Pinnick - failed feminist challenge to "fundamental epistemology"

103
"Until roughly the mid-20th century, liberal feminist politics had little
apparent impact on American universities. But thereafter the transformation
was swift. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, student demographics
shifted, women’s studies flourished, and remarkable reforms to the
liberal arts curriculum became entrenched."

104

"Let me emphasize: It is one thing to digest that literature or religious practice
is shot through with androcentric bias and systematic mistreatment of women,
but it is quite another matter to grasp that serious scholarship in science, across
the so-called hard core, and the application thereof is a sham, in thrall to"
why is this surprising?

105
"Conclusions may be grand, but one ought to
accept conclusions on the basis of good arguments only. And my remarks are
directed, in the first instance, against the arguments. But it would be
impossible for me, in the scope of a single essay, to assess the full range of the
feminist project, or even the complete array of feminist arguments concerning
science and knowledge (but for a wider treatment see Pinnick 1994, 2000a, b)."

Seems to be saying that we have to be following a certain "type" of argument

(1) Arguments which are well-formulated. (This rules out a certain swathe
of the feminist critique, namely feminist contributions that self-consciously
eschew argumentative form.)
(2) Arguments that present a serious or a radical challenge to the epistemic
foundations of knowledge. (After all, if not a serious challenge, i.e., if
not genuinely different and demonstrably better, then why bother?)

Not talking about fair play

106
"Harding’s publications (which began to
make their mark by the 1970s), my concern is narrow, but justified, on the
basis of Harding’s own insistence that she intends to address fundamental
epistemic categories at the hard core, and to do so in a manner she takes to be
friendly to science and rationality. By this, Harding means to say that her
argumentation is a friendly critique that aims to improve the ‘hard core’ of
knowledge."
Ignoring everyone else?


"The feminist project then, at least for Harding, does not question either
the possibility or the desirability of scientific rationality. The project does
question the notion that philosophy of science has embodied or can embody
rationality, unless those aims and epistemic goals associated with the feminist
project embody the fundamental nature of the epistemology of science.
Expressed in this way, as a dichotomy, it is plain that Harding intends to
argue that the feminist project provides necessary conditions for science and
rationality."

"Promise (1): The feminist project will provide a comparatively better theory
for the justification of scientific belief. Thus, we ought to expect the
feminist project to have a distinctive and demonstrably improved means
for warranting sentences that purport to reflect features of the world.
Promise (2): The feminist project will provide a distinctive and demonstrably
better methodology aimed to guide future inquiry toward its epistemic
aims. Thus, we ought to expect the feminist project to retain and
satisfy the epistemic and methodological value placed on a normative role
for any theory of knowledge."

107
critique of Harding

"(that women have a special insight into causal regularities in virtue of
their geography/gender), and the arguments that surround it."

108
"After all,
as Harding writes, if we start off research from women’s lives, then the
promised result is ‘knowledge of nature’s regularities and their underlying
causal tendencies’. It seems only right to assess these theory-linked events as
an empirically testable, hypothetical statement about a means-to-end relation,
that asserts there to be an emergent, epistemic boost, to be gained by the
feminist project. And mark carefully: the scope of the hypothetical (linking
women, insight, causal regularities, boosted objectivity) is not across anything
so narrow as ‘women’s issues’, but instead to nature’s regularities
across the natural and the social sciences"

110
"A point in Code’s favor is that she rejects any turn to essentialism, because
to do so, she writes, ‘would risk replicating the exclusionary, hegemonic
structures of the masculinist epistemology…’(p. 316). However, here too,
Code’s reasoning moves to an irrelevant conclusion. For where is the evidence
to show that a single theory of knowledge, even hegemonic male
epistemology, does always and will always exclude real alternatives to it?
Instead, science or its history seems to be punctuated by white males as
agents of scientific change, if not progress."

111
Longino
 "that social
interaction actually assists us in securing rationally based knowledge’ and
that this insight allows Longino ‘to develop a new account of scientific
knowledge’. If successful, Longino will satisfy one of the early adequacy
conditions we placed on the fundamental project. There are two claims here.
In the first instance, Longino appears (as stated in the quote from the blurb)
to have resolved the question that most vexes me, namely, how, if at all, do
social factors boost our efforts to justify scientific belief?"

 Community?

112
 issues with community:
This ought to bring into sharp contrast the difference. For, regardless
of how a communitarian style epistemology may be dressed up, in the end,
the community is the final arbiter of belief. There is, even in the long run, no
objectively compelling ground for belief, only grounds for a particular
community. In her own words: [ justification is] ‘dependent on rules and
procedures immanent in the context of inquiry’ (p. 92). This stance evades a
pernicious relativism (if, in fact, it does) not by appeal to normative epistemology,
but by appeal to normative sociology.

legitimizing what is going on
"then we need to show that we do (or can do) better science
by means of this intersubjective deliberation. And we would show this on the
basis of isolated and tested-for social factors. In other words, we have to once
and for all place this idea, that there is some new epistemological category,
into our epistemic cross-hairs, and then see what the testing process reveals.
It has not been done."

