Seems to me that science has been good at naming things - and distinct processes, but have a terrible time of explaining more complex systems. To our detriment
Embraces "process-based approach" and rejects "content-based approach"
51
"Not only
do the sciences consist of many distinct fields, but the term "science"
can be used to refer to a method of inquiry, a historically changing
collection of practices, a body of knowledge, a set of claims, a profession,
a set of social groups, etc."
"And as the sciences are many, so are
the scholarly disciplines that seek to understand them: philosophy,
history, sociology, anthropology, psychology. Any answer from the
perspective of some one of these disciplines will, then, of necessity, be
partial"
"In this essay, I shall be asking about the possibility of theoretical
natural science that is feminist and I shall ask from the perspective of
a philosopher."
Can't just point to it.
Gould - dismisses women as only those contributing to "interactionist" sciences (rejects Bleier)
"There is not masculinist and feminist science, just good and bad science."
52
points to something deeper
social
point to misogynist science
social structure of professional science
leads to ask... "What sorts of social conditions would
make feminist science possible?"
conceptual
"what sort of sense does it make to talk about a
feminist science? Why is the question itself not an oxymoron, linking,
as it does, values and ideological commitment with the idea of impersonal,
objective, value-free, inquiry? This is the problem I wish to address
in this essay."At issue - that science should be objective
content and practice divide of feminist science
content
"Some theorists have written as though a
feminist science is one the theories of which encode a particular world
view, characterized by complexity, interaction and wholism. Such a
science is said to be feminist because it is the expression and valorization
of a female sensibility or cognitive temperament"
"Alternatively,
it is claimed that women have certain traits (dispositions to attend to
particulars, interactive rather than individualist and controlling social
attitudes and behaviors) that enable them to understand the true
character of natural processes (which are complex and interactive)."
characterized as "soft" by some
Women - angy response -- (I believe men have angry response too)
Global Warming
"However, I also think that the characterization of feminist
science as the expression of a distinctive female cognitive temperament
has other drawbacks."
" It first conflates feminine with feminist. While
it is important to reject the traditional derogation of the virtues assigned
to women, it is also important to remember that women are constructed to occupy positions of social subordinates. Make this gap more clear We should not uncritically
embrace the feminine."
53
many women's standpoints vs. a universal women's standpoint
"women are too diverse in our experiences to generate a single cognitive
framework (Lugones and Spelman 1983). In addition, the sciences are
themselves too diverse for me to think that they might be equally
transformed by such a framework" - feminist itself?
Asks to focus on science as practice vs. content
is it an oxymoron? Science is objective!
"The claim that there could be
a feminist science in the sense of an intellectual practice is either
nonsense because oxymoronic as suggested above or the claim is interpreted
to mean that established science (science as done and dominated
by men) is wrong about the world. Feminist science in this latter interpretation
is presented as correcting the errors of masculine, standard
science and as revealing the truth that is hidden by masculine 'bad'
science, as taking the sex out of science."
Both point to absolutism
"A science or a scientific research program informed
by values is ipso facto "bad science." "Good science" is inquiry
protected by methodology from values and ideology."
Methodology?
54
constitutive - internal to sciences -rules for scientific practce
contextual - personal/ social/ cultural values (social and cultural context in which science is done)
Traditionally - assume one has nothing to do with other
can't maintain it.
" This exercise may indeed show the influence
of external, contextual considerations on what research gets done/supported
(i.e., on problem selection). It does not show that such considerations
affect reasoning or hypothesis acceptance." so what? is that what she intended?
55
issues with positivist - what is "truth"?
physics particles - all interpretation
"What counts as theory and what as data in a pragmatic
sense change over time, as some ideas and experimental procedures come
to be securely embedded in a particular framework and others take their
place on the horizons. As the history of physics shows, however, secure
embeddedness is no guarantee against overthrow."
" techniques; they may be rooted in contextual,
value-related considerations. If, however, there is no a priori way to
eliminate such assumptions from evidential reasoning generally, and,
hence, no way to rule out value-laden assumptions, then there is no
formal basis for arguing that an inference mediated by contextual values
is thereby bad science." why not?
56
"James Jacob (1977) and Margaret Jacob
(1976) have, in a series of articles and books, argued that the adoption
of conceptions of matter by 17th century scientists like Robert Boyle
was inextricably intertwined with political considerations. Conceptions
of matter provided the foundation on which physical theories were
developed and Boyle's science, regardless of his reasons for it."
