Embodying Knowledge

A Feminist

Critique of Artificial

Intelligence
Alison Adam
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

INTRODUCTION
In this article research on feminist epistemology is brought to bear on
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to offer a critique which I argue is both more
radical than, and qualitatively different from traditional philosophical
critiques of AI. After briefly describing symbolic AI, the article focuses on
the subdomain of expert systems with the Cyc system as a paradigm
example. Feminist epistemology is described and the particular themes
within feminist epistemology which are of interest to this study are
discussed in more detail. These themes - subjectivity, the distinction
between propositional and skills knowledge and the role of the body in
the making of knowledge - are then applied to a consideration of the
epistemology of Cyc. The article concludes by suggesting that a way
forward may be found not only in feminist projects involving traditional
AI technology but also in further AI research informed by feminist and
other writing on the role of the body in knowledge production.
AI is the branch of computer science concerned with modelling
intelligent human behaviour on a computer. Like any other discipline, its
fortunes have varied over the years; sometimes it is fashionable,
sometimes not. Yet because it purports to deal with human intelligence
itself, it has, unsurprisingly, been the subject of much criticism over the
last 20 years, and particularly so from philosophical quarters (Dreyfus,
1972, 1979, 1992; Collins, 1990; Penrose, 1989; Searle, 1987). These
critiques contain many sophisticated criticisms of AI but I argue that they
are conservative in two major respects. Firstly, their arguments are

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Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 2, 1995:355
355-377

(London, Thousand

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constituted round the conditions which would count for the

failure of the whole AI enterprise. With the exception of Collins
success
or failure is seen in purely philosophical terms. In other
(1990),
words if AI systems pass a philosophical test of intelligence they are
deemed to be successful. The second conservative element concerns
gender. Traditional critiques say nothing at all about gender and hence
can say nothing about how AI systems may or may not reinforce existing
power structures or how AI can or cannot represent the knowledge which
differing social groups may have in a gendered analysis. It is because
these are left unasked in traditional accounts that feminists need to find
ways to frame such questions.
There is now a large body of theory in feminist epistemology which
looks at knowledge, what knowledge is and who knowers are. As
knowledge and representation of knowledge is at the heart of AI, this
makes it an appropriate vehicle for a gendered critique of AI. In
developing such a critique, the central question of traditional criticisms,
namely the success or failure of AI in creating true intelligence becomes
less important. Success or failure becomes more of a cultural question to
be seen, instead, in terms of whether we are prepared to accept and use
such systems in our working lives, and less to do with whether or not they
are truly intelligent. Given that there are many AI systems, particularly
expert systems, in use today, we must conclude that they are successful in
that they are being built and used (see, for example, Bryant et al.,1994 for
the huge number of reported expert systems in one small subset of
chemistry). The focus of the critique is therefore shifted from the
philosophical to the cultural and this means that it does become important
to ask how AI systems are used to represent knowledge, what kind of
knowledge and whose knowledge they contain. It is these questions,
essentially about how AI is used and what knowledge it uses, rather than
the possibility of true AI which are important for feminists.
For instance, designing and implementing an AI system which is to be
used by women could have significant impacts in several ways. Adam
and Fumival (1995) describe potential impacts of an example sex
discrimination law AI system. Such a system could clearly be useful in
offering women information about their rights. Furthermore, in translating the users views of their enquiries into the language of the
organization and vice versa, the system could play an important role in
instilling confidence in the lay user. What was at the outset a rather
tentative and intuitive suspicion of discriminatory malpractice could
become, after consultation with the system, a substantial legal indictment
to be acted upon. Secondly the design of such a system incorporates a
view from feminist legal theory which challenges the views of traditional
jurisprudence in excluding womens experiences from the development
of legal knowledge (Grbich, 1991). While being only too aware of the

largely

success or

357

limitations of this particular AI system, it does at the very least begin the
process of offering a challenge to the structures of knowledge built into
traditional systems of knowledge and particularly AI. It is also a far cry
from the abstract toy blocks world systems around which traditional
debates on the possibility of AI are often cast (Winograd, 1973).
The discipline of feminist epistemology is rich and varied but there are
three main strands which I shall use in this article. The first concerns the
idea of the knowing subject in S-knows-that-p epistemologies. It is
argued that work on knowledge-based systems as a prime example of what
will be defined as symbolic AI, is based on just such a traditional
epistemology. Arguments from feminist epistemology on the cultural
ownership of knowledge can be used to argue against the single, yet
universal knower and to examine how far the epistemology of AI is based
on such ideas.
As a philosopher, Dreyfus (1972, 1979, 1992) brings his research on
phenomenology to bear on the epistemology of AI in arguing that the

emphasis in AI on propositional knowledge (i.e. knowledge represented

in the form of logical propositions or rules) and its inability to represent
common sense and skills will ultimately mean that the symbolic AI
programme will fail. The second part of the critique offered in this article
extends Dreyfuss argument on skills to show that AI systems which
represent propositional knowledge cannot represent many of the things
know and that this can be used to deny the status of
to
knowledge traditional womens skills. Thirdly, and in relation to these
two strands, we look to an embodied knower with bodily skills. Feminist
writing on the body is discussed, and related to research on the bodily
that

