Bias Does Not End the Argument: How to Answer the Positionality Veto

Imagine that arguing is like walking down a gentle path through the woods.

We leave our shoes at the trailhead in the hope of meeting reality with less insulation from our preconceptions. Barefoot, we must watch the ground more carefully—and accept that another walker may experience the same path differently.

The trees sway, sunlight filters through the leaves, and the trail feels warm beneath your bare feet. You left your shoes at the trailhead, wanting to feel the ground as it is rather than merely pass over it. Walking alone is easy. Your arguments remain comfortably inside your head, receiving no resistance and suffering no blisters.

Then another person joins you.

You shift to make room, but the path remains wide enough for both of you. You share a vocabulary, recognize the same landmarks, and trust that the trail leads somewhere you both want to go. When disagreement arises, the path becomes narrower and more tangled. You have to watch your footing, explain your turns, and occasionally retrace your steps. The going is harder, but it remains possible because you are still walking on common ground.

Then your companion stops.

“You didn’t see the glass?”

You look down. There are fragments scattered along the shaded edge of the trail.

“There is too much direct sunlight in the middle, so I have to walk along the edge—and the edge is full of glass,” your companion explains. “You can traipse along without worrying about it because the middle works for people like you. I have to understand the path you walk, but I also have to understand the hazards along mine.

“I’m not saying you can never understand. I’m saying that your comfortable position prevented you from seeing something that shapes every step I take. Before you propose a solution, you need to understand why people walking the edges do not trust those in the middle to repair them.”

You look more carefully.

“Oh. You’re right—there is glass along the trail. I’ve kept mostly to the middle, where it has been fairly clear. I watch where I place my feet, but because I’ve never been cut, the glass has never determined how I walk.”

You suggest clearing the fragments, adding shade, and making the edges safer. Your companion shakes his head.

“That will not work. Look how hard I had to work just to explain the problem to you, and you still cannot know what I am going through. I cannot trust people who cannot see the hazards to repair them. This path must be torn up and rebuilt by people who know what it is like to walk along the margins. Otherwise, we will end up exactly where we started.”

The walker at the edge may see a hazard missed by the walker in the clear centre. Her experience adds evidence to the conversation; it does not give her sole authority to decide what the hazard means or how the path must be repaired.

The conversation began with a real observation. One walker saw a danger the other had missed, and the first walker revised his understanding accordingly. The trouble appeared when that experience was asked to confer authority as well as supply evidence. Because one walker had overlooked the glass, he was now considered unqualified to question who should rebuild the path, how it should be rebuilt, or whether tearing it up would make anyone safer.

When Perspective Becomes a Veto

In an earlier essay, Critical Theory: Why the Argument Suddenly Becomes About You, I described a recurring three-step mechanism: disqualify the shared standards, put the questioner on trial, and transfer authority to those claiming critical consciousness.

This essay begins where that one ended. What do you say when someone tells you that your sex, race, nationality, class, or social position prevents you from understanding the subject under discussion?

The problem is not the observation that experience matters. It plainly does.

A woman may possess experiential knowledge of pregnancy that I do not. A black Canadian may encounter racial hostility that I have never experienced. An immigrant may notice features of the immigration system invisible to someone born here. Someone forced to walk along the shaded edge may know about glass that the comfortable person in the middle has never needed to see.

More careful versions of standpoint epistemology do not claim that identity automatically produces knowledge. A standpoint must be developed through inquiry and critical reflection, which already concedes something important: social location may provide access to evidence, but interpreting that evidence remains a fallible and contestable exercise.

This essay concerns the popularized version in which identity itself begins functioning as authority:

You cannot understand this because you are not one of us. Your request for evidence demonstrates your privilege. Your disagreement confirms your blindness. Your silence would make you complicit.

Instead of answering the speaker, the framework situates him and treats that location as its reply. His identity may be relevant context, but it begins functioning as a verdict before anyone has established whether his argument is true.

The progression is subtle:

• “I noticed something you missed” becomes “I understand the entire path better than you.”
• “Include my evidence” becomes “Defer to my interpretation.”
• “You should hear my proposed remedy” becomes “Only people like me may decide what must be done.”

