Abstract
It is an epistemological mistake to conflate the motivation of research by social values or interests with an inevitable deterioration of its reliability and predictive powers. After all, corporate, imperial, or military interests and motives don’t make weapons less reliable at killing; nor do environmental or health concerns in themselves damage the reliability of research they motivate. Only in some cases, but not all, do social values and interests have that effect. The social justice movements have produced a standpoint methodology more competent to maximize objectivity. The need for standpoint’s “strong objectivity” arises when research communities lack diversity and are isolated from pro-democratic social tendencies. Research that starts off questioning nature and social relations from the daily lives of economically and politically vulnerable groups can increase its reliability and predictive power. Such research insists on the conventional goals of fairness to the data and to its severest critics. It retains central commitments of the conventional notion of objectivity while escaping its limitations.
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Notes
- 1.
Another version of this essay, directed to a different readership, appears as “Chapter 2: Stronger Objectivity for Sciences From Below” in Harding 2015.
- 2.
- 3.
The language of “strong” objectivity and the call for symmetrical accounts of the objects and subjects of research – “locating the researcher in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter” – (Harding 1987, p. 8) will remind some science studies scholars of David Bloor’s “strong programme” for the sociology of science (Bloor 1976). Of course Bloor’s conception of the “good science” that should be used to critically examine the researcher and his commitments was precisely the one that is the target of criticism in the present paper. Ethnographers will be reminded of the reflexivity debates in their field of the 1980s and 1990s (See, e.g. Elam and Juhlin 1998). All of these related concerns were “in the air” and no doubt shaped my thinking when I first began to formulate these issues in the mid-1980s. I recollect that at the time my immediate concern was to capture the concept of objectivity that was already informally in use on behalf of a feminism that was persistently accused of abandoning objectivity, rationality, and good method. For better or worse, I intended to do so with as macho language as possible.
- 4.
Smith 1987, 1990. Smith always insisted on “the standpoint of women” in order to emphasize its origins in women’s everyday lives rather than in feminist theory. See also Collins 1991, Haraway 1988, Harding 1986, Hartsock 1983, Jaggar 1988, Rose 1983. These and other subsequent essays developing and criticizing standpoint theory are collected in Harding ed. 2004.
- 5.
I first developed the notion of strong objectivity in my 1991 and 1993. Evelyn Fox Keller (1983), Karen Barad (2007) and Elisabeth Lloyd (1996) provide examples of three other valuable but quite different critical approaches to the “weak objectivity” question. Only my strong objectivity project is conjoined to standpoint epistemology/methodology.
- 6.
I certainly am not claiming that the work of strong objectivity and standpoint theorists is in the same category as the truly magisterial historical study that Daston and Galison provide.
- 7.
Of course some elevator uses of “objectivity” may have this goal while yet remaining methodologically vacuous.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Though Richardson (2003, 2006) argues that that generation of philosophers of science was much more flexible in strategizing how to develop standards that advanced both the reliability and social progressiveness of the sciences than is suggested by the rigidly “positivist” positions usually attributed to them today.
- 11.
The language of “from below” originates in thinking of a society as structured in the form of a pyramid in which the small “top” rules the huge “bottom” of a hierarchical social system.
- 12.
Anderson 2009 identifies several kinds of “alignments” between the postcolonial theory of Franz Fanon, Edward Said and others that has become institutionalized in U.S. English, French, and cultural studies departments and SSST. However, my focus is on alignments between advocacy of “strong objectivity,” on the one hand – which, I argue, appears in all recent democratic liberation struggles – and, on the other hand, mainstream SSST.
- 13.
See http://sts-africa.org and the report of the 2014 conference co-sponsored with the Sociedad Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Technologia (ESOCITE) at http://www.4sonline.org.
- 14.
- 15.
And objectivity became detached from “true to nature” with the introduction a century and a half ago of photography and other mechanical transcribers of nature’s regularities. Daston and Galison refer to this new ideal as mechanical objectivity.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
Consider, for example, legal struggles between Western pharmaceutical corporations and indigenous groups over who should have rights and benefits from the Western appropriation of indigenous pharmacologies and agricultural products (See, for example, Brush and Stabinsky 1996, Hayden 2005). See also Schiebinger’s work on colonial botany as the “big science” of its era. It required that the colonists and explorers extract plant materials and knowledge of their uses from the indigenes to turn them into products Europeans could sell (Schiebinger 2004, Schiebinger and Swan 2004, Brockway 1979, Harding 2015).
- 19.
Yet see Kristen Intemann’s (2011) discussion of this kind of assessment of the value of pluralism, shared with the views of John Stuart Mill, in which the commitments to pluralism or diversity should not satisfy feminist agendas.
- 20.
This project is aligned with Latour’s (1993) famous argument that “we have never been modern,” though it is not his solution to that situation.
- 21.
- 22.
Two collections of essays are addressed respectively to Dorothy Smith’s and Nancy Hartsock’s particular formulations of standpoint theory (Campbell and Manicom 1995; Kenney and Kinsella 1997). Two extended analyses and critiques of standpoint theory by distinguished feminist theorists appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, each with responses by some of the original standpoint theorists (Hekman 1997, Walby 2001). A recent collection of essays brings together the original standpoint essays plus a number of diverse readings and criticisms of it (Harding ed. 2004). Additional analyses and criticisms can be found in book reviews of the work of the standpoint theorists.
- 23.
Sheila Jasanoff has suggested this role for co-production as an agent’s category in the introduction to her 2004.
- 24.
I am not claiming that hooks, Anzaldua, and other authors who do not explicitly refer to standpoint theory or strong objectivity in fact are merely tweaking the arguments developed by the feminist standpoint theorists cited earlier. Rather, as indicated earlier, I propose that the strong objectivity and standpoint positions tend to emerge whenever new groups organized on their own behalf (“for themselves”) critically evaluate the inadequacies of dominant views, policies, and practices. The strong objectivity program and its standpoint theory are organic “logics of scientific inquiry” for creating critical “sciences from below.”
- 25.
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Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity for Sciences from Below. In: Padovani, F., Richardson, A., Tsou, J. (eds) Objectivity in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_3
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