and be better.”

I don’t have my wife chained in the kitchen or demand she can’t have a public life. I can reconcile our current situation with our cultural and biological past. I think a lot of people could.

But the second you start with the whole oppressor-oppressed patriarchy narrative and throw “white privilege” on top of that, all you are doing is creating unnecessary divisiveness under false pretense IMO.

I've not encountered anyone claiming that attempts to study marginalized groups from hegemonic perspectives are inherently illegitimate (but there's plenty of internal arguments about standpoint theory, so I won't say that no one takes this view; I don't know for sure). I think it's common to argue that such attempts have historically involved a lot of inaccuracies, and to argue that the tendency toward inaccuracy is directly related to the nature of the relation between marginal and dominant groups in society. That argument is roughly that groups in dominant positions face little pressure to understand marginalized groups accurately; being in a position of power reduces the consequences of misunderstanding. Dominant groups can often just impose their views. Whereas, the argument goes, for a member of a marginalized group to misunderstand the dominant culture can have disastrous consequences for them. I think there's a valid and interesting point in this way of thinking, although I think it's also subject to the limitations that most theoretical lenses have. (aside: Theory as an almost inherently partial and incomplete "way of seeing" is something I sort of wanted to circle back to in the philosophy thread, but haven't.)

I also think a background premise to standpoint theory in general is the idea that feminist or critical approaches to analyzing culture are "counter-cultural", "oppositional", or, well critical. The underlying assumption is that those approaches are themselves marginal, that they are doing research which goes against the tendencies of the majority, that the majority of science research is done from a positivistic, hegemonic perspective. So I think it's more common to see positive arguments about the value of taking this alternative approach, rather than to see arguments that the entire mainstream of science is illegitimate. Probably some more radical practitioners come close to the latter view. In my reading it seems to me that often the more radical positions arise outside of the social sciences. My favorite text on this topic is Joey Sprague's Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers, and I think she does a good job describing a balanced approach. I have some plan to actually quote some parts of that book, along with some other standpoint theory texts, which might be useful.

To extend your point a little, it may be argued that within specific social science disciplines the above assumption about dominant paradigms in scientific research is not as obvious as it would have been when standpoint theories were first proposed in the 70s and 80s. In a world where "critical" approaches become the dominant approach, I agree that similar arguments would suggest the importance of balance between differing starting points and perspectives. My feeling is that if you're doing a sociology of sociology departments (heh) there's a valid point there. Whereas in the surrounding culture I think these points of view really are still fairly marginal. Which is one reason I think it's interesting to talk about them.

While I do think contingency and path-dependence are often undervalued in understanding social structures, I would agree with you that a truly universal or near universal characteristic of different human societies would probably have a common cause or set of causes. However, I think we have to be careful in what we mean by claiming that something is due to biology. It's true - men and women are biologically different in socially relevant ways. But we shouldn't assume that this is just a manifestation of innate differences in psychology. In particular, biological differences around childbirth or reproduction can lead to different power relationships between the sexes based on technological or cultural changes that result in common social arrangements that are more or less egalitarian.

Sure. This is my view. If I say that social phenomena do not reduce to biology I don't mean biology has absolutely no role to play. As a general rule I think it is widely accepted in social sciences that nature vs. nurture is a false dichotomy. Here, for example, is Joey Sprague, the feminist author I'm leaning most heavily on in this thread:

So, I think perhaps your view of feminism is distorted, or at least you are making the most radical views stand in for the whole of a very diverse movement. Feminism is hardly monolithic. I also think you are overstating the strength of the argument from the biological side when you claim that "there is a strong biological reason for universal, traditional gender roles". Or, you may be trying to apply the argument to too wide a range of human social behavior. I think most feminists would accept that sex characteristics explain more about certain social aspects of childcare than they explain about gendered stereotypes of competence, for example. "Gender roles" encompasses a very wide range of phenomena.

I would point out that you are introducing a lot of terms that I haven't used yet at all. Let me just talk about my motivations for a moment, of which there are a few. First, I think social location is an important concept apart from feminism. So one goal of this thread is just to present that concept.

