Epistemologie des situierten Wissens

The aim of this Habilitationsschrift is to rethink the tasks of epistemology in the light of the growing evidence for the historically, culturally and socially contingent nature of scientific knowledge. Consequently, the dominant view of scientific rationality-identified as white, western and male-has increasingly been subjected to searching criticism. Feminist, anti-racist, post-colonialist and postmodernist critiques have raised difficult questions about the entanglement of science with power and domination. Despite their marked diversity, these critiques presuppose a perspective-relativity of scientific knowledge. In classical sociology of knowledge it is conceptualised as "situational contingency/determinedness of knowledge" (Karl Mannheim) whereas in feminist discourse it is known as "situated knowledge" (Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway). What follows epistemologically from the insight that knowledge is situated and depends on context? Does that lead to epistemological relativism? Can justifiable knowledge claims go beyond local standards and context-dependent rules? Is science merely a continuation of politics by other means? Are claims to "objectivity" and "truth" therefore just disguised power claims? These critical questions must not only be raised for dominant scientific knowledge claims, but must also be directed at the critique itself and its practices of justification. The present work draws from the fields of philosophy of science, feminist epistemology and critique of science, from cultural studies, traditional sociology of knowledge and more recent sociology of scientific knowledge. What is to be understood by situatedness and contextuality and which version thereof has moved to the centre of attention? In this Habilitationsschrift I outline an epistemology of situated knowledge that dissociates itself both from ahistorical, disembodied, and decontextualized knowledge claims (view from nowhere) and perspective-relativist knowledge claims (view from everywhere). The Habilitationsschrift is structured as follows. I set out with a feminist interest and from works inspired by feminist epistemologies. With respect to social epistemology I enrich gender perspectives with critical views of cultural studies. Science is entangled in politics, morality, and the market place which, I argue, necessitates re- conceptualised concepts of truth and objectivity and not their abandonment. The following epistemological issues are of central importance: - the relationship between knowledge, power and empowerment-referring to the promises of Enlightenment; feminist epistemologies, empirical epistemology, and the insights of cultural studies; - the need to ground philosophical concepts of truth and objectivity historically and to re-conceptualise them politically and ethically; - the challenge of re-conceptualising subject-object relations, especially with regard to current technoscientific state of affairs; - the status of empirical subjects of knowledge, relations between situatedness, positionality and engaged standpoints; questions concerning standpoint theories and the epistemic-societal difficulty of justifying privileged critical standpoints in the light of the politics of differences; - implications of the divide between universal and local-situated-knowledge globally, historically and politically; imperialism and colonialism and the accompanying problems in the self-positioning of critical Western intellectuals.