women

basis of knowledge from philosophy (Johnson,1987; Lakoff, 1987). In this

way the role of the body is seen as fundamental to the creation of
knowledge and its representation in AI systems. The article concludes by
suggesting ways in which the critique from feminist theory points to
fundamental problems with an approach to the development of AI
systems which denies the role of the body in the production of

knowledge.
What is

Symbolic AI?
The symbolic approach to AI evolved alongside the new paradigm in
cognitive sciences which arose in response to criticisms of behaviourism
in the 1970s. The focus turned away from external observable responses
and stimuli towards internal mental states and the description of these in
terms of symbols and symbol manipulation. Importantly, mental activity
to be seen as a type of computational activity. In computer science,

came

the

cognitive science paradigm found a focus in the view that

intelligence could be represented symbolically on a computer (Newell,
new

358

1990: 76; Newell and Simon, 1976). Such a hypothesis could apply both
a digital computer and a human mind; indeed the strongest advocates

to

of the

symbolic view of AI assert the equivalence of the two (Pylyshyn,

1984).

logic is the most established way of handling sentences of symbols

formal way, such a view implies that human knowledge and intelligence can be expressed in the form of logical rules. The appeal of logic is
clear; it appears to offer certainty, exactness and above all else, truth. It is
hardly surprising that predicate logic has been enormously influential in
AI (Bratko, 1986; Kowalski, 1979). But the certainty is illusory; it is the
established syntax of logic which offers this while the meaning of the
symbols is entirely up to us to interpret.
As Nye (1990) suggests, logic teaches us to ignore the circumstances
in which something is said. Logic transcends the body and bodily processes. However, much of human reasoning does not appear to conform
to this type of reasoning, and this is precisely why some critics have asserted that this is the reason for the relative lack of success of this paradigm of AI (Dreyfus, 1992).
Dreyfus has been one of AIs most vocal and infamous critics for over
20 years (Dreyfus, 1972, 1979, 1992; Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986, 1988).
He suggests that when he first articulated his position that programmed
AI would never succeed it was somewhat controversial, but no more.
He claims that it is a paradigm case of what the philosopher of science,
Lakatos, called a degenerating research programme, i.e. one which
starts off with great promise but where phenomena resist the new techniques to the extent that the programme stagnates and researchers
abandon it in favour of a better alternative approach (Dreyfus, 1992: ixAs

in

x).
Since the early impressive work of Newell and Simon in the 1950s and
the grand claims that an intelligent machine was but a few years away,
symbolic AI has run into difficulties over commonsense reasoning. The
gurus of AI, such as Minsky and Papert (1969), began to realize that the
whole enterprise was much more difficult than they had believed in the
1960s. Meanwhile, Dreyfus had been arguing that the symbolic programme would eventually fail because of the difficulty of representing
know-how along with all the interests, feelings, motivations and bodily
capacities that make up a human being (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986).
Connectionism is an alternative approach to symbolic AI. In connectionist systems, knowledge is modelled through training a system which
mirrors the neuron firings in the brain. From the 1960s when symbolic
AI still dominated connectionist research, Dreyfus has argued that the
symbolic programme never lived up to its promises and by the 1980s researchers who were tired of a paradigm which was the only straw
afloat began to defect to the connectionist programme (Dreyfus,

359
1992: xiv). Yet it may be that connectionism is just getting its own chance
fail, and is now being given enough rope to hang itself.
Dreyfuss view as to the state of symbolic AI is somewhat polarized.
Although it is outside the scope of the present article to review the
quantity and quality of AI research in Europe and America there is plenty
of evidence that symbolic AI is not yet laid to rest - far from it, it appears to
be alive and kicking. There are many cheerful survivors clinging to the
wreckage and not even regarding it as wreckage. Although not involved
in the project myself, I shall use published reports to review Lenats huge
Cyc project which aims to produce an intelligent system by means of
encoding vast rafts of commonsense knowledge as a paradigm example
(Lenat and Guha, 1990).
to

Knowledge Engineering and Expert Systems

The Cyc system is a special type of expert system. In order to construct a
critique of Cyc, we must give some definitions of expert systems before
continuing in the next subsection to raise some questions regarding the
epistemological assumptions inherent in the design of Cyc.
Knowledge engineering is the name given to the part of AI which deals
with building expert or knowledge-based systems. These are computer
systems with expert knowledge built in and which constitute a large part
of the practical end of symbolic AI; their use has spread to many areas
including business, law, science and engineering (Jackson, 1990). Knowledge acquisition or acquiring the knowledge of the person or persons
whose knowledge is going to be put into the system is a major part of the
effort in building such a system (Welbank, 1983). Although some authors
do not use the terms synonymously, knowledge-based systems is the
apparently more neutral term for what are often termed expert systems.
Just by using the term, expert systems, an epistemological claim is being
made, quite simply that it is the knowledge of experts that will be put into
such systems and the knowledge is to be in the form of hard, objective,
scientific facts. Leaving aside the not inconsiderable difficulties in
acquiring knowledge from experts for these systems, it is hard to escape
the generalization that, barring pitifully few exceptions (Furnival, 1993;
Metselaar, 1991), in the Western world, it is the knowledge of relatively
small, yet powerful groups of white middle-class males which is
represented. Expert systems is thus a very good starting point for an
examination of the epistemology of AI.
Epistemology and the Cyc System
Cyc is a ten-year project, supported by large grants from American
industry and due for completion in the mid-1990s. The rationale, or as

