Science and Anti-Science: Objectivity and Its Real Enemies

Amazon Odyssey (New York, NY: Links Books, 1974), p. 131.Google Scholar

Gerald Holton,Science and Anti-Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 143.Google Scholar

Holton, pp. 152–154; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Holton, p. 181; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Lewis Wolpert,The Unnatural Nature of Science: Why science does not make (common) sense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 101; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Wolpert, p. 103; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Wolpert, p. 115; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Wolpert, p. 117; my emphasis.Google Scholar

M. F. Perutz, “The Pioneer Defended”; Review of Gerald L. Geison’s The Private Science of Louis Pasteur’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press),New York Review of Books, XLII (20) (December 21, 1995), p. 54; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Perutz, p. 54; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt,Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), p. 9.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 2; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 45–46. That is, strong cultural constructivists “view science as a wholly social product, a mere set of conventions generated by social practice” (1994, p. 11, their emphasis).Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 45; my emphasis. Or, it “affords no special leverage among competing versions of the story of the world” (1994, p. 38; my emphasis).Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 47.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 4. Cf. p. 15, on the potential for these authors having a “great and pernicious social effect.”Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 7.Google Scholar

See David Hull’s important analysis and documentation of a variety of dynamics in scientific inquiry, in David L. Hull,Science as a Process (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar

In describing the value of social analyses of science to scientific success, Sandra Harding writes: “we can hold that certain social conditions make it possible for humans to produce more reliable explana tions of patterns in nature just as other social conditions make it more difficult to do so,” ‘Why “Physics” is a Bad Model for Physics,’ in The End of Science? Attack and Defense (25th Nobel Conference, 1989) (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), p. 7. Cf. Gross and Levitt’s claim: “scientists welcome the sort of ‘social’ explanation that examines minutely and honestly the intellectual, attitudinal, and … the moral preconditions of culture that encourage and sustain the practice of science” (1994, p. 128).Google Scholar

E.g., Holton, 1993, pp. 114–123Google Scholar

155–156Google Scholar

181–184Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 110Google Scholar

Wolpert, 1992, Ch. 8.Google Scholar

See their section heading, “The Face of the Enemy” (1994, p. 34).Google Scholar

“The central appeal of [science studies] is the pretext is provides to disparage the natural sciences — to dismiss their astounding achievements as so much legerdemain on the part of a ruling elite” (Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 240; my emphasis).Google Scholar

Helga Nowotny and Hilary Rose, ed. (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel, 1979).Google Scholar

1994, pp. 245–257.Google Scholar

“Modern science is seen, by virtually all of its critics, to be both a powerful instrument of the reigning order and an ideological guarantor of its legitimacy” (Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 12; my emphasis). Do they think the sciences play important, legitimating, social roles, or not?Google Scholar

Quoted in Wolpert, 1992, p. 170.Google Scholar

Wolpert, p. 178.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 68; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Wolpert, pp. 113–114.Google Scholar

Wolpert, p. 110; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Harding, 1992, p. 19; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Again, these authors claim they’re not against pursuing the questions asked in history, philosophy, anthropology, or sociology of science; they are only against how these studies are actually done (Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 69; but see nn. 21 and 23). Their proposals for a proper or more appropriate standard of practice for these studies will be discussed in later sections; at this point, however, the burden of proof is on them to reject the present standards in science studies.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 58; their emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 58; their emphasis.Google Scholar

Harding, 1992, p. 14. Harding also emphasizes the unsuitability of the training of natural scientists for the task at hand: “Natural scientists are trained in context stripping, while the science of science, like other social sciences, requires training in context seeking” (1992, p. 16).Google Scholar

Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

Shapin and Schaffer, p. 283, quoted in Gross and Levitt, p. 63; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 64.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 63; surely Gross and Levitt would not want to deny this.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 64; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Shapin and Schaffer, p. 344, quoted in Gross and Levitt, p. 65.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 65.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 67; their emphasis. One hotly debated question at the time concerned the proper role of mathematics, scientifically; the issue was especially pressing, given the prominent place that Descartes had given mathematics in the definition of knowledge itself, contrasted with the deficiencies of his physics. Gross and Levitt ignore this.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 67.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 68.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 65; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 234.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 49.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 49; my emphasis. Given this view of appropriate explanation and evidence, we must wonder about the ingenuousness of Gross and Levitt’s disclaimer that “working scientists are not entitled to special immunity from the scrutiny of social science” (1994, p. 42).Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 49; their emphasis.Google Scholar

Wolpert, p. 116Google Scholar

my emphasis. Andrew Pickering,Constructing Quarks: a sociological history of particle physics (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

Wolpert, p. 116; my emphasis.Google Scholar

“We are accusing a powerful faction in modern academic life of intellectual dereliction. This accusa tion has nothing to do with political correctness or ‘subversion’; it has to do, rather, with the craft of scholarship” (Gross and Levitt, p. 239).Google Scholar

