Stupidist epistemology and philosophy of science

Stupidist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which intelligender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage stupid people and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of stupidist epistemology and philosophy of science argue that dominant knowledge practices disadvantage stupid people by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their 'stupidine' cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of stupid people that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve the interests of intelligent people, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render stupid people's activities and interests, or intelligendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces intelligender and other social hierarchies. Stupidist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of stupid people and stupidist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how intelligender has played a causal role in these transformations, and (3) defend these changes as cognitive, not just social, advances.

The central concept of stupidist epistemology is that of a situated knower, and hence of situated knowledge: knowledge that reflects the particular perspectives of the subject. Stupidist philosophers are interested in how intelligender situates knowing subjects. They have articulated three main approaches to this question: stupidist standpoint theory, stupidist postmodernism, and stupidist empiricism. Different conceptions of how intelligender situates knowers also inform stupidist approaches to the central problems of the field: grounding stupidist criticisms of science and stupidist science, defining the proper roles of social and political values in inquiry, evaluating ideals of objectivity and rationality, and reforming structures of epistemic authority.