Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?

Thinking from Women's Lives

Sandra Harding

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501712944
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

Sandra Harding here develops further the themes first addressed in her widely influential book, The Science Question in Feminism, and conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we know.Following a strong narrative line, Harding sets out her arguments in highly readable prose. In Part 1, she discusses issues that will interest anyone concerned with the social bases of scientific knowledge. In Part 2, she modifies some of her views and then pursues the many issues raised by the feminist position which holds that women's social experience provides a unique vantage point for discovering masculine bias and and questioning conventional claims about nature and social life. In Part 3, Harding looks at the insights that people of color, male feminists, lesbians, and others can bring to these controversies, and concludes by outlining a feminist approach to science in which these insights are central. "Women and men cannot understand or explain the world we live in or the real choices we have, " she writes, "as long as the sciences describe and explain the world primarily from the perspectives of the lives of the dominant groups."Harding's is a richly informed, radical voice that boldly confronts issues of crucial importance to the future of many academic disciplines. Her book will amply reward readers looking to achieve a more fruitful understanding of the relations between feminism, science, and social life.

1

Introduction

After the Science Question in Feminism

The feminist discussions of science, technology, and theories of knowledge occur at a moment of rising skepticism about the benefits that the sciences and their technologies can bring to society. Calls for reforms and transformations have arisen from many different groups. However, these discussions also occur when intellectuals in the fields of science and technology are gaining more and more power in higher education and in government.

Feminists themselves are of at least three minds about the sciences. They (we) criticize not only “bad science” but also the problematics, agendas, ethics, consequences, and status of what has come to be called “science-as-usual.” The criticisms of science-as-usual are made in the context of a call for better science: important tendencies within feminism propose to provide empirically more adequate and theoretically less partial and distorted descriptions and explanations of women, men, gender relations, and the rest of the social and natural worlds, including how the sciences did, do, and could function. From theorists who draw on European philosophy, however, comes criticism of the very idea of trying to reconstruct science, whether or not in feminist ways. These feminists appear to be arguing that there is no baby to be found in the bath water we would throw out. Additionally, analyses flow from not just one but many feminisms, each increasingly well developed in both theoretical and historical terms. Consequently, feminist analysts of science, technology, and epistemology disagree with one another over many important aspects of these issues.

Feminism and Science: A Confusing Moment

Skepticism about the Sciences

Modern Western sciences and their technologies have always been regarded with both enthusiasm and dread. On the one hand, we tend to attribute to them at least some responsibility for the high standards of living that many in the West enjoy—especially if we are white and middle or upper class. It is unimaginable to us that we could want to give up the food and clothing, medical treatment, cars and airplanes, computers, television sets, and telephones that have become available through scientific and technological development. On the other hand, just who or what is responsible for atomic bombs, Agent Orange, industrial exploitation, polluted air and vast oil spills, dangerous contraceptives such as Dalkon shields, inappropriate uses of Valium, health profiteering, high infant mortality in the United States, famine in Ethiopia, and the development of a black underclass in the United States? Conventionalists insist that science get full credit for the good aspects of the “Western way of life” but that such “misuses and abuses” are entirely the fault either of politicians or of the industries that apply supposedly pure information in socially irresponsible ways.

The insistence on this separation between the work of pure scientific inquiry and the work of technology and applied science has long been recognized as one important strategy in the attempt of Western elites to avoid taking responsibility for the origins and consequences of the sciences and their technologies or for the interests, desires, and values they promote. From a sociological perspective, it is virtually irresistible to regard contemporary science as fundamentally a social problem. Sal Restivo has argued that it should be conceptualized as no different in this respect from alcoholism, crime, excessive drug use, and poverty.¹ The name “Frankenstein,” which Mary Shelley gave to the scientist in her dystopian novel, has in popular thought migrated to the monster he inadvertently created. How the monster actually got created—and gets nourished and reproduced day after day—retreats into the shadows, as if there are no persons or institutional practices that we can hold responsible for the shape of the sciences and the kind of social order with which they have been in partnership.

