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NATURALIZED FEMINIST EMPIRICISM
Lynn Hankinson Nelson was the first to declare for a feminist naturalized philosophy of science, one that meets three recognized criteria for naturalization. A naturalized philosophy of science should:
1 Be commensurable with the actual history and contemporary practice of science; we can take this to mean that a naturalized philosophy of science is subject to the same criteria the relevant sciences are subject to, for example empirical adequacy – understood as conforming to a rich body of evidence and/or as having scope or a range of applications. And meeting criteria such as empirical adequacy is one reason naturalized philosophies of science require far less rational reconstruction of history or contemporary practice than traditional accounts – although philosophers of science always have to select which facts to present when setting out cases. (Compare, for example, Conant 1970 and Potter 2001.)
2 Be grounded in sciences relevant to theories of theorizing, e.g. empirical psychology, social psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and/or sociology.
3 Have consistent methodological principles for explaining consensus and dissent, progressive and less than progressive episodes in science, i.e. adhere to a principle of symmetry, explaining consensus and dissent, progressive and less than progressive episodes, in the same terms (for example, if we give a social explanation for dissent, we should also explain consensus in social terms; thus, we do not argue that the consensus around successful theory T was reached solely because T is true, while the dissent was caused by the social values of the dissenters). And, she argues, philosophies of science attending to the practices of feminist as well as non-feminist scientists and to results in feminist as well as mainstream science scholarship satisfy these three criteria better than those that do not (Nelson 1995).
1.1 A feminist empiricist account of evidence
Nelson develops Quine’s empiricist philosophy of science in ways that make it feminist. (Of course, these developments produce an empiricism very different in many ways from Quine’s.) We will not here describe Quine’s philosophy of science; instead, we will begin with his conclusions that there are no foundations of knowledge and there are no pre-theoretic or untheorized observations, i.e. there is no sharp distinction between theory and observation (see Nelson 2000 and Nelson and Nelson 2003). Philosophers had counted on a sharp distinction based on the worry that if all observations are “theory-laden,” then using observations as evidence for theories must beg the question in favor of those theories. This worry leads to foundationalism: for empiricists, there must be some sensory evidence, itself unconceptualized, that provides the ultimate justifying evidence for our knowledge claims. Thus, as empiricists, Quine and Nelson owe us an account of what evidence is that retains observations as the final arbiter of our theories without treating observations as foundations of knowledge. Nelson suggests the following as a methodological principle for a naturalized feminist account of evidence, FAE:
The acceptance of FAE marks Nelson’s philosophy of science as empiricist; i.e. it says that evidence is constituted by observation and by theories that themselves are supported by evidence and by other theories. When Nelson says that observation is largely structured as current theories would have it, she means that observational experience is not explained by a philosophical account such as sense-data theory, but by scientific accounts such as those given in neurobiology, developmental biology, neuropsychology, and evolutionary biology. FAE also distinguishes Nelson’s feminist empiricism, not only from many mainstream empiricisms, but also from other feminist empiricisms, most notably Longino’s. This is because FAE entails a very broad notion of evidence, much broader than traditional empiricists have supposed. Evidence has been limited in traditional empiricist accounts to the deliverances of our senses or to empirical observations based upon our senses and often referred to as “data.” And these data are held to be independent of any theories so they can support a hypothesis or theory without begging the question by depending on them.
As Nelson points out, the question whether theories and observations are independent of each other was settled many years ago. So the question now is “What are the implications for evidence of the demise of the theory/observation dichotomy?” How are hypotheses, theories, models, etc. tested and supported by sensory evidence? According to many post-positivists, a hypothesis faces the test of experience together with auxiliary assumptions (which include a large part of science). And according to semantic theorists, including Longino (1990), a hypothesis faces the test of experience in the form of data along with background assumptions that mediate the relationship between the data and the explanatory hypotheses, models, and theories. But according to Quine himself, a hypothesis faces the test of experience only together with all of science and with our “commonsense” theories. In this picture, there are no sharp boundaries between any of our theories; not between scientific theories and not between the theories of science and those of common sense. This is why Quine’s philosophy is referred to as “holism.” He describes all of our theories, scientific, philosophical, and common sense, as a “network.” Nelson differs here from Quine, arguing that a hypothesis faces the test of experience together with a “modest chunk” of science and common-sense theories, not necessarily with all of science and all common-sense theories.
Thus, for Quine the unit of empirical significance and the test for a hypothesis or theory is a body of theory, in principle all current science; but for Nelson, the evidence for a hypothesis includes the observational consequences of the hypothesis and a larger chunk of the theories within which the hypothesis is embedded, i.e. the relationship of the hypothesis to many, but not all, current theories, metaphysical assumptions, methods, standards, and practices. These, of course, include “common-sense” theories. Sometimes Nelson says “however much we can accommodate;” this means that the evidence against which a hypothesis or theory is tested includes as much current science and common sense as humans can actually apply when testing the hypothesis or theory. Thus, she leaves it an open question how large a chunk of theory and results is used in assessing a specific research program or theory; the “size of the chunk” varies from case to case (Nelson 1996:101). But our current theories, metaphysical assumptions, methods, standards, and practices are all part of the evidence; they are not “merely background assumptions, auxiliary theories or ‘disciplinary matrices.’” So her holism is a “modest holism” compared to Quine’s view of evidence, but compared to Longino, Lloyd, and other semantic theorists, it is still holism with a very broad notion of evidence.