360
Lenat describes it, the vision of the project is to build a vast knowledge
base (KB) spanning most of human consensus knowledge. But how does
Lenat decide which commonsense knowledge is to be put into his Cyc
system? Is the knowledge of Yucatan midwives to be ranked alongside
that of American university professors? And what if my common sense
disagrees with your common sense; whose is to be chosen? Lenat does
see this as a problem. Ultimately, he would have
consensus reality KB for the world.

not

Cyc be the major

no one would even think of buying a computer that didnt

operating system and that couldnt run a spreadsheet and a word
processing program, we hope that by 1999 no one would even think about
having a computer that doesnt have Cyc running on it. (Lenat and Guha,
1990: 358)

Just as, today,

have

an

Yet whose consensus reality is to be represented? Lenat assumes that

there is one and only one consensus reality available. It is everyones
consensual knowledge be they a professor, a waitress, a six-year-old
child, or even a lawyer (Lenat and Guha, 1990: xviii).
Lenats faith that Cyc will succeed is based neither on arguments nor
on actual successes but on two untested traditional assumptions; first that
human beings have a vast library of commonsense knowledge which can
be represented in propositional form, i.e. in terms of rules; second, that
the question of scaling up from a small subdomain to the world at large
can be solved by supplying further knowledge. It does indeed appear to
be a question of faith.

FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY
Even a brief examination such as this, into the tacit assumptions built into
a system like Cyc, suggests that there are many important
epistemological issues which must be unpacked and decoded. I argue that although
research on feminist epistemologies has not yet been brought to bear in
critiques of AI to any great extent (although see Adam,1993, 1994, and for
related feminist approaches to AI see Cooper and van Dam, 1994; Jansen,
1988, 1992; Star, 1991), it can be a powerful tool in this process. Feminist
epistemology can, I believe, offer further, more radical insights into an
understanding of epistemological issues in AI and in this sense two jobs
are being done. The first job is to provide an interesting and practical
example for feminist epistemology in the traditional feminist spirit that

become too abstract and that we must not divorce

philosophy
practice (Wajcman, 1991). The second task is to bring
feminist theory to a domain which has excited mostly mainstream
philosophical criticism in the past in what might be termed traditional
we

must

never

from

361

exemplified by the arguments of Dreyfus (1992). Dreyfus, and

other critics such as Searle (1987) and Penrose (1989), are concerned with
the possibility or otherwise of creating a truly artificially intelligent
machine. Arguments from feminist epistemology, while not disagreeing
with this, can be used to emphasize the importance of the use of AI
systems over the possibility of creating true AI systems, and in particular
how they may be used to further reinforce the drawbacks of traditional
rationalist epistemologies which deny women as knowers and deny
womens skills the status of knowledge.
Feminist epistemology is a major growth area in feminist research as it
straddles the disciplines of philosophy, history and philosophy of
science, and earlier polemical feminist writing (Hawkesworth, 1989). It
has become a large and complex discipline and, without tackling a
comprehensive review of the area, there are three main strands,
stemming from this research, which provide the focus of the following
sections. The first relates to the issue of whether the epistemic locus, the
subject or the knower, should be seen as the individual or the community, and how this is mirrored in the design of AI systems to reinforce
the denial of women as knowers. This point, in particular, is expanded in
a detailed analysis of the Cyc system and its treatment not only of
knowers but of knowledge and beliefs. The second point relates to the
distinction between knowing that and knowing how, or the propositional/
skills distinction, which Dreyfus has identified as the crucial issue for the
possibility of AI systems, and how the design of such systems cannot be
brought to bear on traditional womens skills. The third related area from
feminist epistemology concerns the role of the body in the making of
accounts

knowledge.
The following sections continue with a discussion of the first concept
from feminist epistemology, namely the question of the knowing subject
and epistemological communities. This point is then related to the design
of the Cyc system in some detail. The next section analyses the second
issue from feminist epistemology, the propositional/skills distinction and
describes some of the implications for expert systems. The article
concludes with a discussion of the role of the body and common sense.
S-KNOWS-THAT-p - THE VIEW FROM

NOWHERE?

Mainstream epistemologists have largely ignored the specific identity or

nature of the knowing subject (Code, 1993). This is important for feminist
theory as unacceptable points of view may be ignored in an illusion of a
universal subject which is somehow perspectiveless; this is a view from
nowhere. Part of the reason for this is the way that epistemology is
traditionally cast in the form S-knows-that-p where S, the knowing

362

subject is taken to be universal, and p is a piece of propositional

knowledge which that subject knows. The archetypal knowers, authors
of scientific research, are supposed to be anonymous - the individual is
always abstract; it is held that this makes no difference to the quality of the
research, yet this constitutes
disinterested moral

philosopher,

statement of the ideal knower

a

good

man

of liberal ethics

as a

(Harding,

1991 : 58).
In traditional epistemologies, paradigms are usually selected from
observational claims about everyday objects, which are seemingly shared
by everyone, and then scaled up so that all knowing is taken to be just as
objective. Thus the ideal knower is nowhere and understandably this
has been criticized by feminists as both containing a deep gender bias and
as also highly implicated in projects of gender domination (Arnault,
1989). The problem with a non-situated disinterested standpoint is that
not only are there no such ideal observers but also the ideal is a masculine
ideal and this hinders members of subordinate groups in participating on
a level with dominant groups in the creation of knowledge. This denies
the feminist epistemological programme of taking subjectivity into
account and suggests that not only must we move away from perception
at a distance where knowers are taken to be universal but attempts to
introduce a first-person subject must also be avoided where this excludes
the views of crazy or abnormal others and is used to establish a