But, I also believe I've gained many valuable insights from engaging feminist thought, and I also want to present some of those insights. Now, for better or worse, I am not particularly radical (I'm well aware some would roll their eyes and explain that as a consequence of my social location ). What often frustrates me in these conversations is that those who are suspicious of feminism tend to insist on making the most radical views stand in for the entirety of feminist thought, regardless of the actual conversation. So, my goal here is not to defend literally all possible feminist ideas, much like I said in the philosophy of science thread that my goal was not to defend literally all social science work as "scientific". My goal is to present ideas that I think are worth engaging with, even if you think some parties sometimes extend those ideas beyond their usefulness.

Fair enough. I’ll admit my critiques are going way beyond your arguments, and aren’t as nuanced as they should be, which in my defense is because I do too much phone posting.

However, I am not sure the rhetoric I am criticizing is viewed as particularly radical anymore. For example, we now have “mainstream” Democratic candidates like Biden giving soeeches denouncing “white mans culture” and “systemic racism.”

Whether you agree with the rhetoric or ideas behind the or not, it seems we all have to accept what was once considered radical rhetoric is becoming mainstream.

Leaving that discussion aside for a minute, I wanted to actually present some selected quotes from some feminists who have written about standpoint theory, in their own words. Really, they might argue I should have started there, but I thought it was useful to try to prepare the ground a little bit with the more general overview of social location, since they tend to be writing for academic audiences. Note that the authors I'm highlighting are not all social scientists, but the quotes themselves speak a bit to the blending between science and politics, which is one point of interest.

Whose Science, Whose Knowledge?

That is also the title of a 1991 book by Sandra Harding, a philosopher who has written extensively about feminist approaches to the philosophy of science. But the selections below are from the introduction to the 2004 book The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, which is a great collection of essays on this topic. Harding presents both a brief overview of the original motivations behind the development of standpoint theory and its critique of traditional ideas in the philosophy of science.

I admit I am having trouble conceptualizing how feminist standpoint theory operates in practice in a “hard” science discipline, like physics, mathematics or biology. Do you have any examples?

bell hooks on the the margin as a space of radical possibilities

I doubt these considerations are very important in math and physics insofar as one speaks of methodology. I think if you broaden the scope to consider ethics than a more interesting question is possible, at least for physics. Pure math is so abstract you're going to have to get to some application before Harding's point about the socially situated nature of scientific research becomes relevant. But in physics, consider the ethical problems around something like the development of nuclear technology.

In biology, I think it's more straightforward. Think of the history of scientific racism, the history of biological arguments for the superiority of men, and the preconceptions which scientific researchers brought to their work when writing on those subjects.

Just to give a little background, I have a PhD is a biological field, and have done postgraduate research (although I am currently doing something else) so I am particularly interested in your last statement.

I admit I don’t see how traditional biology makes any claims, explicit or implicit, for the “superiority” of men. I don’t see how it makes any value judgements at all. I admit that non honest actors can and will twist the science and politicize it for their own ends, which is unfortunate, but doesn’t mean the discipline itself is corrupted.

Edit: it seems I either misread your last statement or you slightly edited it while I was replying. Either way, I don’t think any modern day scientific researcher would accept any historical “scientific” argument for racial or gender “superiority” to be valid.

The whole concept of assigning any value at all (except in a framework of evolutionary fitness) is not valid.

I have one more little bloggy section I want to write, so I'm going to try to be brief for now. I think it's interesting to compare your sentence about "non-honest actors" to the last paragraph I quoted from Sandra Harding. I would also note the choice of language about what "biology" asserts. Notice how you are defaulting to this idea of a neutral point of view where it is not a person asserting something, but the field itself, and where what biology asserts is some timeless set of truths, apart from any specific era or location.

But that's an idealization. It is actually people who assert things, and they do so in a specific social context. When I say there is a history of scientific racism or scientifically justified beliefs in the superiority of men I am speaking historically. Clearly those views are far less popular now, but you don't have to go back very far to find a time when it was simply common knowledge to all biological researchers that men were superior to women. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong is an interesting book by a journalist that details some of this history. See for example chapter 4, "The missing 5 ounces of the female brain".

