Abstract
Feminist inquiry in the natural and social sciences has challenged science at three levels.* In the first place, many beliefs claimed to be well-supported by research in biology and the social sciences now appear as androcentric. Thus the processes of inquiry which have supported the androcentric claims no longer appear to be gender-free — and in that sense value-neutral, objective, disinterested, dispassionate, and so forth.1 In the second place, critics have pointed to constant historical alliances between fledgling sciences and local projects of sexual politics. New sciences have appealed to sexual politics as support for their legitimacy; and men, when threatened by the possibility of shifting social relations between the sexes, have appealed to the new sciences to support the legitimacy of subjugating women. Each has provided moral and political resources for the other.2 Furthermore, while the processes of inquiry in physics — the model of objective inquiry — escape incriminating challenges at the first level, they are not so lucky at the second. The conceptions of nature and inquiry central both to classical and contemporary physics now appear as suspiciously androcentric as do those central to biology and the social sciences.3 Thus it should not be surprising to find clear signs of androcentrism in heretofore well-supported scientific beliefs. Sexual politics as old as the Garden of Eden appear to have been omnipresent in the purportedly objective ‘mechanisms’ of scientific inquiry.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Harding, S. (1987). The Garden in the machine: Gender relations, the Processes of Science, and Feminist Epistemological Strategies. In: Nersessian, N.J. (eds) The Process of Science. Science and Philosophy, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3519-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3519-8_7
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