perspectival hierarchy.
Communities of Knowers

Using these arguments in analysing symbolic AI further reinforces the

views of feminists on the need to look towards epistemological communities rather than individuals as the locus of knowledge. Nelson (1993)
seeks to move away from the passive Cartesian knower as a recipient or
collector of knowledge. This views knowledge as an individual affair ...
the mental activity of knowers grasping the one objective truth (Addelson and Potter, 1991:12). Feminism challenges the view that knowledge
is the property of the individual, suggesting rather that it is the social
group where knowledge is located and that interpersonal experience, the
knowing of others, is necessary to have beliefs and knowledge. Nelson
(1993:148) suggests that epistemological communities can be identified
in terms of shared knowledge standards, and practices. Science communities serve as obvious examples. However individual our experiences are, what we know, based on those experiences, is possible because
of the knowledge of one or more communities to which we, as
individuals, belong.
Such views strike a significant chord with recent work in the sociology
of scientific knowledge (SSK) which has seriously challenged the view of

363

objective thread of rationality running through the history of science,

suggesting that knowledge is constructed not discovered and locating
scientific knowledge instead in the interests of the social groups who
create it (Collins, 1990; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour and Woolgar, 1979;
Law, 1991; Pickering, 1992; Woolgar, 1988). However feminism and SSK
have not traditionally made very happy bedfellows, partly, and perhaps
largely, because of the persistence of SSK studies in ignoring feminism
(although it should be emphasized that this ignoring is not a one-way
process), and also partly because of a certain distrust within feminist
writing of a discipline which seemingly makes a pretence to neutrality
an

where feminism has declared that none exists. Nevertheless feminist

theory and SSK are making similar claims about knowledge and many
feminist studies are social constructivist in nature (Cockburn, 1993).
Although I shall suggest, in a later section, that feminism and social
constructivist studies part company over the role of the body, they are
largely in agreement over the role of the social group in the manufacture
of knowledge.
The crux of both the feminist and sociological arguments is that
knowledge is a social, cultural product and epistemologies which rest on
an invisible yet universal subject, and by extension AI systems based on
these epistemologies, deny such a cultural plurality and set up a
hierarchy of knowers where women as knowers are near the bottom.
Indeed it seems unlikely that such systems could work as, alongside their
expert knowledge, they need the bits of culture that you only get by
growing up in such a culture. The knower embodied in such systems may
be based on expert knowledge, but only on a fraction of real knowledge;
the cultural aspects of knowledge are ignored and knowledge is seen in
terms of hard-edged rational propositions.

Cyc Handle Knowledge and Belief?

We now return to the Cyc system to analyse the way in which Cyc models
the knowing subject. In a sense, because of the very assumption of
universality it is hard to find explicit mention of a subject at all. Only
when we come to the question of how conflicting beliefs are modelled do
the assumptions become clear.
In Cyc, when it comes to modelling conflicting beliefs, e.g. Marxist
economic theory vs the capitalist model, the knowledge will be entered
into the system in such a way that one view is tagged as knowledge and
the others as mere belief. It is a question of what Nelson (1990) and
Addelson (1983) have characterized as cognitive authority where the
knowledge has a higher status than the beliefs. There are many assumptions
How Does

built into this model.

First of all Cyc is, potentially,

going to believe one model itself and as

&dquo;

364
it is marketed as a system which models consensus knowledge this means
that it will contain knowledge which does not necessarily faithfully
represent majority opinion. Even if it did there is no warrant for turning
the definition of knowledge into a numbers game. Knowledge is more to
do with power and status. The hegemony of white middle-class male
views means that such positions can be maintained despite being in a
minority. The second point is that an appeal to the state of the real world
to show that it is fruitless to hold a single economic model says more
about how we regard economics and economic theorizing than it says
about the real world. Philosophers (Quine, 1960) have long since
abandoned the notion that there are independent observations of the real
world to be had, arguing instead that all our observations are mediated by
our theories of the world. In talking of economics, Lenat is appealing to a
kind of intellectual folklore that we all know economics to be inexact, like
weather forecasting, we are never quite sure how things are going to turn
out. But it could equally well be the case that Cyc, or its builders, could
decide that psychology say, is not as inexact a science as economics and
privilege one theory of psychology in the system, buttressed by appeals
to the state of the real world. Do the builders of Cyc wish to mirror and
maintain existing prejudice and inequity or should their system be
deliberately designed to expose unfairness and inequality?
Lenat and his team are forced to say who is doing the believing when it
comes to distinguishing between knowledge and beliefs. Anything an
agent knows can be true or just a belief. Of course a belief can be

supported by some direct physical observations or by other agents.

