DOES SCIENCE HAVE GENDER?

FEMINIST THEORY ON SCIENCE AND WHY (MALE) SCIENTISTS OUGHT TO PAY

ATTENTIONThe Feminist Challenge to

‘Fundamental Epistemology’Cassandra L. Pinnick

cassandra.pinnick@wku.eduPhilosophy

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 HardingMerrill HintikkaDiscovering 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 HardingIs 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 CodeWhat 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 forHelen LonginoThe 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.