That is the positionality veto: the conversion of possible insight into personal authority and possible bias into automatic disqualification.

Bias in the Scholar, Objectivity in the Process

The same argument appears on a larger scale in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said observes that no scholar can detach himself from his class, beliefs, social position, historical circumstances, or membership in society. Western scholars studying “the Orient” therefore approached it as Westerners formed within imperial powers, not as disembodied minds observing from nowhere.

Said’s scholar is another walker on the trail. He cannot step outside his history before describing what he sees. The limitation is real, but it does not follow that his description cannot be examined by people approaching from other positions.

James Lindsay identifies this category error in a New Discourses podcast examining Said. Western knowledge does not depend upon producing people without histories, interests, ambitions, loyalties, or blind spots. Its defence lies in a process designed to prevent the circumstances of any one participant from determining the result.

Researchers publish evidence. Rivals challenge their methods. Other investigators attempt replication, while competing explanations are compared against reality. Critics may be generous, hostile, personally ambitious, or deeply invested in proving the original claim wrong. What matters is that nobody possesses permanent authority to end the process.

Objectivity is not personal purity but an imperfect institutional achievement. Jonathan Rauch describes the liberal knowledge system through two governing rules: no one gets the final say, and no one possesses personal authority. Claims survive provisionally because they remain open to criticism, not because the people making them have escaped their humanity. Rauch develops this argument in The Constitution of Knowledge.

The modest claim that everyone has biases does not prove that members of a dominant culture are all biased in substantially the same direction, that their disagreements remain trapped inside one political hegemony, or that the person who recognizes this structure possesses superior access to truth.

Institutional blind spots exist. Funding can influence research, professional consensus can harden into conformity, and comfortable experts can protect one another. Hegemony may give us useful questions to ask about a field, but it cannot supply the answers before the evidence has been examined.

Knowledge can be socially produced without being socially determined.

Lindsay becomes less persuasive when he says that “we should keep our cultural hegemony” and deliberately cultivate the cultural pride sustaining it. We do not need to defend every Western inheritance in order to answer Said. The inheritance worth defending here is the open process through which Western institutions, counterhegemonic theories, and Lindsay’s own claims may all be questioned.

The Footbridge Did Not Fall from the Sky

Back on the trail, you point toward a footbridge crossing a stretch of broken ground.

“This path is not only its failures,” you say. “Look at what generations of walkers have built into it. Someone recognized a danger there, and people worked to make the trail safer. The bridge is good, but it is not beyond criticism. We can strengthen it, extend it, or revisit its construction when necessary.

The footbridge did not fall from the sky. It was built because people forced others to confront dangers they had overlooked—but the case for building it was made through evidence, persuasion, and principles that everyone could examine.

“Why not repair the trail together? We can clear the glass, make the shaded edges safer, and ask the people who use every part of the path what we have overlooked. It will never be perfect, but it can become better. If we tear everything down, we lose not only the hazards but the accumulated knowledge contained in the path and its previous repairs.”

Your companion is unimpressed.

“That footbridge did not fall from the sky. People walking along the margins had to raise a ruckus. They had to demonstrate that the old trail was dangerous and persuade everyone else that changing it was the right thing to do. They made comfortable walkers uncomfortable because the path was not built for everyone. Without that disruption, people like you might never have admitted anything was wrong.”

The objection has now changed. The question is no longer whether social position grants exclusive knowledge, but whether comfortable institutions will correct entrenched injustice without agitation. That is a different and considerably stronger argument.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not emerge from tranquil institutional self-correction. It followed decades of protest, litigation, organizing, political struggle, and personal courage. Its passage outlawed segregation in public accommodations and prohibited discriminatory practices in employment. The National Archives describes both the law and the political resistance surrounding its passage.

Sometimes people walking comfortably in the middle do not notice the glass. Sometimes they notice and prefer not to bear the cost of removing it. Agitation may be necessary to force an institution to confront the distance between its stated principles and its practices.

Howard Zinn’s You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train expresses the legitimate moral insight that doing nothing can preserve an existing injustice. Zinn’s argument grew from his civil-rights and antiwar activism. That warning should not be dismissed merely because activists sometimes abuse it.