Cobelieving communities make it easy to propagate rumors, prejudice,
and superstition (Lenat and Guha, 1990:284). Beliefs are to represent
minority opinions and they are tagged in the system. Entries without
belief tags are knowledge belonging to TheWorldAsTheBuildersofCycBelieveItToBe, very little of which is supposedly questionable as it
contains facts such as people have two arms and two legs or you are not
likely to get a speeding ticket if you are less than 5 mph over the speed
limit. But is it really unquestionable? There are many easily elicited
contemporary examples of where common sense is quite different in
different cultural settings even before we bring in gender or before we
think of how common sense changes over time. For instance, in some
countries where the climate is very wet for a substantial part of the year, it
is considered normal to remove your shoes when entering a house. This is
an article of common sense in a country with a very wet climate. In the UK,
where winters are long, cold and damp (but not excessively wet or
snowy) and houses are generally poorly insulated, such action will
merely give you cold feet.
These examples might seem innocuous but what happens if other

untagged and therefore unquestioned knowledge, particularly of a more

365

saying how people ought to be, is put into the

Could
children and ethnic minorities be Cycs suspect
women,
system?
communities?
cobelieving
Cyc could perhaps assert things about how
from
different
races
should behave, or the nature of women or
people
children or what rights should be given to people with disabilities all
under the rubric of consensual knowledge. These sorts of agents are not
minorities and even if they were this does not remove their entitlement to
equal rights. Is it not perhaps a little arrogant to assume that what
constitutes true knowledge over mere belief is TheWorldAsTheBuildersofCycBelieveItToBe ? This is especially worrying as the authors of
the system hope that it will eventually be the gold standard global
knowledge base which all expert systems will use for commonsense
knowledge. Yet Lenat (Lenat and Guha,1990: 348) himself admits that the
fundamental tenet on which the philosophy of Cyc rests is a belief, we
believe that the current brittleness problems with expert systems are the
results of their inability to fall back on ever more general knowledge.
Should Cyc tag this as a belief?
normative nature, i.e.

Cyc, Subjectivity and Universal Knowledge

In Cyc we have an example of what Code (1993) has described as the
supposed universality of the knowing subject, or the view from nowhere
being used potentially to discount views which are crazy or maverick or
one of Lenats minority beliefs. This also supports what she suggests is a
perspectival hierarchy where the perspective of the group at the top of the
hierarchy is accorded higher status than that at the bottom. Middle-class
male professional knowledge informs TheWorldAsTheBuildersofCycBelieveItToBe and hopes that such a world might be available in a global
knowledge base as a form of epistemological imperialism. But as Dalmiya
and Alcoff (1993) have argued, much of traditional womens knowledge,
e.g. in midwifery and medicine, is historically of a skilled rather than a
propositional nature and cannot be written down. Systems like Cyc can
do nothing to change this; if anything they will aggravate it, of necessity,
ignoring such knowledge.
Although Dreyfus may be waiting in the wings, rubbing his hands at
the prospect of Cycs failure it is still chugging along nicely despite a set of
searching criticisms (see Artificial Intelligence 61(1), 1993). The goal of the
project remains unchanged - it is the engineering of an artefact, not the
proving of some hypothesis about knowledge.
occasionally have had to delve into quagmires of logic, but we have
studiously avoided the quagmires of philosophy. How did we do that,
when we had to represent Time, Substances, Perception, Contexts, Belief,
and so on? The philosophical quagmire around such topics has had three
We

366
thousand years

to form. We avoided it

by being pragmatic. (Guha

and

Lenat, 1993:151)
It is difficult to escape the feeling that they avoided it by ignoring it just as
they appear to have avoided by ignoring the moral dimension of the
knowledge which is to be represented in the system.
Research in feminist epistemology argues strongly against the idea of
universal knowledge. Indeed the classic good advice for building expert
systems is to seek out a single expert, as using a number of experts is just
too difficult as they will not agree (Welbank, 1983). Hence there seems to
be a tacit admission that, at least for a traditional expert system, a plurality
of views is best avoided. A perspectival hierarchy is constructed with the
expert at the top and others, including women, either at the bottom or
excluded.
Expert system research is not synonymous with symbolic AI but it does
constitute a major part of it and is the area where the knowing subject is
made most explicit. It is hard to escape the conclusion that symbolic AI is
broadly based on S-knows-that-p epistemology, where S is the expert,
and preferably a single expert to make the job easier, and p represents the
chunks of propositional knowledge to be represented in such systems,
preferably in the form of logical rules. There seems to be something of a
dichotomy as on the one hand the view of the knower must be universal,
but on the other it is recognized that different knowers will have different

knowledge.
PROPOSITIONAL AND SKILLS KNOWLEDGE
We

now leave the first concept from feminist

epistemology, the question
of the knowing subject and how this is represented in the Cyc system, to
turn to a discussion of types of knowledge. Traditional epistemologies
concentrate on propositional knowledge or knowing that. This type of
knowing is seen as superior to knowing how knowledge or skills. Many
womens skills, for instance about midwifery and child rearing, herbal
medicine and the like, as skills do not take on the status of knowledge.
However, we must beware of assuming that all womens knowledge is ot
this type and that such knowledge can only be transmitted by some form
of apprenticeship. Yet Star (1991) points to the invisibility of womens
work, how it escapes formal representation. The process of denying the
value of womens work can be described as epistemic discrimination
(Dalmiya and Alcoff, 1993). The consequence of assuming that S-knowsthat-p is adequate means that all knowledge comes to be seen as
propositional and knowledge which is not propositional is therefore not
knowledge. Such an epistemology forgets about practical skills or