1.2 Facts and values
Nelson is much more rigorous than Quine was about the consequences of holism and of the coherence theory of evidence. Quine argued that there is no sharp boundary between common-sense theories and beliefs and scientific theories and beliefs with one important exception: he believed in a strong boundary between science and non-constitutive values. This is because he thought that moral, social, and other such values are not subject to empirical control. Nelson argues, to the contrary, that socio-political claims and non-constitutive (usually assumed to be non-scientific) values sometimes help constitute evidence in good science, i.e. science that scientists themselves say is good science. Thus, she formulates the coherence theory of evidence as FAE, according to which the theories that, along with our experiences, constitute evidence include values and socio-political theories. We must, she argued in 1990, “reconsider the assumption that political beliefs and theories, and values, are not subject to empirical control, that there is no way to judge between them” (Nelson 1990:297). We return to this issue in our discussion of Anderson’s model of the interaction between values and science.
Feminist and non-feminist science scholars have offered many cases, Nelson points out, showing that social processes, both internal and external to the “context of justification,” social beliefs, and/or values, are sometimes part of good scientific work. What counts as a social or a political process or factor? Nelson points out that there are many candidates including “peer review mechanisms, funding mechanisms, ‘negotiations’ within science communities which lead to consensus, prestige hierarchies among sciences and specialties, the internal politics of disciplines and sciences, and features of larger social environments, including social relations of gender, race, and class” (Nelson 1995:409; see also Solomon 1994 and 2001, Burian 1985 and 1993, Fuller 1988, Longino 1990 and 2002, Maffie 1991, Nelson 1990, Potter 1993 and 2001, and Stump 1992). Nelson refuses to give a list of factors because, as she says, “a naturalistic philosophy of science must allow the details of individual episodes to indicate which, if any, such factors were of import, in what ways, and to what degree.” Traditional, non-naturalizing philosophies of science have responded to such case studies in different ways, by denying that such cases are good science, by denying that the case studies are correct, and/or by rationally reconstructing the cases to show why the social values or other factors are epistemologically irrelevant, i.e. not relevant to why they are cases of good science (Nelson 1995:409 and 1996:96–7).
1.3 Naturalized philosophy of science and its normative discontents
Feminist naturalized philosophy of science has no need to or interest in rationally reconstructing case studies of science in these ways. It is, therefore, more continuous with science and much more likely to be empirically successful.
One of the greatest concerns raised by naturalized philosophy of science is that, if philosophy is continuous with science, philosophy gives up its normative role, especially the role of providing criteria by which to distinguish good science from bad science. We should note, therefore, that Nelson’s holistic view of evidence leaves norms intact: empirical success, explanatory power, and predictive success are still the basic norms distinguishing good and bad science. Thus, she introduces the example of the nineteenth-century science of craniometry, which looked for sex, race, and class differences among human beings; craniometry is now deemed to have been bad science. On Nelson’s view, it was bad not because non-constitutive values were used as part of the evidential warrant for it, but because its observational consequences were not borne out. It lacked explanatory power and empirical adequacy (Nelson 1995:406). We see, then, that on Nelson’s view, when good values constitute part of the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they do not make the science bad; nor do bad values make otherwise good science into bad science. The distinction between good and bad science is still based on traditional constitutive virtues including (though not limited to) empirical adequacy, explanatory power, and predictive power.
Epistemology and philosophy of science do, however, give up their traditional normative role because, Nelson argues, epistemology does not justify our knowledge; instead, it explains how knowledge is acquired. It does not need to justify our knowledge because we do not begin with global skepticism, the worry that we could be wrong about everything we think we know. This skepticism is beautifully set out by Descartes in the First Meditation. Unlike Descartes, Nelson and Quine begin from the position that our beliefs are true and that we do know. The distinct contribution of epistemology is to examine our best cases of knowledge – among these are the results of science in the narrow sense, i.e. the natural and social sciences – to figure out why and how we do in fact know. Naturalized epistemology will explain how we construct theories, including “common-sense theories” that we use every day to get around in the world as well as our scientific theories. So if our theories are successful, i.e. help us make sense of and predict our experiences, then in giving a correct account of how we know, an epistemology describes the norms of successful theorizing. Epistemology describes the successful norms that we do in fact use. Here we can see why it is so important for an epistemology to give an empirically adequate description of how and why we are successful.
Normative questions in philosophy of science will no longer turn on what criteria justify the decisions made by individual scientists; instead, the questions turn on
We will return to the normative nature of philosophy of science below.
A particular theory or claim (whether common sense, scientific, or philosophical) is justified, in the end, by its ability to make sense of what we experience and to predict our experience. What does Nelson mean when she says that a theory “makes sense” of our experience? She means that theories provide “bridges” between otherwise unconnected sensory experiences. Without theories, an individual’s experiences would be a meaningless barrage of sensory stimulations.
1.4 Feminist social epistemology
So how are theories constructed? Here we turn to Nelson’s greatest departure from Quine and many other empiricists: she argues that knowledge is social; theories are produced and maintained by communities; therefore, we need a social epistemology, SE: “The appropriate loci of philosophical analyses of science are science communities, with the standards, theories, and practices of such communities the appropriate loci of philosophical explanations and evaluations of scientific practice” (Nelson 1996:101).
Nelson gives many related arguments for SE; here we will present four of them.
1 SE follows from the demise of the theory/observation dichotomy....