Remember that the previous quotes and discussion are about philosophy of science in general, and not just a critique of (say) the status quo in 2019. Nor is it an attack on biology as a discipline. The point is that it is worthwhile to look at history and ask questions about the sociology of the production of knowledge in the sciences, evident in examples like scientific racism.

I guess one exception to the argument I posted is the historical propensity to often only use male subjects when doing medical research, obstensibly to reduce variables, but I could see how this could be validly viewed as a value judgement.

This is a good example. The question Harding is asking is: viewed as a valid value judgement by whom?

Alright, to try to bring this full circle, I want to go back to Joey Sprague's Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers to try to deepen the concept of a "standpoint" as it pertains to scientific research methodology more specifically, apart from all of the ethical considerations and politics.

Sprague tries to clarify the idea in part by contrasting standpoint theory's take on epistemology from some competing approaches: positivism, radical social constructionism (postmodernism), and critical realism. I want to highlight the contrast between positivism, postmodernism, and standpoint theory specifically.

Positivism

The central ideas of positivism (the assertion of objectivity and neutrality) and the feminist criticisms of those ideas are covered fairly well in the previous discussion and quotes from Harding, so I won't dwell on them further. Sprague sums up a lot of that in the question "do the facts really speak for themselves?"


Radical Social Constructionism


Standpoint Theory

I assume the above properly telegraphs the idea, then, that standpoint theory as presented by Sprague is an attempt to retain the useful critical ideas from postmodernism without rejecting the notion of scientific objectivity in its entirety, or falling into a mire of pure relativism about facts.

But, one of the more common misconceptions about this attempt to forge a middle way between positivism and postmodernism involves treating the idea of a "standpoint" too individualistically:


The Subjectivist (Mis)Interpretation of Standpoint Epistemology

Sprague is careful to make this distinction because she is concerned with the value of standpoint theory for social science research specifically, separate from some of the political and philosophical considerations which bell hooks or Sandra Harding raise. I wanted to present at least a little bit of that political and philosophical discourse associated with standpoint theory, because it's relevant especially given the historical context in which standpoint theory was developed. But, from the standpoint of social science, it's the methodological considerations tied to the concept of social location that I wanted to highlight most of all.

Perhaps I'm thinking too much of how this view has filtered down into popular consciousness, where eg "mansplaining" female actions or culture from a male perspective would I think often be regarded as illegitimate or inaccurate.

I'm more in the positivitist camp about science and don't really agree with Foucault's view of knowledge as a form of hegemonic power, so I'm not that sympathetic with this way of viewing knowledge or science, but I'm interested to see your presentation of it here.

Do you think we're in this world (genuine question - I'm not competent to do a sociology of sociology)?

My very un-scientific assessment of conference programs over the last few years (A few Pacific Sociological Association conferences, one for Sociologists for Women in Society, and the American Sociological Association annual conference) suggests we might be getting close to living in that world.

Or, at the very least I think more activist and critical approaches to sociology are quite mainstream now, within the discipline. There's so many areas of expertise that are almost like sub-disciplines, it really varies across them. But if you attend a paper session or panel discussion on race or gender I think it is very likely that many or most presenters will incorporate critical approaches, and be familiar with a lot of these arguments. If you go to a paper session on sociology of religion, or on sociology of organizations, or social network theory, or some other areas of study further removed from politics then all of that will seem more distant.

Here, for example, is the program from the 2019 PSA conference I attended last month.

I'm struggling to pin this down concretely. So, for instance, the criticisms of social science researchers as having biases against women, especially women from marginalized social categories, seems plausible to me. I'm not sure how prevalent this still is in sociology or other social sciences, but certainly historically this was a problem. But this doesn't on its own seem sufficient to generate an entire epistemology - there have been many biases identified in the social sciences in the last decade that don't merit this. For instance, is this really different in kind from publication bias? P-hacking? A focus on WEIRD psychology? etc.