See Gross and Levitt’s appeal to scientists’ right to judge, as experts, all work concerning “scientific methodology, history of science, or the very legitimacy of science” (1994, p. 255).Google Scholar

The majority of adult Americans receive their information about the world from TV news, with radio news running second. Among the science scandals aired on national network news within the past 24 months, I would mention: the manufacture of data for the Pittsburgh Breast Cancer study; the reinstatements of eggs into the recommended anti-cholesterol diet; the well-publicized omission of women from nearly all of the most extensive and expensive heart disease studies, which led to a special initiative by Congress; and earlier, the Dalkon Shield devastation; the fanciful claim by President Ronald Reagan that there is no evidence that radiation causes cancer (see Philip Fradkin,Fallout (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989)); or the revelations of the horror of radiation experiments done on unsuspecting civilians from the 1940s through the 1970s. The public perceptions of some of the scientists involved in these events is far from the genius with special insight into nature, and closer to Drs Frankenstein or Mengele.Google Scholar

The fact that ‘executive deniability’ has been an essential part of CIA operations policy since its inception is well-documented; see John Ranelagh’s sympathetic history,The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, 1986.Google Scholar

Perutz, 1995, p. 54.Google Scholar

John F. W. Herschel,A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831). I must note that this distinction has come under sustained criticism within philosophy of science, especially by feminists. My focus here, however, is on the most conservative views of science held by working scientists. The point is that even under these views, objections to the feminist source of specific scientific contributions violates the canons of scientific conduct.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Friedrich A. Kekule, ‘Origin of the Benzene and Structural Theory,’ Chemistry, 38 (1965): 9.Google Scholar

See sections 4.2 and 5.2 for elaboration. For the most recent work on why sexist science is not properly characterized as ‘bad’ science, see Synthese, 104 (September 1995).Google Scholar

Anne Fausto-Sterling,Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 10.Google Scholar

Fausto-Sterling, pp. 8, 60.Google Scholar

Ruth Bleier, ‘Sex Differences Research: Science or Belief?’ Ruth Bleier, ed.,Feminist Approaches to Science, (New York, NY: Pergamon, 1986), p. 149.Google Scholar

Also, Ruth Bleier,Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

See esp. Helen Longino, ‘The Essential Tensions — Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science,’ A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 257–272Google Scholar

Longino,Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar

John Dupre,The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar

Sandra Harding,Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar

Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity?,’ Feminist pistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), 49–82Google Scholar

Harding, ‘“Strong Objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question,’ Synthese, 104.3 (1995), 331–349CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Longino J, ‘Gender, Politics, and the Theoretical Virtues,’ Synthese, 104.3 (1995), 383–397CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lynn Hankinson Nelson,Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990)Google Scholar

Lynn Hankinson Nelson, ‘Epistemological Communities,’ Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), 121–159Google Scholar

Nancy Tuana, ‘The Values of Science: Empiricism from a Feminist Perspective,’ Synthese, 104.3 (1995): 441–461CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Tuana, ed.,Feminism and Science (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989)Google Scholar

Alison Wylie, ‘Methodological Essentialism: Comments on philosophy, sex and feminism,’ Atlantis, 13.2 (1988), 11–14Google Scholar

Cf. Paul Feyerabend,Against Method (London, UK: New Left Bookstore, 1975)Google Scholar

John Stuart Mill,On Liberty.Google Scholar

Longino, 1993, p. 266.Google Scholar

1993, p. 266; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Treated at length in E. Lloyd, ‘Objectivity and the Double Standard for Feminist Epistemologies,’ Synthese, 104 (September 1995), 351–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

1993, p. 265. See also Longino,Science as Social Knowledge, 1990, esp. Chapters 4 and 9.Google Scholar

1995, p. 384. Cf. Wolpert, on science’s “rigorous set of unstated norms for acceptable behaviour”: “Included in these norms are the ideas that science is public knowledge, freely available to all; that there are no privileged sources of scientific knowledge — ideas in science must be judged on their intrinsic merits; and that scientists should take nothing on trust, in the sense that scientific knowledge should be constantly scrutinized” (1992, p. 88). Like Longino, Wolpert emphasizes the community-level process over the individual traits of researchers: “leaving aside the question of whether scientists are more objective, rational, logical and so forth, scientists have developed a procedure in which there are free discussion, accepted standards of behaviour and a means of ensuring that truth will, in the long run, win. Truth will win in the sense that open discussion and observing nature constitute the best way of making progress” (1992, pp. 122–123; my emphasis).Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt assert: “there are as yet no examples…of scientific knowledge informed, reformed, enhanced by feminism” (1994, p. 112). Their strategies for dealing with the numerous feminist contributions to the sciences they subsequently cite are instructive: briefly put, if feminist work is persuasive and is accepted as correct, it’s simply good science; if not, it’s bad science tainted by ideology. In other words, the feminist contributions to science are either not feminist or not contributions.Google Scholar