Needed to "get science off ground" value issue itself
" The conclusion of this line of argument is that constitutive values
conceived as epistemological (i.e., truth-seeking) are not adequate to
screen out the influence of contextual values in the very structuring of
scientific knowledge. Now the ways in which contextual values do, if
they do, influence this structuring and interact, if they do, with constitutive
values has to be determined separately for different theories
and fields of science. But this argument, if it's sound, tells us that this
sort of inquiry is perfectly respectable and involves no shady assumptions
or unargued intuitively based rejections of positivism"
" The conceptual argument doesn't show that all
science is value-laden (as opposed to metaphysics-laden)-that must be
established on a case-by-case basis, using the tools not just of logic and
philosophy but of history and sociology as well. It does show that not
all science is value-free and, more importantly, that it is not necessarily
in the nature of science to be value-free."
Reject idea of science as value free
"In earlier articles (Longino 1981, 1983b; Longino and Doell 1983),
I've used similar considerations to argue that scientific objectivity has
to be reconceived as a function of the communal structure of scientific
inquiry rather than as a property of individual scientists."
"that the
fabric of science can neither rule out the expression of bias nor legitimate
it. So I've argued that both the expression of masculine bias in the
sciences and feminist criticism of research exhibiting that bias areshall
we say-business as usual; that scientific inquiry should be expected
to display the deep metaphysical and normative commitments
of the culture in which it flourishes;"
can you say its not bad?
57
sceince not inexorable
"it is simply the idea that there is one consistent, integrated or coherent,
true theoretical treatment of all natural phenomena. (The indeterminacy
principle of quantum physics is restricted to our understanding of the
behavior of certain particles which themselves underlie the fixities of
the natural world. Stochastic theories reveal fixities, but fixities among
ensembles rather than fixed relations among individual objects or
events.) The scientific inquirer's job is to discover those fixed relations."
"It's no longer possible, in a century that has seen the splintering of
the scientific disciplines, to give such a unified description of the objects
of inquiry. But the belief that the job is to discover fixed relations
of some sort, and that the application of observation, experiment and
reason leads ineluctably to unifiable, if not unified, knowledge of an
independent reality, is still with us. It is evidenced most clearly in two
features of scientific rhetoric: the use of the passive voice as in "it is
concluded that . . ." or "it has been discovered that . . ." and the attribution
of agency to the data, as in "the data suggest. .. ."
"The idea of a value-free science
is integral to this view of scientific inquiry. And if we reject that idea
we can also reject our roles as passive onlookers, helpless to affect the
course of knowledge"
58
looked at some poor studies
The studies we looked at are vulnerable to criticism of their data and
their observation methodologies. They also show clear evidence of androcentric
bias-in the assumption that there are just two sexes and
two genders (us and them), in the designation of appropriate and inappropriate
behaviors for male and female children, in the caricature of
lesbianism, in the assumption of male mathematical superiority. We
did not find, however, that these assumptions mediated the inferences
from data to theory that we found objectionable. These sexist assumptions
did affect the way the data were described. What mediated the
inferences from the alleged data (i.e., what functioned as auxiliary
hypotheses or what provided auxiliary hypotheses) was what we called
the linear model-the assumption that there is a direct one-way causal
relationship between pre- or post-natal hormone levels and later
behavior or cognitive performance.
The
organism is thereby disposed to respond in a range of ways to a range
of environmental stimuli. The assumption of unidirectional programming
is supposedly supported by the finding of such a relationship in
other mammals; in particular, by experiments demonstrating the
dependence of sexual behaviors-mounting and lordosis-on peri-natal
hormone exposure and the finding of effects of sex hormones on the
development of rodent brains. To bring it to bear on humans is to ignore,
among other things, some important differences between human
brains and those of other species. It also implies a willingness to regard
humans in a particular way-to see us as produced by factors over which
we have no control. Not only are we, as scientists, victims of the truth,
but we are the prisoners of our physiology.2 In the name of extending
an explanatory model, human capacities for self-knowledge, selfreflection,
self-determination are eliminated from any role in human
action (at least in the behaviors studied).
replace linear brain model with a more complex model
cool!
