Standpoint Epistemology and the Value of Emotions: Is There an Affective Advantage to Being Oppressed?

Abstract While research on oppression has focused on the various ways in which oppressed or marginalized individuals are disadvantaged, standpoint epistemologists have long been arguing that the standpoints achieved from oppressed social locations can provide the marginalized with an epistemic advantage. While in themselves laudable, we venture, discussions of the advantage thesis tend to continue a tradition in mainstream epistemology that undermines the crucial role affectivity plays in disclosing facts about the world by framing the debate in purely epistemic terms. Bringing standpoint theory into conversation with contemporary philosophy of emotions, we argue, allows us to recognize the epistemic value of emotions and to see that some knowledge the marginalized can gain about the workings of oppression while cultivating their standpoint is at root fundamentally and irreducibly affective. This lends not only more credibility to the advantage thesis in general, but it also allows to arbitrate between two different readings of this thesis that are currently a matter of controversy: marginalized standpoints afford knowledge that is, due to its fundamentally affective nature, not just easier for the marginalized than the dominant to obtain, but in principle inaccessible to the dominant.