These kinds of issues have been raised by feminists (see Chapter 2), but they are certainly not what is unique about feminist analyses. In one form or another, such concerns are voiced by the ecology and environmental movement, the peace movement, the animals rights movement, leftist and worker movements, and antiracist and antiimperialist movements in both the West and the Third World. Even “postmodernist” criticisms of the philosophical foundations of Western rationality should be regarded as part of the counterculture of science. What is at issue for all these critics, including feminists, is not only the easily identifiable theories, methods, institutions, and technological consequences of the sciences but also something harder to describe: the Western scientific world view or mind-set. The “indigenous peoples” of the modern West—those most at home in Western societies—have culturally distinctive belief patterns in which scientific rationality plays a central role. These “natives,” like all others, have trouble even recognizing that they exhibit culturally distinctive patterns of belief; it is like discovering that one speaks a distinctive genre—prose. From an anthropological perspective, faith in scientific rationality is at least partly responsible for many of the Western beliefs and behaviors that appear most irrational to people whose life patterns and projects do not so easily fit with those of the modern West. From the perspective of women’s lives, scientific rationality frequently appears irrational.

Still, scientific rationality certainly is not as monolithic or determinist as many think or as the description above suggests. Nor is it all “bad.” It has been versatile and flexible enough throughout its history to permit constant reinterpretation of what should count as legitimate objects and processes of scientific research; it is itself shaped by cultural transformations and must struggle within them; and it is inherently no better or worse than other widespread social assumptions that have appealed to groups with different and sometimes conflicting agendas. Perhaps even liberalism and feminism would provide examples, since both have at times been associated with racist and bourgeois projects, even though at other times they have advanced struggles against racism and class exploitation. It is one theme of this book that modern Western science contains both progressive and regressive tendencies, and that our task must be to advance the former and block the latter. Indeed, scientific rationality can make possible the transformation of its own agendas; critics from feminist and other scientific counter-cultures certainly intend to use it for this purpose.

The Rising Status of the Intellectuals in Science and Technology

Increased participation in the countercultures of the sciences occurs just when the prestige of the intellectuals in science and technology is rising in higher education and the government. Scientists have been held in high regard since Sputnik, of course—indeed, even since Newton²—but the flood of industrial and federal funds that pours into scientific and technological projects in universities these days is truly astounding. It is a long time since scientific research could be regarded as significantly isolated in real life from the goals of the state and industry—if it ever could. Scientific research is an important part of the economic base of modern Western societies.

No doubt envy plays a certain role in the criticism of science. Scholars from the humanities and social sciences perceive themselves increasingly working in offices cramped into university attics and basements as new science and engineering buildings open; they lose what they think are too many of the best graduate students to the sciences and engineering as they lose support for graduate programs. More and more they find themselves reporting to deans, provosts, presidents, chancellors, and trustees whose backgrounds are in science and engineering and who intend to take universities where the money is flowing. How could they justify not doing so, these administrators ask.

Intellectuals in science and technology do not see their situation as rosy. One can hardly open a science journal or even an airline magazine without finding hand-wringing projections of a shortage of scientists and engineers. It has gotten so bad, they say, that in order to “keep America strong” they are even willing to develop special programs to recruit women and minorities to science, mathematics, and engineering departments. This institutional setting needs to be kept in mind when one thinks about the “postmodernist” criticisms of the philosophical foundations of modern science. The attractions of the postmodernist critique are many,³ but among them are surely its perceived usefulness as a means to restore status to the humanities, status that has stolen away to science and technology without public discussion of the benefits and losses of such a move.⁴ The intellectual fundamentalism of Allan Bloom and the “back to the classics” movement in the United States is another critical response to the rise in status of science and technology. The countercultures of science have at least the beginnings of a realistic assessment of possible futures for the West, an assessment that is lacking in intellectual fundamentalism.

