**3. The invention of standpoint methodology and its strong objectivity standard**

Standpoint methodology was the name given to the research methodology intended to address such problems. It calls for "strong objectivity," that can provide a more reliable standard for universally valid research. Though it emerged from all of the social justice movements of the 1970s, it was not so named at the time. Each of those movements proposed that reliable research to guide policy about their lives should start off its projects in a different way. It should not be addressing the standard issues that were the focus of mainstream natural and social sciences, but instead, start off from questions arising from the everyday lives of members of groups that experienced oppression and discrimination. Health, environmental, and social science research must take the "standpoints" of the everyday lives of marginalized groups to produce maximally reliable results of research. Through the efforts of marginalized members of the sciences, as well as of many non-marginalized scientists who immediately recognized the importance of the issue, this practice rather quickly became the strong objectivity standard for good research across most of the social sciences as well as health and environmental sciences that are a mix of natural and social science projects. Of course, there persist today continuing cases of both ignorance of and resistance to such practices.

Feminists were the first of these groups to call it standpoint theory. This began with a half dozen such political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Interestingly, they were almost entirely working independently of each other in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. These included the sociologist of science Hilary Rose [2] in the U.K., sociologist of knowledge Dorothy Smith [3] in Canada, political scientists Nancy Hartsock [4] and myself, a philosopher of science, in the U.S. We all began asking such questions in the 1970s. Soon, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins [5] and many more African Americans and other feminists of color also began to refer to it as standpoint methodology, epistemology, and theory.

### **4. The beginning of the end of Western modernity?**

Now newer social justice movements are raising additional issues. The sciences today are beginning to realize that if they want to understand how COVID-19, the associated economic crisis, and climate change actually work, they have to start off their research from the daily lives of the peoples least advantaged by such phenomena. Everyone is affected by what happens to everyone else in our shared world, but we are affected in different ways depending on the circumstances of our daily lives.

As Sheila Jasanoff [6] argued, sciences and their societies co-create and coconstitute each other. Early modern science was co-created and co-constituted with the new economic, political, social, and technical forms of life emerging in early modern Europe [7]. These sciences bore the imprint of the still existing residues of medieval European societies and were directed by the desires of the new social classes coming into power at that time. Today we may well be experiencing the beginnings of a similarly big shift in economic, political, social, and technical forms of life as electronic advances now permit both good and bad news to travel rapidly around the globe, and apparently beyond the kinds of federal controls permissible in democratic societies, and as our existing institutions appear unable to act effectively for the linked phenomena of the pandemic, the economic collapse, and climate change. The gap between the rich and the poor has rapidly escalated over the last four years, but it was well underway before this disastrous period in U.S. and international life. Traditional Liberal governments seem unable to organize the resources necessary to block the anti-democratic effects of such processes. Are we experiencing the beginning of the end of Western modernity its Liberal form of democracy and its philosophy of science?

Standpoint methodologies were developed for the political projects of the 1960s and 70s social justice movements in the global North, as noted earlier. Can they be adapted to these changing circumstances of peoples' everyday lives, as these are represented in the new global South social justice movements?

The Latin American theorists of recovering ancestral knowledges provide one of the major critical forces developed in the global South that are calling for new scientific epistemologies and ontologies. They claim to offer radically different accounts of how nature and social relations work in our everyday lives and consequently point toward the need for new political resources to advance pro-democratic outcomes. And they insist that this recovery project is necessarily entangled with gender issues. What is the relation between these projects and those directed by standpoint methodologies?