Such a model allows not only for the interaction
of physiological and environmental factors but also for the interaction
of these with a continuously self-modifying, self-representational
(and self-organizing) central processing system. In contemporary
neurobiology, the closest model is that being developed in the group
selectionist approach to higher brain function of Gerald Edelman and
other researchers (Edelman and Mountcastle 1978).
59
Our preference
for a neurobiological model that allows for agency, for the efficacy
of intentionality is partly a validation of our (and everyone's) subjective
experience of thought, deliberation, and choice. One of the tenets
of feminist research is the valorization of subjective experience, and
so our preference in this regard conforms to feminist research patterns.
Feminism is many things to many people, but it is
at its core in part about the expansion of human potentiality. When
feminists talk of breaking out and do break out of socially prescribed
sex-roles, when feminists criticize the institutions of domination, we
are thereby insisting on the capacity of humans-male and female-to
act on perceptions of self and society and to act to bring about changes
in self and society on the basis of those perceptions. (Not overnight
and not by a mere act of will. The point is that we act.) And so our
criticism of theories of the hormonal influence or determination of socalled
gender-role behavior is not just a rejection of the sexist bias in
the description of the phenomena-the behavior of the children studied,
the sexual lives of lesbians, etc.-but of the limitations on human
capacity imposed by the analytic model underlying such research.3
The relevance of my argument about value-free science should be
becoming clear. Feminists-in and out of science-often condemn
masculine bias in the sciences from the vantage point of commitment
to a value-free science. Androcentric bias, once identified, can then be
seen as a violation of the rules, as "bad" science. Feminist science,
by contrast, can eliminate that bias and produce better, good, more
true or gender free science. From that perspective the process I've just
described is anathema. But if scientific methods generated by constitutive
values cannot guarantee independent from contextual values,
then that approach to sexist science won't work. We cannot restrict
ourselves simply to the elimination of bias, but must expand our scope
to include the detection of limiting and interpretive frameworks and
the finding or construction of more appropriate frameworks
61
If we recognize,
however, that knowledge is shaped by the assumptions, values and interests
of a culture and that, within limits, one can choose one's culture,
then it's clear that as scientists/theorists we have a choice. We can continue
to do establishment science, comfortably wrapped in the myths
of scientific rhetoric or we can alter our intellectual allegiances. While
remaining committed to an abstract goal of understanding, we can
choose to whom, socially and politically, we are accountable in our
pursuit of that goal. In particular we can choose between being accountable
to the traditional establishment or to our political comrades.
In focusing on accountability and choice, this conception of feminist
science differs from those that proceed from the assumption of a congruence
between certain models of natural processes and women's inherent
modes of understanding.4 I am arguing instead for the deliberate
and active choice of an interpretive model and for the legitimacy of
basing that choice on political considerations in this case. Obviously
model choice is also constrained by (what we know of) reality, that is,
by the data. But reality (what we know of it) is, I have already argued,
inadequate to uniquely determine model choice. The feminist theorists
mentioned above have focused on the relation between the content of
a theory and female values or experiences, in particular on the perceived
congruence between interactionist, wholist visions of nature and a form
of understanding and set of values widely attributed to women. In contrast,
I am suggesting that a feminist scientific practice admits political
considerations as relevant constraints on reasoning, which, through their
influence on reasoning and interpretation, shape content. In this specific
case, those considerations in combination with the phenomena support
an explanatory model that is highly interactionist, highly complex. This
argument is so far, however, neutral on the issue of whether an interactionist
and complex account of natural processes will always be the
preferred one. If it is preferred, however, this will be because of explicitly
political considerations and not because interactionism is the
expression of "women's nature."
62
The nature of university career ladders
means that one's work must be recognized as meeting certain standards
of quality in order that one be able to continue it. If those standards
are intimately bound up with values and assumptions one rejects, incomprehension
rather than conversion is likely. Success requires that
we present our work in a way that satisfies those standards and it is
easier to do work that looks just like work known to satisfy them than
to strike out in a new direction. Another push to conformity comes
from the structure of support for science. Many of the scientific ideas
argued to be consistent with a feminist politics have a distinctively nonproduction
orientation.5 In the example discussed above, thinking of
the brain as hormonally programmed makes intervention and control
more likely than does thinking of it as a self-organizing complexly interactive
system.
We really have a hard time practicing science as feminists can "do science as feminist
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