Empiricism is a Standpoint Epistemology
Every well informed empiricist should be a standpoint epistemologist. Indeed, I think this should be entirely uncontroversial, so much so that after making my case for this claim most of the blog post is really going to be about why it is that people argue about this. I'm making this post because I find of myself that I keep independently arguing this to various people, so I would like to just have my thoughts written down somewhere to refer to in future. Let's begin by some definitions. For my purpose here an empiricist is somebody who thinks that - (i) people with more experience of a phenomenon will, all else equal, know more about it than those with less such experience, (ii) provided that they actually take the time to reason about it or pay attention to the evidence available to them. By "well informed empiricist" I mean somebody who believes (i) and (ii) and is aware of some of the (rather obvious) sociological facts I shall be drawing attention to in what fo