Abstract: This talk develops a political-epistemological account of situated knowledge. Its central claim is that situated knowledge is not relativism but a corrective operation inside a fallibilist theory of truth. Truth is understood as the best available concordance between the identification of an object and the facts about that matter. Error arises when this concordance fails, especially when a restricted subset of an object is presented as the whole object.
The talk proceeds through a sequence of truth, error, fallibility, situated knowledge, power, and the refusal of correction. I first argue that fallibility keeps truth open to correction but does not by itself explain how excluded properties of an object become visible within inquiry. I then argue that situated standpoints perform this corrective function: they disclose excluded properties, restore them to inquiry, and bring the identification of the object closer to the facts about that matter.
The final part of the talk applies this framework to contemporary anti-woke discourse. I argue that the anti-woke offensive attacks situated correction by recoding situated standpoints as distortion, excess, irrationality, censorship, anti-science, or threat. In this sense, the correction of error is transformed into the alleged source of error.
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Ockham Society Convenors: Jack Tristani, Yuxin Tang and Meredith Ross-James | Ockham Society Webpage
