DOES SCIENCE HAVE GENDER? FEMINIST THEORY ON SCIENCE AND WHY (MALE) SCIENTISTS OUGHT TO PAY ATTENTION

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DOES SCIENCE HAVE GENDER?FEMINIST THEORY ON
SCIENCE AND WHY (MALE) SCIENTISTS OUGHT TO PAY
ATTENTION

• The Feminist Challenge to
• Fundamental Epistemology
• Cassandra L. Pinnick
• cassandra.pinnick_at_wku.edu
• Philosophy
• Western Kentucky University

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The attempt to add understanding of women to
our knowledge of nature and social life has led
to the realization that there is precious little
reliable knowledge to which to add them. A more
fundamental project now confronts us. We must
root out sexist distortions and perversions in
epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and the
philosophy of science in the hard core of
abstract reasoning thought most immune to
infiltration by social values. Sandra
HardingMerrill HintikkaDiscovering Reality
1983.
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• The Feminist Project makes two promises
• The Project will provide a comparatively better
  theory for the justification of scientific
  belief.
• The Project will provide a distinctive and
  demonstrably better methodology.

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Sandra HardingIs Science Multicultural?
Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies
1998.Women and men in the same culture have
different geographical locations in
heterogeneous nature, and different interests,
discursive resources, and ways of organizing the
production of knowledge from their brothers. Here
the focus is on gender differences, on the
reasons why it is more accurate and useful to
understand women and men in any culture as having
a different relationship to the world around them.
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The issue isabout the resources that starting
off research from womens lives can provide for
increasing human knowledge of natures
regularities and the underlying causal tendencies
anywhere and everywhere that gender relations
occur. In many ways they are exposed to
different regularities of nature that offer them
different possible resources and probable dangers
and that can make some theories appear more or
less plausible than they do to those who interact
only with other environments.
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When science is defined in terms of these
linked meanings of objectivity and masculinity,
science itself is distorted.Standpoint
approaches can show us how to detect values and
interests that constitute scientific
projectsStandpoint approaches provide a map, a
method, for maximizing a strong Objectivity in
the natural and social sciences.
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Lorraine CodeWhat Can She Know? 1991.As
long as epistemology bears the stamp of the
postpositivist, empiricist project of determining
necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge
and devising strategies to refute skepticism,
there can be no feminist epistemology. These
goals are inimical to feminist concerns on many
levels ontological, epistemological, moral,
political. Ideals central to the project ideals
of objectivity, impartiality, and universality
are androcentrically derived. Their articulation
maps only typical middle- class white male
experiences.I contend that mainstream
epistemology, in its very neutrality, masks the
fact of its derivation from and embeddedness in a
specific set of interests the interests of a
privileged group of white men.
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Princeton University Press advertisement
forHelen LonginoThe Fate of Knowledge
2001.Helen Longino challenges this
assumption, arguing that social interaction
actually assists us in securing rationally based
knowledge. This insight allows her to develop a
new account of scientific knowledge that
integrates the social and cognitive.
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K. B. WrayThe Epistemic Significance of
Collaborative Research 2002.Ideally, it would
be useful to have information on specific
research groups, showing increased productivity
after collaboration, followed by greater funding,
which in turn would be followed by continued
collaboration. Unfortunately, at present, such
data are not available.