113

114
 "Since that time when advocates of the feminist project claimed to discover
that ‘there is precious little reliable knowledge’ at the ‘hard core’, and they
then began to advance what I have called the boost hypothesis, no tests have
been made to support the hypothesized connection as between women and
the cognitive ends of science.
Without question, there is a wealth of anecdotal reportage, and a whole
lot of desire to promote women’s involvement across all fields of inquiry, in
particular within science. But anecdote and desire do not provide the kind of
evidentiary warrant that should be relevant to an assessment of the feminist
project. As matters stand, the hypothesis rallies only those already converted
to it – a situation that is no boon to rationality!"

"More, reliance on anecdotal reportage represents a step back by way of
testing hypotheses. And, as for the sociopolitical gains made to secure a level
playing field on behalf of women, these gains were achieved on the basis of
compelling data. It would be nothing short of a self-defeating maneuver for
women to advert to standards of proof that undercut the reasoned grounds
for these past gains.
I return again and again to questions about methodology and justification,
and raise and re-raise objections about lack of empirical support, just because
feminist philosophical arguments make empirically based assertions about
science and women or gender."

" In one sense, my refrain is made in the interest of a simple concern for
good scholarship: if any author makes an empirically based claim, then the
author is bound to provide supporting evidence. I fail to find substantiating,
empirically based evidence, anywhere in this literature."
Umm...what about BEFORE the "empirical tradition? Seriously. Caught up in her own trap - response to only women , when it is most likely happening anywhere.



Where is your empirical evidence on p.115?

Response to Pinnick: (from Stanford)
"
In arguments characteristic of the Science Wars of the 1990s, philosophical critics like Haack 1993, Pinnick 2005, Gross and Levitt 1994, as well as contributors to Pinnick et al. 2003, and to Gross et al. 1996, insist that feminist and other allegedly naïve critiques of science are predicated on a cynical, anti-enlightenment rejection of the epistemic ideals that (properly) animate scientific inquiry. They maintain this position despite trenchant criticism that challenges the accuracy of their claims about feminist science studies scholarship, and exposes inconsistencies within their own arguments (e.g., Anderson 2004a, 1995; Nelson and Nelson 1994; Wylie 1995a). The claim that feminists are categorically hostile to science appears to derive from a conviction that feminism, as a political stance, is inimical to science; the politics of feminism threaten the epistemic integrity of science. This presupposes the convention of a sharp distinction between the contexts of discovery, in which contingent social values and interests have free reign setting the research agenda (shaping questions and generating hypotheses), and contexts of justification in which the scientific adjudication of knowledge claims (prospective answers, competing hypotheses) is rigorously rational and exclusively informed by considerations of evidence. On this view, the distinctive objectivity of the sciences depends on shielding scientific inquiry (in its justificatory mode) from the influence of contextual (non-epistemic) values and interests of just the sort that feminists would bring to bear. Haack finds it so profoundly counter-intuitive that feminist perspectives might be relevant to the sciences in any constructive sense that she speculates about the motivations of those who embrace this category mistake. Feminist philosophers of science and their fellow travellers must either be cynics who intend to subvert the ideals and the authority of science, or disillusioned romantics who held such unrealistically high expectations of science that, when evidence from actual practice undermined these ideals, they lost epistemic faith altogether (Haack 1993, 560–562)."

" Feminist perspectives on the sciences are more complex and diverse than such critics acknowledge. It does not follow from feminist critiques—of scientific institutions, the authority vested in the disciplines identified as scientific, framework assumptions, or specific methodologies and research results—that feminists are hostile to the sciences, to the epistemic ideals presumed to underpin the sciences, or to the diverse assumptions and methods associated with specific research traditions. Many feminists embrace (and defend) the orienting ideals and tradition-specific conventions associated with the fields in which they work. Some focus chiefly on equity issues, often insisting that gender bias in the institutions of science do not bear on issues of content or method (see section Feminist Equity Critiques below). Others make a case for redefining research priorities without challenging existing research traditions; they aim to extend well established modes of inquiry to questions that have not been asked and to aspects of otherwise well mapped subject domains that have been neglected but that are of particular interest to women and feminists. This selective appropriation of the conventional tools of science also serves critical ends when feminists use them to expose and correct gender bias in the content of favored models and theories or background assumptions; these critiques are sometimes presupposed by, and sometimes arise from remedial interventions. Advocates of these “successor science” projects, as Harding describes them (1986, 160, 240), often endorse the very epistemic ideals of objectivity and value freedom feminists are accused of repudiating."