Fausto-Sterling, p. 213; her emphasis.Google Scholar

Fausto-Sterling, p. 213.Google Scholar

See Donna Haraway,Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989), for a comprehensive bibliography and analysis. I have borrowed from Haraway’s discussion of J. Altmann in presenting this case.Google Scholar

Jeanne Altmann, ‘Observational Study of Behavior: Sampling Methods,’ Behaviour, 49, 227–267.Google Scholar

Haraway, p. 307.Google Scholar

‘Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female,’ Feminist Approaches to Science, Ruth Bleier, ed. (New York, NY: Pergamon), 135–136Google Scholar

cf: Linda Fedigan,Primate Paradigms (Montreal, Can: Eden, 1982)Google Scholar

Shirely Strum,Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons (New York, NY: Random House, 1987).Google Scholar

Margarita Levin, ‘Caring New Science: Feminism and Science,’ American Scholar, 57 (Winter 1988), 100; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Levin, p. 100; her emphasis.Google Scholar

Levin, p. 104; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Clifford Geertz, ‘A Lab of One’s Own,’ NY Review of Books, 37 (8 November 1990), 19; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Geertz, p. 23; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 111.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 38.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 162; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 123; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 145–146.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 146.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 147; their emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 147.Google Scholar

Other instances can be found in: Levin, 1988Google Scholar

Michael Ruse,Is Science Sexist? And Other Problems in the Biomedical Sciences, (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981); andGoogle Scholar

John R. Searle, ‘Rationality and Realism: What is at Stake?,’ Daedalus, 122.4 (1993), 55–84.Google Scholar

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Helen Longino and Ruth Doell, ‘Body, Bias and Behavior: A Comparative Analysis of Reasoning in Two Areas of Biological Science,’ Signs, 9 (1983), 206–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(See block quote, above). Bleier, 1984,Science and Gender, Fausto-Sterling, 1985, 133–141. The work of Harvard biologist and feminist Ruth Hubbard is also very important, especiallyGoogle Scholar

Anne Fausto-Sterling,Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, (New York: Basic Books, 1985, 133–141. The work of Harvard biologist and feminist Ruth Hubbard is also very important, especiallyGoogle Scholar

Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifen, and Barbara Fried, eds,Biological Woman, the Convenient Myth: A Collection of Feminist Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1982)Google Scholar

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Gross and Levitt, p. 125. Since Fausto-Sterling acknowledges the existence of biological differences between males and females throughout her book, it remains mysterious how Gross and Levitt could defend this statement, unless they put all the weight for its truth on whatever they mean by “significant”.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 11, their emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 47.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 46.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 122Google Scholar

quoting the Biology and Gender Study Group, ‘The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology,’ Hypatia, 3 (1): 61–76 (Spring 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Reprinted in Nancy Tuana, ed.,Feminism and Science (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

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also Levin, p. 100.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 110.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 112.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 110.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 44.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 56; their emphasis.Google Scholar

Levin, p. 100.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 112.Google Scholar

My analysis of the inconsistencies and grave evidential problems in recent evolutionary theorizing about women’s orgasm has been met repeatedly with the response that it is ‘simply good science’; this reaction fails to engage the problem I address, namely,why it took decades for these able scientists to become aware that the evidence they cited undermined their own explanations. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, ‘Pre-theoretical Assumptions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality,’ Philosophical Studies, 69(1993), 139–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt,Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), p. 131. They also admit that women’s scientific “contributions have often in the past been undervalued” (1994, p. 123). How do they account for the fact that this happened in the first place? How do they account for the fact that it has, according to them, changed?Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 32Google Scholar

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Holton, pp. 152, The targets are Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding, respectively.Google Scholar

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1990, p. 193, my emphasis.Google Scholar

Harding, 1992, p. 1. She also states, “it’s a very conservative notion of objectivity that I’m … proposing here … there are important aspects of the traditional notion of [scientific] objectivity which need not be challenged in order to accomplish the goals that I have in mind” (p. 20).Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 109; my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, p. 108, my emphasis.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 108.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 122.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 251.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 159.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 235.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 236.Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt, pp. 251.Google Scholar

While Holton clearly is referring to Keller’s work, he perveresely refuses to name her or to cite any of her books or articles (1993, p. 154).Google Scholar

Gross and Levitt’s inclusion of Haraway and Keller among the four chief representatives for feminist views of science belies their earlier aside that “a handful of figures with scientific credentials, as well as the occasional refugee from an unsatisfactory scientific career, can be found on the movement’s fringes” (p. 14; p. 6, my emphasis).Google Scholar

“Sciences will not, in any serious way, be influenced, deflected, restricted, or even inconvenienced by these critics and those they influence” (1994, p. 236; see pp. 3, 11, 112, 253–256).Google Scholar