Here’s the deal with theta: it’s a different kind of knowing than beta. Beta is a crisp, oh-I-just-cogitated-this-thought. But experience in theta is knowing. Theta hits you in a total, murky, deep-but-diffuse way.
To have a "standpoint" means to be able to not only experience the harms of a social or political system, but to recognize the ways in which that system interacts with one's identity. While "lived experience" can be personal and reasonably unreflective, standpoint epistemology is a position of knowing "earned" through intentional analysis.
How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anything but its correspondence to facts that were fixed before we started investigating them?
Some philosophers have argued that, despite widespread intuitions to the contrary, knowledge is not merely a mat... See more