Discomfort alone does not prove justice, however, since destructive movements are equally capable of raising a ruckus. What made the civil-rights cause right was not simply the identity of its advocates or the disruption they created. They demonstrated identifiable injustices and appealed to principles that other citizens could examine: equal citizenship, individual rights, equal protection, and consistency between the country’s promises and its practices.

Their experience helped reveal the failure, while publicly contestable reasons established why the remedy was just.

The liberal achievement was not the replacement of white authority with exclusive black authority. It was the expansion of equal standing under common law. The Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin. Its principle was not that one identity should inherit the power previously held by another, but that identity should no longer determine a citizen’s access to public life.

Liberal institutions frequently betray liberal principles. When that happens, reform may require protest, conflict, and considerable discomfort. The answer is to widen participation, expose the failure, make authority more contestable, and repair what can be repaired. Finding glass along the shaded edge does not prove that the entire path is fraudulent, while preserving what works cannot excuse leaving the glass where it lies.

Returning to the Argument

Most people confronted with the positionality veto become defensive. They attempt to prove that they are not racist, sexist, privileged, colonialist, or otherwise morally contaminated. In doing so, they accept the transfer from the argument to their character.

A better response concedes fallibility without accepting disqualification:

“I may have blind spots. So might you. That is why neither of us should get the final word.”

Then return to the proposition.

These questions do not deny the other person’s experience. They ask that experience to enter a process in which its meaning and implications can be examined.

Someone repeatedly cut by glass deserves particular attention when describing where the fragments lie. That does not make him a trail engineer, establish that every margin-walker encounters the same hazard, or prove that demolishing the existing path is safer than repairing it.

Lived experience can contribute evidence. Identity cannot supply a veto.

People affected by a policy should participate in evaluating it, but no identity provides final authority over every factual, moral, legal, or practical question connected to it.

Some conversations cannot be rescued once disagreement itself has been converted into confirmation of the theory. If requests for evidence prove privilege, contrary examples demonstrate internalized oppression, and no possible answer could count against the preferred interpretation, the discussion is no longer operating as inquiry.

At that point, the response can remain calm:

“If my identity disqualifies every objection before you hear it, then there is no argument available to us. You have decided who may speak, not what is true.”

Going barefoot did not allow either walker to perceive the whole trail. It made both more vulnerable to what they missed—and more dependent upon keeping one another’s warnings open to examination.

When moral diagnosis prevents people from raising questions about immigration, education, crime, sex, race, or public policy, the underlying problems do not disappear. They continue without the benefit of open correction, while citizens learn that speaking honestly carries greater social risk than allowing the failure to continue.

Bias does not end the argument. It is one reason the argument must remain open.

They need not see the path in exactly the same way before they can reason together about it. Experience brings evidence into view, questions test their conclusions, and neither walker’s identity settles the argument in advance.

References

• Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978; Vintage Books edition, 1979). Said’s foundational account of how Western scholarship, cultural representation, and imperial power became intertwined. Publisher’s page
• James Lindsay, “Edward Said and How the West Went Woke,” New Discourses Podcast, Episode 216, July 31, 2026. This is the podcast examined in the essay and Lindsay’s interpretation of Said’s influence; it should not be treated as independent proof of that interpretation.
• Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity’?” Originally published in The Centennial Review, Vol. 36, No. 3 (1992), pp. 437–470. Harding’s argument is important because it does not simply declare marginalized testimony automatically true; it proposes beginning inquiry from neglected social positions while still subjecting claims to critical examination.
• Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A useful overview of the different forms of feminist standpoint theory, including their arguments about situated knowledge and relative epistemic advantage.
• “Feminist Standpoint Theory,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This provides a broader account of the tradition’s development, internal disagreements, and claims about the relationship between social power and knowledge.
• Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press). Zinn’s memoir supplies the phrase used in the essay and places it within his civil-rights, anti-war, and social-justice activism.
• U.S. National Archives, “Civil Rights Act (1964).” Includes the Act’s principal provisions and an account of the institutional and political resistance its supporters had to overcome.