367
know-how and intangible forms of knowledge such as intuition. This is at
the heart of epistemic discrimination and it can be used to define
traditional womens knowledge as not knowledge. It is an accepted tenet
of modern feminism that we must not assume that womens experiences
are all the same, hence it is not meaningful to speak as if there were a
universal womens knowledge; this falls into the same trap of universalism as exemplified by traditional epistemologies. But, on the other hand,
there are identifiable historical moments and geographical spaces where
we can identify a specific body of knowledge belonging to a group almost
exclusively composed of women, and where knowledge has a special
character because of that. Pre-19th-century midwifery and herbal medicine in the USA, before it was to fall into the hands of men, the
practitioners of scientific medicine, serves as a suitable exemplar for this
article (Ehrenreich and English, 1979). Although this is a historical
example, evidence suggests that there are similar models of midwifery in
parts of the world today. Jordans (1979) study of midwifery in different
countries shows that, in the present day, many models of midwifery exist
from the highly technologized Scandinavian model to the Yucatan
midwife, practising without medical practitioners and formal qualifications.
The issue of skills is a difficult one and we should be very wary of a
crude equation of male knowledge with propositional knowledge and
female knowledge with skills knowledge, with the latter at the bottom of
the heap. In the labour market the definitions of skilled and unskilled jobs
are clearly important as they determine pay and status yet it is often
suggested that women are low paid because they are unskilled
(Wajcman, 1991 : 37). Skilled status is traditionally identified with masculinity and as work that women do not do, while womens skills are
defined as non-technical and undervalued. In technological jobs, acquiring technical skills to the exclusion of women is an important source of
mens power over women and a way in which to protect their better
incomes and access to scarce jobs. This suggests that in a society where
propositional knowledge is valued over skills, the skills that women do
have are valued less than mens skills, further reinforcing the knowledge

hierarchy.
point about knowing how knowledge is that much of it cannot be
Imagine trying to learn how to ride a bicycle from a manual
as opposed to getting on and practising until you get it right. Historically,
much of the skill of midwifery in the Western world, before the present
day, was of this sort (Dalmiya and Alcoff, 1993; Jordan, 1979). Knowledge
and skills were handed on orally and by watching and doing; apart from
the impossibility of writing rules for such practical skills, it could not have
been written down as many practitioners were illiterate. The story of the
rise of the male medical obstetrician over the traditional midwife is hardly
The

written down.

368

of the triumph of modern science over ignorance and superstition.

The skill of midwives was based on an accumulated body of beliefs and
experience of the community of experts on childbirth, much like science,
but unlike scientific knowledge the practitioners were women and the
knowledge was not written down. Traditional midwifery clearly emone

phasized practical experience over propositional knowledge (Ehrenreich

and English, 1979).
Turning once more to the Cyc system we see that no distinction is
made between propositional and skills knowledge. Indeed, there is an
assumption that there is no fundamental difference between the two
and that everything important about what we know can be represented
in propositional form. Given that Lenat (Lenat and Guha, 1990:15) asserts that the brittleness of expert systems is due to the fact that all they
are doing is pushing around opaque tokens, Cyc could be accused of
doing the same, albeit with more general tokens and more of them. Yet
Lenats (Lenat and Guha, 1990:15) response is that cognition just consists of pushing tokens around in our minds; what makes his system
different and better is that, unlike most expert systems, his tokens are
solving any particular problem.
There is other evidence to suggest that a similar assumption, i.e. all
that matters is the propositional part of our knowledge, is at work in the
design of other expert systems and is, at least, part of the reason why
they fail or are not used. Collins (1985, 1990; Collins et al., 1986) suggests
that much of our tacit knowledge is in the form of skills and that the
transfer of such knowledge is notoriously difficult if not impossible
through the written word and through the medium of expert systems.
In an argument which is in broad agreement with the above analysis of
midwives skills he argues that the way to transfer skilled knowledge is
through apprenticeship with someone who is already an expert (Collins,
1985: 73). Collinss (Collins et al., 1986) and his colleagues own attempts
at building a scientific expert system failed as it captured textbook knowledge and not the actual skill which the scientists used in tackling their
not tied to

problem.
THE ROLE OF THE BODY IN MAKING KNOWLEDGE

theory points to the importance of the role of the body in

producing knowledge (Grosz, 1993). The knower in traditional epistemology is not only an individual knower but is disembodied as well; reason
is presented as purely mental. Much of knowing how knowledge is of this
corporeal form - it is meaningless to talk of riding a bicycle as a purely
mental activity as it is meaningless to describe delivering a baby in purely
mental terms. The midwives example is one of skilled embodied
Feminist

