Abstract
Some feminist philosophers of science claim the insight that science is social.
Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly transformed into total falsehoods and then acclaimed as revolutionary revelations [Thomas Szasz].2
I woulsd like to thank Paul Gross for helpful comments on a draft.
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Note and References
The Second Sin, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY, 1974.
Collected Papers, eds Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P. and Burks, A., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931–58, 7.51.
In this paper I shall be characterizing as the Old Deferentialism versus the New Cynicism what I formerly called the “Old Romanticism” versus the New Cynicism (‘Science “From a Feminist Perspective”,’ Philosophy, 1992, and reprinted in Halfpenny, P. and McMylor, P.,Positivist Sociology and its Critics, Edward Elgar Press, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT, 1994; ‘Epistemological Reflections of an Old Feminist,’ Reason Papers, 18, 1993, and reprinted, modified and abridged, under the title, ‘Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist,’ in Partisan Review, Fall, 1993.) The earlier vocabulary, I now realize, was inappropriate, because, as Leo Marx puts it, “much of today’s criticism of science… may be traced to the… romantic reaction of European intellectuals in the late eighteenth century” (‘Reflections on the Neo-Romantic Critique of Science,’ in Limits of Scientific Inquiry, eds Gerald Holton and Robert S. Morison, Norton, New York, 1978, p. 63; my emphasis).
Susan Haack,Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, Chapters 6, 7 and 8. The reader is also referred to my ‘Puzzling Out Science,’ Academic Questions, 8.2, Spring 1995, 20–31; to ‘Towards a Sober Sociology of Science,’ in The Flight From Reason and Science, eds Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 775, 1996, 259–65, and forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD; and to ‘The Puzzle of “Scientific Method”,’ forthcoming in Revue Internationale de Philosophie.
The analogy is due to Michael Polanyi, from ‘The Republic of Science,’ in Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Grene, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1969, 49–62.
A point explored in more detail in my “The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered,’ forthcoming in Lewis Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm, Open Court.
David L. Hull,Science as a Process, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL, and London, 1986, is illuminating on how science balances co-operation and competition.
See Donald T. Campbell, ‘Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish-Scale model of Omniscience,’ in Sherif, Muzafer and Carolyn W., eds,Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences, Aldine, Chicago, IL, 1969, 328–448, for helpful discussion of the question of overlapping competencies.
On Nazi science, see Alan Beyerchen,Scientists Under Hitler: Politics in the Third Reich, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1977 and ‘What We Now Know About Nazism and Science,’ Social Research, 59, 1992, 616–441.
On Soviet Science, see Valery N. Soyfer,Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, Rutgers University Press, Newark, NJ, 1994.
Collected Papers, 8.143.
These steps of this argument are made very explicitly by Mary Hesse in ‘How to be a Post-Modernist Without Being a Feminist,’ The Monist, 77.4, October 994, 445–61.
Though the thesis of the underdetermination of theory by data is frequently referred to as “the Duhem-Quine thesis,” the attribution to Duhem is a bit misleading; his thesis, that scientific claims are often not testable in isolation but only in conjunction with a bunch of other claims involved in reliance on instruments, is significantly more modest. Even Quine’s commitment to the thesis is not unwavering; in ‘Empirical Content’ (Theories and Things, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1981, 24–30) he suggests that what he formerly described as empirically equivalent but incompatible theories would really be verbal variants on one theory (pp. 29–30). This reveals the dependence of the underdetermination thesis on implicitly assumed criteria for the individuation of theories. Since his initial commitment to the underdetermination thesis, furthermore, Quine has shifted away from the unqualified holism of verification which motivated it, towards what he calls “moderate holism,” i.e., towards something more like Duhem’s position.
This is the position of Karl Pearson, whose The Grammar of Science, Adams and Black, London, second edition, 1990, Peirce is criticizing in the passage quoted at the head of this section.
For a vivid example, see ‘How Many Scientists Does it Take to Screw in a Quark?,’ Newsweek, 5.9.1994, 54–5, reporting how “it took 440 physicists from 34 countries… 17 years” to discover the top quark (p. 54). For a more theoretical discussion of the phenomenon in question, see John Hardwig, ‘Epistemic Dependence,’ Journal of Philosophy, LXXXII, 1985, 335–49.