What might distinguish it is a conception of knowledge as inherently driven by power a la Foucault, but you (and Sprague) want to resist this idea to some extent. Why? Isn't that at the heart of the critique?

I'm also still not clear what the concrete implications are for researchers. Let's say someone wanted to study enrollment in elite NYC public and private schools. How would someone who accepted feminist standpoint theory differ in their methodology from someone who didn't?

I think this is fair enough. And I might say that one should never underestimate the need academics have to invent new jargon unnecessarily (e.g. "standpoint theory").

I don't really think of this as an "entire epistemology". I think of it more like a set of useful criticisms of possibly naïve forms of positivism. I think it's entirely possible for thoughtful researchers to consider themselves positivists while watching out for these sorts of methodological and conceptual problems. They may, for example, conceptualize them as problems of cognitive bias, and even if that gets the social/psychological distinction Sprague is making wrong it may still guide them in the right direction. Or, they may consider them merely as problems of argumentative rigor. I think Howard Becker may be a useful example here. He would not use the language of this thread, but his books on methods are very concerned with similar problems.

I also don't think these considerations become less useful in the absence of the historical problems which may have prompted the development of standpoint theory ideas to begin with. I think pondering the "socially situated" nature of knowledge production will probably always be useful to social scientists, simply because it will point in the direction of the likely biases to watch out for. Social scientists have a lot of room to maneuver in terms of which theoretical ideas, conceptualizations, and methods of measurement they employ, and so I think there is a more pressing difficulty here than in many other sciences.

I can't speak for Joey Sprague, but my feeling is that Foucault's points (or Marx's, for that matter) have some validity, but don't really suggest some complete overturning of positivistic science, as per the above. I think power has a role to play and is almost always worth considering when investigating the social world, but it's not the only factor. I'm not sure I would say my goal is to "resist" that argument as much as to try to put in perspective with other ways of thinking about the philosophy of social science, to take something from it that's worth pondering but not to invent an entire systematic world-view from it.

This is my fault. About two thirds of Sprague's book is concerned with more concrete considerations in actual research. I've focused more on the first third of the book and various philosophical and conceptual problems both because I feel like they are necessary in order to make sense of the concrete suggestions, and also because it would be hard to summarize some of the latter ideas for an audience that may know little about basic social science research methods to begin with.

I'll try to briefly describe one class of problems Sprague considers: conceptual problems with standardized quantitative measures. This is similar to the problem Becker introduces with research on social class, described in the other thread. The rough idea is to try avoid "Linnaean" (to borrow Becker's framing) classification schemes that embed hegemonic value judgements about the members of each class in the scheme, or which otherwise conceptually bias the results. Sprague gives some historical examples like

- the US census only counting the husband as "self-employed" in a household owning a farm or small business, while his wife is counted as a dependent, and the effect this has if such measures are used to count labor participation by women (I'm not clear from the text whether this is ongoing)

- Dept. of Labor occupation classifications making finer-grained distinctions of managerial responsibility in high-status occupations which men tend to occupy than in lower-status occupations which women tend to occupy, biasing attempts to understand the role of women in management roles.

- A commonly used measure of domestic violence (the Conflict Tactics Scale) which is biased towards overestimating the amount of domestic violence faced by men because of the types of violence it includes and those which it doesn't.

The advice here then is mostly just not to embrace and use standard measures without thinking carefully about these potential problems, even if those measures are already widely adopted and used. This is basically the same advice Becker gives.

One other interesting observation Sprague makes is related to what topics get researched. The ASA has a set of "sections", basically a classification scheme that groups research into topic areas. ASA members express interest in specific topics, and the ASA uses those numbers to inform decisions about what topic areas become official ASA sections, which informs decisions about conference scheduling. Sprague presents tables from 2010 showing which sections would be considered most important if you included only those most popular with men in comparison to women, or black sociologists in comparison to white sociologists and Hispanic sociologists. The lists are quite different, for example the "Sex and Gender" section was 87% women. So another recommendation is just what was quoted previously: the idea of beginning research from social locations other than the one you commonly occupy.

You nailed it. Postmodern and feminist theory too often confuse a critique of epistemology as an epistemology itself.