369
interaction which cannot be fully described in mental terms. This
suggests that a computer system to assist, say, a trainee midwife might be
useful but one to tell her how to deliver a baby would surely be of much
more questionable value (Adam, 1993). Yet the Cartesian view of reason
in terms of rules where the body stands in the way of intelligence rather
than being seen as an integral part of it has been taken on board by both
symbolic and connectionist AI. Dreyfus (1992) argues that the body is
indispensable for intelligent behaviour and the simulation of the body
cannot be programmed on a digital computer.
The role of the body in the production of knowledge has become
increasingly important in feminist theory. Much of this work is a
refutation of essentialism, as feminists have been wary of views of the
body which tie it too closely to nature and reproduction (Grosz, 1991 : 1).
Yet at the same time many philosophies which might be considered as
natural allies of feminism, including Marxism, socialism and the social
constructivist programme in the form of the sociology of scientific
knowledge, have a tendency to subordinate the body. Just as an earlier
section of this article suggested in relation to predicate logic, these
philosophies transcend the body, as part of the leitmotiv permeating
Western rationalist philosophy of the triumph of reason over nature,
which feminism rightly views with suspicion.
As Kirby suggests, the debate between essentialism and antiessentialism encourages a fear of bodily functions or somatophobia
(Kirby, 1991: 4). I would suggest that just such a somatophobia lies at the
heart of the symbolic approach to AI and this in itself is part of a strong
current of Cartesian philosophy, splitting off the mind from the body and
elevating the mind over the body. Several feminist writers talk explicitly
of this split (Harding, 1991; Rose, 1994). Applying this to womens lives
and work, we can see that women are assigned the work that men do not
want to do. In particular, womens lives and experiences are to do with
bodies, the bearing and raising of children, the looking after of bodies, the
young, old and sick and mens bodies too. Women also belong to the
places where bodies are located, in domestic work in their own and
others homes and in the workplace. Harding (1991) describes this as
concrete work - the better women are at it the more invisible it becomes. In
fact the invisibility of such labour has become institutionalized in many
systems of thought - one looks in vain in Marxs Capital for a discussion of
this type of labour. It is invisible from mens perspective and it frees men
in the ruling groups to immerse themselves in the life of the mind - the
world of abstract concepts while caring for bodies and the places that they
exist disappears into nature in a process which Rose (1994: 40) describes
as womens compulsory altruism. This type of bodily, concrete yet
invisible labour produces a type of knowledge which is taken to be
subordinate to mental knowledge, that is, if it is accorded the status of

370

Small wonder that the machines that AI gives birth to

mental machines devoid of bodies and bodily knowledge.

knowledge at all.
are

Womans identity has traditionally been associated with the body and
nature, just as mans has been located in their transcendence as mind and
culture. Woman is thereby positioned as mans attenuated inversion, as
mere specular reflection through which his identity is grounded. The brute
matter of womans embodiment and the immediacy of her lived experience
provide the corporeal substratum upon which man erects himself and from
which he keeps a safe distance. (Kirby, 1991 : 5)

This split rests on the ancient dichotomy of spirit and matter developed
within the Aristotelian/Christian tradition where matter and spirit were
put in opposition and attributed, respectively, to the female and male
principles. Spirit was associated with the rational, principled and ethically
sound and was superior to dark passive matter, a nature to be dominated
and controlled. Such a view found voice in the Baconian view of sciences
domination over nature and gives us the man of reason, the ideal of
rationality associated with the rationalist philosophies of the 17th century
(Lloyd, 1984). The man of reason further reinforces the associations between
male and rational and between female and non-rational. The
Cartesian method of the 17th century splits mind and matter, emphasizing
clear and distinct reasoning and eliminating emotions and sensuality.
But what is feminism to make of the body now? There is obviously a
danger here. In order to eschew essentialism we may end up
disembodying the body - making it into something purely cultural and
letting gender float free-yet this shores up the view that we find from social
constructivism and which can be androcentric - that everything must be
seen in terms of its cultural use (Bigwood, 1991 : 59). Feminism and certain
types of philosophers and cognitive scientists, namely phenomenologists
such as Dreyfus (1992) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) and body in the mind
theorists such as Johnson (1987) and Lakoff (1987), wish to retain a measure
of realism so that the embodied body may be retained in the face of the
relativism which constructivism and unbridled postmodernism seems to
promise. This means that feminism is ambivalent regarding the offerings
of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
How can feminism naturalize the body while steering clear of the twin
spectres of essentialism and a disembodied postmodernism? And,
importantly for this study, what has feminist epistemology to say about
embodiment and what, in turn, does this say about the projects of artificial

intelligence?
In the wake of historys elevation of pure reason as the Cartesian ideal it
surprise that propositional knowledge has found a voice as true
knowledge and similarly that large and prestigious projects, such as Cyc,

is

no

are

based

reason.

on

such

knowledge,

as an

example

of masculinist Cartesian

371

underlying assumption in the design of Cyc is that consensual

knowledge can be represented without reference to the
body. The justification for any piece of knowledge can be made by
Lenats

commonsense

reference to another and

so on.

Lenat assumes that these:

bottom out at physical - somatic - primitives: up, down,

forward, back, pain, cold, inside, seeing, sleeping, tasting, growing,
containing, moving, making noise, hearing, birth, death, strain, exhaus-

eventually
tion.

(Lenat and Feigenbaum, 1991: 201)

But there is no evidence that Cycs propositional knowledge can be

reduced to such primitives and no evidence given that all these primitives
are indeed primitive and cannot be reduced further. By designating them
somatic Lenat is admitting that the body is necessary in the production of
knowledge, and increasing awareness of the role of the body leads critics
of Cyc (Kirsh, 1991) to suggest that disembodiment, i.e. the concept that
cognitive skills can be treated as disembodied from perceptual-motor
skills is becoming one of the most important issues for debate in AI. The
next section looks at alternative embodied theory of knowledge which can
inform AI.
The arguments in this article have shown that a focus on propositional
knowledge invalidates the lived experience of womens work and makes
invisible the skilled bodily knowledge which that brings. The argument
does not rest here. It is not purely a question of ignoring some aspects of
knowledge; it is the question of whether these ways of knowing are
crucial to having even propositional knowledge; it is a question of
whether these ways of knowing are essential to knowing anything at all.
Feminist epistemology answers these questions in the affirmative.

