-> In the second half of the 1900’s, science began to be seen as a force in the maintenance of the status quo, especially w/ political inequalities.
-> Science began to be viewed as not neutral, and feminist critiques were the harshest critics.
-> Feminst thinking about science can be unified by the idea that science has a been part of a structure that has perpetuated inequalities between men and women.
Feminism: in general aims to understand and fight against inequalities between the sexes with respect to political rights, economic standing, and social status.
Feminist analysis in the history ideas and the history of science
Feminist analysis of specific scientific fields and theories, especially in social science, biology, and medicine.
Feminist epistemology, the attempt t to analyze rationality, knowledge and other basic epistemological issues from a feminist point of view.
-> Lloyd analyzes the historical roots of ideas about knowledge and rationality and draws conclusions for epistemology.
She argues that the early development of ideas about reason and knowledge were influenced by views about the relation between maleness and femaleness.
Ideas about the relationship between mind and nature were modeled on the relationship between male and female.
This also provided a model for theorizing about the relations between different aspects of the mind itself – perception and thought, reason and emotion.
Reason and maleness began to be associated with each other in the early development of science and philosophy in Europe.
A key source for this pattern of thinking is the old association between femaleness and nature.
Earth = fertile, female, source of life.
Femininity = receptivity, intuition, empathy, emotion
E.g. Francis Bacon thought knowledge is manifested in control of nature, wherein nature is female, and the mind and nature must be married.
-> The views about relation between men and women were important resources in the development of ideas about reason and knowledge.
-> A case in which the gender of researches affected the development ideas beneficially via the increasing role of women in the field.
This case concerns the past 30 years of study of sexual social behavior in nonhuman primates within the fields of primatology and behavioral ecology.
Male sexual behavior had been finely honed by natural selection, while female behavior hadn’t because females could do much less to affect their reproductive success due to pregnancy.
This picture began changing in the 1970’s, and a much more complex and active social role for female primates began to develop. It coincided with an influx of women to the field.
-> an increasing representation played a big role in shifting people’s views about female primate behavior.
-> This field includes work that uses feminist theory as a basis for criticizing how science handles evidence and assesses theories.
-> This field also includes feminist criticism of the social structure and organization of science, where that structure affects epistemological issues
-> This field also includes arguments that our fundamental concepts of reason, evidence, and truth are covertly sexist.
Spontaneous feminist empiricism
Philosophical feminist empiricism
Radical feminist epistemology
Using a feminist point of view to criticize biases and other problems and other problems in scientific work in a way that doesn’t challenge traditional ideals, methods, and norms of science.
Wants to revise and improve traditional ideas about science and knowledge in a way that remains faithful to the most basic empiricist themes. Avoids relativism.
Two approaches:
Feminist Postmodernism: Embraces relativism. Members of different genders, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic classes see the world fundamentally differently. There is no single ‘true’ description of the world that transcends these different perspectives.
Standpoint Epistemology: Stresses the role of the ‘situatedness’ of an investigator or knower – their physical nature, location, and status in the world. There are some facts that are only visible from a special point of view a.k.a. the POV of marginalized and oppressed people.
Contextual Empiricism: A form of empiricism that emphasizes the role of social interaction in which the social group is the basic unit with which to distinguish rationality from irrationality. Science is rational to the extent that it chooses theories from a diverse pool of options reflecting different points of view, and makes its choice via a critical dialogue that reaches concensus without coercion. Epistemology becomes concerned with distinguishing good community-level procedures from bad ones.
Feyerabend argued for the importance of maintaining diversity in scientific communities.
John Stuart Mill provided the raw materials for social and intellectual progress via a ‘marketplace of ideas’
Feminists accept that class and ethnic differences have as much or more of an effect as gender in ways that are relevant to science.
Barbara McClintock: the geneticist who discovered ‘jumping genes’ that move around within the genome of an organism. She had a ‘feeling for the organism’ that enabled her to do a different style of science from her male colleagues.
-> ‘Science Studies’ resulted from the creation of a new approach that drew on many different fields without worrying about ‘whose questions were whose.’
The aim is to draw on any field that can help our understanding of how science developed, works, and what role it has.
History
Sociology
Philosophy
Cultural anthropology
Classics
Economics
Some parts of literary theory
Some parts of feminist theory
Semiotics
Cultural studies
Critical theory
Postmodernism: a family of ideas and projects with themes having to do with representation and meaning.
Part of a recent tradition that opposes the idea that language should be analyzed as a system used to represent or ‘stand for’ objects and situations in the world.
It’s an anti-representationalist view of language.
Postmodernists argue that we live in a time where the representational role of symbols is being replaced by a recursive (?) one.
The profusion of symbols and language today, along with their role in politics and consumer/pop culture, has undermined the representational relations between object and symbol.
Concepts like accuracy, reference, and truth are no longer useful for understanding the role of symbols in our lives.
Arguing for extreme forms of relativism
Arguing for a kind of skepticism and do-nothingism
Arguing for extravagant metaphysical views about how language and reality are related
Science studies welcomed postmodernism and other obscure trends in the humanities.
-> This led to a backlash which came in the form of attacks
-> A backlash to Science Studies’ Laxity
Had to do with criticism of larger trends within academia and education – perception was that science was under threat
Main argument was that the humanities had gone to hell, and science was now being wrecked via relativist claims that it was “just another approach to knowledge with no special status.”
-> Physicist Alan Sokal submitted a parody-paper to a literary-political journal doing a special issue on science to see if it would be accepted and printed – which it was. The paper used the jargon of postmodernism to discuss progressive political possibilities implicit in recent mathematical physics.
Sokal showed that the field had lost all intellectual standards and would print anything that used the right buzzwords and expressed the right political sentiments.
Sokal’s attack was effective because he wasn’t writing from the point of view of conservative politics.
For the most part English-speaking philosophy hadn’t accepted postmodernism and other French-influenced literary-philosophical movements.
Philosophers saw their own journals as ‘hoax-proof’ because of the philosophical demand for clear argumentation.
This hoax was seen as a reassertion of Enlightenment values like science, democracy, rationality, equality, and secularism.
Hostility towards the idea of explaining patterns in scientific change in terms of relations between scientific theories and the structure of the world.
The most rejected explanations are those regarding the popularity of a theory in terms of its real accuracy or explanatory power.
Explaining a theory’s historical role in terms of our present estimation of its worth is viewed as a mistake
Hostility towards the general idea of looking at scientific theories in terms of how they relate to preexisting structure of the world itself.
But after we’ve described the social structure of science, a gap remains where we still need to know how that social structure and its products connect to the larger natural world within which scientific activity is embedded.