See, for example, Bruno Latour,Science in Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
Steven Fuller,Social Epistemology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1988.
The strategy is illustrated in a particularly striking way by the terms in which, in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1991) Sandra Harding discusses how to “justify” her theory, which unmistakably reveal that she has identified this with the question, how to sell her theory to this or that audience.
Putting me in mind of C. I. Lewis’s shrewd description of the method “which the bigot unconsciously applies”: “he simply doesn’t believe any evidence which is unfavorable to his bigoted conclusion; and if any such is put forward, he will argue it away by using this same method over again” (The Ground and Nature of the Right, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1955, p. 32).
The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1986, p. 251.
See, for example, Lorraine Code,Epistemic Responsibility, University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1987 (but note that, though she stresses “trust,” and recognizes the co-operative character of science, she is disposed to play down scientific knowledge in favor of the literary). See also my critical notice of this book,Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1990, 91–107.
Helen Longino, ‘Can There be a Feminist Science?,’ in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds,Women, Knowledge and Reality, Allen Hyman, Boston, MA, 1989, and Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990
Lynn Hankinson Nelson,Who Knows?: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1990. “Slack” is a term of which Nelson is fond; “doing science as a feminist” is a phrase Longino likes. I note that Longino tends to stress underdetermination in practice, whereas Nelson tends to take the Quinean line of underdetermination even in principle.
Sandra Harding,Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: ‘After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics and “Strong Objectivity”,’ Social Research, 59.3, 1992, 567–87.
See Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt,Higher Superstition, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1994, pp. 78 ff.; and, on the more general issue of the cognitive role of metaphor, my ‘Dry Truth and Real Knowledge: Epistemologies of Metaphor and Metaphors of Epistemology,’ in Jaakko Hintikka, ed.,Aspects of Metaphor, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1994, 1–22.
‘Science and the Construction of Meanings in the Neurosciences,’ in Sue V. Rosser, ed.,Feminism Within the Science and Health Care Professions: Overcoming Resistance, Pergamon Press, Oxford and New York, NY, 1988, 91–104; the quotations below are from pp. 92 and 100.
The Science Question in Feminism, Chapter 6. I note that Nelson is not a feminist empiricist in Harding’s sense, either; my position is too modest to qualify, hers too radical. Longino’s criticism (‘Science, Objectivity, and Feminist Values,’ Feminist Studies, 14.3, 1988, p. 571), that Harding’s concept of “feminist empiricism” seems tendentiously designed so as to be a foil to the feminist standpoint epistemology Harding herself favors, is apropos.
On this point, see Noretta Koertge, ‘Are Feminists Alienating Women From the Sciences?,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 9.14.94, A80. As she observes, “What young women really need is special encouragement and equal opportunity to learn science, not a feminist rationalization for failure.”
Mary Field Belenky, Blythe Mcvicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jill Mattuck Tarule,Women’s Ways of Knowing, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1986 — a remarkable work of sexist pseudoscience. As antidotes, I recommend Carol Tavris,The Mismeasure of Woman, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY and London, 1992, especially Chapter 2; and Martha T. Mednick, ‘On the Politics of Psychological Constructs: Stop the Bandwagon, I Want to Get Off,’ American Psychologist, 44, 1118–23.
Apropos, see Harriet Baber, ‘The Market for Feminist Epistemology,’ The Monist, 77.4, October 1994,403–23.
“That is preposterous which puts the last first and the first last…. Valuing knowledge, we preposterize the idea and say… everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion” — Jacques Barzun,The American University, Harper and Row, New York, NY, Evanston, IL, and London, 1968, p. 221
See also Susan Haack, ‘Preposterism and Its Consequences,’ Social Philosophy and Policy, 13.2, 1996, 296–315, and in Scientific Innovation, Philosophy, and Public Policy, eds Ellen Frankel Paul et al., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, 296–315.
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Haack, S. (1996). Science as Social? - Yes and No. In: Nelson, L.H., Nelson, J. (eds) Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library, vol 256. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1742-2_5
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