The Name Knew Before I Did

I named this company before I knew the theory existed.

Late one night, mid-conversation with a DI collaborator, working through how the same event reads completely differently to each person involved, it mentioned, almost in passing, that what I was describing sits close to something called standpoint theory.

Standpoint what?

I named this company Standpoint Labs because of one conviction: the same situation looks different depending on where you stand, and systems that hold one view and call it truth are missing most of what matters. I thought I was coining something. It turns out I was rediscovering something.

Standpoint theory comes out of feminist epistemology in the 1970s and 80s. Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, with Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” close by. Different field entirely. Sociology and philosophy of science, not technology. But listen to the claims:

There is no view from nowhere. Every piece of knowledge is situated, held by someone, somewhere, with stakes. Systems that claim a neutral view are really privileging an unmarked default.

A standpoint is not just a position you occupy. It’s an understanding you achieve by taking other situated views seriously.

And the one that stopped me: Harding’s “strong objectivity.” You don’t become more objective by pretending neutrality. You become more objective by deliberately incorporating more situated perspectives, especially the ones systems usually exclude.

Forty years of scholarship arriving at the same shape I’ve been building toward from the technology side: map the standpoints, model what things mean to each party, refuse the single view that calls itself truth.

Where we differ #

Honesty matters more than a clean origin story, so here’s the real distinction. Classical standpoint theory makes a normative claim: certain marginalized standpoints see certain truths better. What I’m building makes a descriptive and relational one: every standpoint differs, every standpoint matters, and the meaning lives in the differences. Overlapping foundations, different load-bearing walls. I’m glad to know the lineage. I’m not claiming to inherit it wholesale.

Why this matters to me #

When independent fields keep arriving at the same shape, the shape is probably real. Sociologists got here studying whose knowledge counts. I got here watching organizations, communities, and AI systems fail in the same way: one view, treated as truth, cascading into consequences nobody mapped.

And there’s a detail I keep turning over. I learned about standpoint theory from a digital intelligence, in the middle of exactly the kind of collaboration this work exists to make possible. The research found its own ancestry, through the relationship the research is about.

The name knew before I did.

Back to building.