 Misunderstandings of the situated knowledge and epistemic advantage theses are partly due to two errors: thinking of them in isolation from each other and mistakenly taking them to be claims about individualistic knowledge. Feminist standpoint theory is not an account of how an individual acquires knowledge, but rather an account that treats knowledge as social. This point can be made more clearly by considering the achievement thesis—the idea that standpoint is not automatic and must be achieved. Harding distinguishes between a perspective and a standpoint in order to clarify this. First, feminist standpoint theory 