AI AND COMMON SENSE - WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE

US?

The epistemology of symbolic AI is based on the Cartesian rationalist

view that all knowledge is based on symbolic representations, of which
the ideal type of representation is symbolic logic, where as we have
described, expressions in logic can be manipulated independently of their
meanings. This means that symbolic AI can be seen as a giant Cartesian
research programme which has attempted to discover the logical rules
which comprise human knowledge and where the rules of logic offer a
comforting certainty. Although researchers like Lenat believe that this is
possible and it is largely a quantitative process, others have conceded that
representing common sense is a vastly more complex affair than was
believed in AI research laboratories in the 1960s (Winograd, 1989).
Dreyfus (1992; Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1988) believes that it was inevitable

372

that

symbolic AI should reach this position as the phenomenology of

everyday common sense has defeated philosophers, including, latterly
Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger, for years.
In constructing argument round Heideggers work, Dreyfus (1992;
Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1988) is arguing against symbolic AI and makes the
same point as feminist theorists in claiming that knowledge of the world
cannot be subsumed into propositional atomic knowledge and, indeed,
the view of natural science, as the epitome of propositional knowledge is
seriously challenged by modern work on the sociology of scientific
knowledge where studies have focused on the importance of laboratory
practices and discourse between networks of actors (Latour and Woolgar,
1979).

Importantly for AI, there is mainstream research which offers a strong

epistemology in terms of the body. The two main authors are
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987), whose work spans linguistics, category
theory and phenomenology. They both attack a point of view which they
term Objectivism, and which has been broadly characterized here as the
Western rationalist tradition in philosophy. Under this view, meaning
and rationality are transcendental, transcending the limitations of any
particular being. Reasoning is seen as a rule-governed manipulation of
connections among symbols and is essentially disembodied. Yet the view
which they offer, instead, sees meaning in terms of embodiment, in
terms of our collective biological capacities and our physical and social
experiences as beings functioning in our environment (Lakoff,
1987:207). We import structure and order in the world through metaphor, which Lakoff and Johnson see as a much more powerful instrument
than has traditionally been understood. Metaphor is at work in image
schemata. For instance, the container schema gives us basic boundary
descriptions between interiors and exteriors - what is in and what is
out. More is described as up, while less is described as down. We
have metaphors related to force, to balance and so on. Where do we get
these image schemata from? We learn them through the interactions of our
bodies with our environment. For instance, watch an infant learning to
walk, acquiring concepts of balance, up, down, being upright, falling,
etc. These are Lenats somatic primitives which the design of Cyc must
view of

somehow be based on but cannot represent.

These views are important in that they provide strong theoretical and
empirical support for a view of epistemology based on the body, and for
that reason they may have much to offer feminist theory and AI. For
feminist theory, however, such views appear to say little about power
and status as, regrettably, they are gender blind. Having looked at AI in
terms of the status of different types of knowledge where propositional
knowledge is at the top of the hierarchy and skills, particularly womens
skills, are at the bottom, we need a theory which offers explanations for

373

this. For AI, there is already evidence that researchers are taking to heart
the need to consider the body in new embedded robotics projects, and are
making a start on the programme of putting the body back into
knowledge as far as AI is concerned (Cog, 1994).

CONCLUSION

writing, coupled with non-feminist critiques of AI from philosand

ophy
sociology can be used to make important political points about
the use of AI in addition to the possibility of true AI. In particular systems
designed from a consciously feminist position, few in number though
they may be, can be used to challenge traditional epistemologies particularly where these involve assumptions as to what womens natures are or
to what womens rights should be (Adam and Furnival, 1995). Arguments that pure AI is doomed to failure seem to miss the point here as it
seems fruitless to suggest sweeping away all such systems when clearly
many have the potential to assist people, to help them with decisions, to
make their work more interesting and organized. The arguments in this
article suggest that the epistemology of AI is predicated on traditional
rationalist epistemology. This makes the knower at once invisible and
universal and excludes alternative points of view where feminist epistemology emphasizes the standpoint of the observer which can include race
and class as well as gender and also the role of the body in knowledge
production. In this way AI systems, by the process of reifying knowledge,
can be used to exclude the other, the different and inevitably women.
Secondly the emphasis on propositional knowledge in AI systems
makes material and explicit one form of knowledge at the expense of
common sense and skills or knowing how, which, it is argued, is the form of
much of traditional womens knowledge. The body has to be brought into
AI. The force of such arguments suggests that it is not a question of
deliberate exclusion of womens knowledge from such systems, rather
that in many cases it would not be possible to capture the knowledge, so
the notion of a system based on that knowledge becomes meaningless.
The fact that systems are built based on propositional forms of knowledge
further serves to reinforce traditional epistemology against the challenges
of feminism in seeking to constitute knowledge along with subjects and
objects collectively and to seek a plurality of truths rather than a single
Truth (Hekman, 1990: 63).
The way forward for an AI informed by feminism can involve not only
tackling feminist projects with traditional AI technology but also more
ambitious and speculative attempts to become involved in the newer
areas of AI which are consciously addressing the need to involve the body
in the representation of knowledge.
Feminist

374

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Alison Adam

is a Lecturer in Computation at UMIST where she teaches artificial

intelligence. She is currently working on a book on gender and artificial

intelligence.