Objectivity, Perspectivity and Difference

Knowledge is situated, perspectival (and political). The conventional concepts of objectivity are inadequate and misleading, but the related concepts of subjectivism and relativism are even more unacceptable; especially if you are concerned with investigating, comparing and judging claims from other positions in order to reach relevant and closer truth/s . This book, written in 1993, is a discussion of these issues, and largely supportive of aspects of Marxist and feminist standpoint theory, dialectics and hermeneutics; both as descriptions of how understanding and knowledge actually come about; and as how conscious acknowledgement of situatedness can be used to approach a kind of objectivity that does not pretend to be a view from nowhere, or everywhere but a view from a specific somewhere that can be critiqued, enlarged and modified by views from other locations. Among the many theorists discussed are Thomas Nagel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Peter Winch, Hans Georg Gadamer, as wellas feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins.