Transcript DOES SCIENCE HAVE GENDER? FEMINIST THEORY ON …

DOES SCIENCE HAVE GENDER?
FEMINIST THEORY ON SCIENCE
AND WHY (MALE) SCIENTISTS
OUGHT TO PAY ATTENTION
The Feminist Challenge to
‘Fundamental Epistemology’
Cassandra L. Pinnick
[email protected]
Philosophy
Western Kentucky University
The attempt to add understanding of women to our
knowledge of nature and social life has led to the
realization that there is precious little reliable
knowledge to which to add them. A more fundamental
project now confronts us. We must root out sexist
distortions and perversions in epistemology,
metaphysics, methodology and the philosophy of
science – in the ‘hard core’ of abstract reasoning
thought most immune to infiltration by social values.
Sandra Harding
Merrill Hintikka
Discovering Reality 1983.
The Feminist Project makes two promises:
•The Project will provide a comparatively better theory
for the justification of scientific belief.
•The Project will provide a distinctive and demonstrably
better methodology.
Sandra Harding
Is Science Multicultural?: Postcolonialisms,
Feminisms, and Epistemologies 1998.
Women and men in the same culture have
different ‘geographical’ locations in
heterogeneous nature, and different interests,
discursive resources, and ways of organizing
the production of knowledge from their
brothers. Here the focus is on gender
differences, on the reasons why it is more
accurate and useful to understand women and
men in any culture as having a different
relationship to the world around them.
The issue is…about the resources that starting off
research from women’s lives can provide for
increasing human knowledge of nature’s
regularities and the underlying causal tendencies
anywhere and everywhere that gender relations
occur.
In many ways they are exposed to different
regularities of nature that offer them different
possible resources and probable dangers and that
can make some theories appear more or less
plausible than they do to those who interact only
with other environments.
When science is defined in terms of these linked
meanings of objectivity and masculinity, …science
itself is distorted.
Standpoint approaches can show us how to detect
values and interests that constitute scientific
projects…Standpoint approaches provide a map, a
method, for maximizing a ‘strong Objectivity’ in
the natural and social sciences.
Lorraine Code
What Can She Know? 1991.
As long as ‘epistemology’ bears the stamp of the postpositivist,
empiricist project of determining necessary and sufficient
conditions for knowledge and devising strategies to refute
skepticism, there can be no feminist epistemology. [These goals]
are inimical to feminist concerns on many levels: ontological,
epistemological, moral, political. Ideals central to the project –
ideals of objectivity, impartiality, and universality are
androcentrically derived. Their articulation maps only typical
middle- class white male experiences.
I contend that mainstream epistemology, in its very neutrality,
masks the fact of its derivation from and embeddedness in a
specific set of interests: the interests of a privileged group of white
men.
Princeton University Press advertisement for
Helen Longino
The Fate of Knowledge 2001.
“Helen Longino challenges this assumption,
arguing that social interaction actually assists us in
securing rationally based knowledge. This insight
allows her to develop a new account of scientific
knowledge that integrates the social and
cognitive.”
K. B. Wray
“The Epistemic Significance of Collaborative Research” 2002.
Ideally, it would be useful to have information on
specific research groups, showing increased productivity
after collaboration, followed by greater funding, which
in turn would be followed by continued collaboration.
Unfortunately, at present, such data are not available.