The dominant modes of epistemology tend to privilege some facts over others. Facts that can be fit into simple, constrained models are superior to those that require complex models.
You can see this in the distinction between "hard" and "soft" sciences. The hard sciences are considered "better", and the people who practice them considered smarter. Less-hard sciences like biology are relegated to "stamp-collecting", and sciences that study human behavior are disputed as sciences at all.
In such epistemologies, vast numbers of facts about the universe go from "hard to model" to "not important" to "nonexistent". You lack the ability to be rigorous about them, but that doesn't make them non-facts, just a limitation of how we practice epistemology.
Noticing this is not fundamentally feminist, and there are lots of other philosophers taking different approaches. Compare Kuhn and Feyerabend's work on theory-ladenness: everything we can possibly know about the world is limited by how we conceive the world to take measurements. Things that we don't know how to measure simply don't exist -- more, we don't even think about them long enough to dismiss them. The things we choose to measure are social constructs, not facts of the universe.
Feminist epistemologists note the way this kind of thinking affects marginalized groups of people. Things that matter to them are dismissed as non-facts, and the social construction of facts shuts the entire question out of existing.
This isn't to say that it's easy. The entire point is that we've been engaging in an epistemology of things that are easy. They're asking us to reconsider the assumptions, and that's going to appear "less rigorous" because "rigor" has been defined to exclude things that are hard.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I don’t have any thoughts about it at the moment, I think it is a concept that will have to marinate a bit. But I appreciate the explanation.
The dominant modes of epistemology tend to privilege some facts over others. Facts that can be fit into simple, constrained models are superior to those that require complex models.
You can see this in the distinction between "hard" and "soft" sciences. The hard sciences are considered "better", and the people who practice them considered smarter. Less-hard sciences like biology are relegated to "stamp-collecting", and sciences that study human behavior are disputed as sciences at all.
In such epistemologies, vast numbers of facts about the universe go from "hard to model" to "not important" to "nonexistent". You lack the ability to be rigorous about them, but that doesn't make them non-facts, just a limitation of how we practice epistemology.
Noticing this is not fundamentally feminist, and there are lots of other philosophers taking different approaches. Compare Kuhn and Feyerabend's work on theory-ladenness: everything we can possibly know about the world is limited by how we conceive the world to take measurements. Things that we don't know how to measure simply don't exist -- more, we don't even think about them long enough to dismiss them. The things we choose to measure are social constructs, not facts of the universe.
Feminist epistemologists note the way this kind of thinking affects marginalized groups of people. Things that matter to them are dismissed as non-facts, and the social construction of facts shuts the entire question out of existing.
This isn't to say that it's easy. The entire point is that we've been engaging in an epistemology of things that are easy. They're asking us to reconsider the assumptions, and that's going to appear "less rigorous" because "rigor" has been defined to exclude things that are hard.