On the "Situatedness" of Our Knowledge

The question of how “situated” our knowledge is—how much it depends on where, when, and who we are—has become inescapable in the modern world. In the classroom, this takes the form of epistemic debates about standpoint theory and the authority of lived experience. In culture, it shapes how we read, teach, and even tweet. Each time we read a book, listen to a neighbour, or attempt to judge a politician’s claim, we wrestle with the same unease: How much of what I know is truly mine—the product of reason and experience—and how much is an inheritance of accident, culture, and mood?

To acknowledge that knowledge is situated is to admit that we all see the world through keyholes shaped by history, language, gender, and temperament. Yet that recognition, taken too far, risks breeding paralysis. It leads one, understandably, to question: if each person’s knowledge is inseparable from their circumstance, can we still speak across the walls of culture or class? Can there be such a thing as truth, or only versions of it? 

Philosopher Mary Midgley wrestled with this dilemma long before the language of “situatedness” became fashionable. Writing in an age dominated by scientific reductionism and postmodern skepticism alike, she warned against both extremes: the arrogance of those who believed in an absolute, context-free “view from nowhere,” and the lamentations of those who believed there were only fragmentary views with no common ground. Knowledge, to her, was neither purely objective nor hopelessly subjective; rather a network of perspectives that, taken together, form something close to a whole.

But Midgley’s defense of pluralism was not the loose relativism of the postmodernists that later came to dominate the humanities. She did not mean that every claim was as good as any other, or that truth was an obsolete ideal. Rather, she asked us to understand that truth itself has a texture: it is woven from partial visions brought into conversation. We do not arrive at it by purging our biases but by testing them against the world and one another. A physicist sees through the lens of mathematical abstraction; a farmer sees through the rhythm of soil. 

The trouble begins when one perspective tries to swallow the rest. In the twentieth century, the natural sciences often claimed to be the only legitimate way of knowing, dismissing revelatory and imaginative knowledge as soft or subjective. Midgley called this the “myth of science as salvation”—the belief that empirical methods could replace all other ways of understanding. But the mirror-image of that arrogance exists too: when cultural relativism insists that all truths are local, that no claim can cross boundaries of identity or experience. Both impulses—the imperial and the defeatist—stem from forgetting that partial views can overlap, and that shared meaning can emerge even from difference.

Interpretation, then, becomes the art of balance. When we interpret a text, an event, or a person’s experience, we must hold two truths together: that we can never see it as they did, and yet that we can see something of it. If we discard, what I like to call “the author’s rootedness in experience”, as irrelevant, we lose the coherence of the work; if we fetishize it, we lose our own creative engagement. Interpretation, at its best, is a dialogue between situated minds, not a contest for ownership of the truth.

The young student who dismisses Shakespeare as a dead white man, or the scientist who dismisses philosophy as empty talk, are both committing the same epistemic sin: confusing perspective with prison. Midgley’s insistence that “no view can be the view from nowhere” was, more than anything, a call to humility. The mind must move between standpoints as the eye moves between near and far. Discarding the possibility of shared truth because knowledge is partial would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The best writers have known this instinctively. They have written not from “nowhere”, but from somewhere, with a moral weather and a social climate pressing upon their words. The illusion of neutrality in art, like in knowledge, is sterile. Writers who deny their own location often end up circling abstraction, writing about small things in big words for people who already agree with them. (One could think here of the self-referential prose of Judith Butler, whose sentences often seem to exist only for those already fluent in their code.) As Nietzsche quipped in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “They muddy the waters, to make it seem deep.”

Charles Dickens, for instance, wrote from the teeming heart of industrial London. His novels were not abstract moral tracts but living documents of his time, so deeply embedded in the texture of nineteenth-century England that they still breathe its sooty air. John Steinbeck, too, wrote of migrant workers and drifters not as symbols, but as neighbours. His prose, stripped of pretension, carries the dignity of those who speak plainly. Mark Twain’s Mississippi River flowed through him much as it flows through American memory. His satire, often mistaken for cynicism, was rooted in deep familiarity with the culture he mocked. He laughed at hypocrisy from within its walls, not hovering above them. His humour was the humour of the insider who knows too much, whose laughter is both rebellion and love. 

Yet, it is precisely this rootedness that later thinkers, especially those influenced by postmodernism, came to distrust. To them, to be situated was to be complicit: one’s class, gender, or cultural frame was seen as a limitation, not a resource. The irony is that in trying to escape the “partiality” of perspective, we risk losing the very ground that gives understanding its force. The postmodern suspicion of context — born of an arguably noble desire to unmask hidden power, sometimes turned into a flight from meaning itself.

What unites these writers is not only their empathy for the common man but their refusal to mystify language. It was their situatedness that allowed them to write outward towards others, rather than inward, towards self-congratulation. What the postmodernists call “situated,” is what these writers would call anchored. They understand that universality grows from the particular, that the human condition is best revealed through the lives of individuals. Each writer is a species in the ecosystem of literature, nourished by their own environment yet contributing to a larger balance. Detach them from that environment, and what remains is cleverness without roots, a literature of mirages. 

To write from somewhere, after all, is the only way to speak to everyone.

Image Source: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)