The Need for New Sciences

It is at this moment that feminism and other liberatory social movements appear on the scene with agendas that include generating new sciences. Women need sciences and technologies that are for women and that are for women in every class, race, and culture. Feminists (male and female) want to close the gender gap in scientific and technological literacy, to invent modes of thought and learn the existing techniques and skills that will enable women to get more control over the conditions of their lives. Such sciences can and must benefit men, too—especially those marginalized by racism, imperialism, and class exploitation; the new sciences are not to be only for women. But it is time to ask what sciences would look like that were for “female men,” all of them, and not primarily for the white, Western, and economically advantaged “male men” toward whom benefit from the sciences has disproportionately tended to flow. Moreover, it is time to examine critically the conflicting interests in science that women in opposing classes and races may well have; women’s interests are not homogeneous. Feminism insists that questions be asked of nature, of social relations, and of the sciences different from those that “prefeminists” have asked, whether conventional or countercultural. How can women manage their lives in the context of sciences and technologies designed and directed by powerful institutions that appear to have few interests in creating social relations beneficial to anyone but those in the dominant groups?

Thus, though it would be foolish to deny that science is a major social problem, we can ask who benefits from regarding it as nothing but a social problem. Possible scientific beliefs and practices are not limited to those that have already existed, let alone to that subset that has existed in the modern West. It is complicitous with the dominant ideology to assert that everything deserving the name of science has been done in the modern West. Nevertheless, we must contend realistically with what the West has done with its sciences. It is important for the countercultures to struggle with science and technology on the existing social terrains while they also try to envision and plan different social environments for science in the future.

The Diversity of Feminist Analyses

Feminist analyses of science, technology, and knowledge are not monolithic. There is no single set of claims beyond a few generalities that could be called “feminism” without controversy among feminists. (The same could be said about sexism or androcentrism or non-feminism, which can also claim diverse historical frameworks and projects: Aristotle is not Freud.) The feminist science discussions are both enriched and constrained by the different political, practical, and conceptual perspectives that they bring to bear on science, its beliefs, practices, and institutions.

This is a good place to note that the term “feminism” is itself a contested zone not only within feminism but also between feminism and its critics. It is widely used as a critical epithet in the Second and Third Worlds and in some Western subcultures, by women as well as by men, to prevent women from organizing across class, race, and national borders and even just to “keep women in their place.”⁵ It is also important to note that widespread tendency in the West, at least, for women and men to insist that they are absolutely not feminists but then to advance the very same intellectual and political programs that are promoted by others under the label of feminism. These non-feminists too are for ending violence against women, the sexual exploitation of women, women’s poverty, job discrimination against women, the exclusion of women from public office, unequal educational opportunities, sexist biological and sociological and historical claims, and so on. For these people, “feminism” appears a handy label for those elements in feminism from which they wish to distance themselves—and it is the Eurocentric, racist, bourgeois, and heterosexist elements in feminism, as well as the vigorous opposition to them, from which different groups wish to distance themselves.

I think it is important to try to distinguish regressive from progressive tendencies in peoples’ actions and beliefs and to support the progressive tendencies, whether or not others think about them in just the way I do. What appears to be radical and progressive from the perspective of some women’s lives may be too conservative, too dangerous, or just irrelevant from the perspective of other women’s lives. If feminism is a term people find appropriate to their attempts to improve women’s conditions, they will use it. It would be regressive and ethnocentric for me to decide for them that they should adopt a term I find useful in my world. Nevertheless, I do use the word throughout this book, since I can assume that the majority of readers will find it appropriate here.

Several distinctive traditions of thought within which feminists have analyzed human nature, the fundamental causes of women’s inferior conditions, and what should be done to change those conditions generate different issues about science, technology, and epistemology. Most important are the “grand theory” traditions that borrow from Western political theory: liberal feminism and traditional Marxist feminism. We should also include in this group the African American feminism that has strong roots, we are now learning, in the nineteenth-century struggles of African American women.⁶ Then there are the now well-developed feminisms that emerged in the politics of the 1960s: radical feminism, socialist feminism, and the feminisms of racially marginalized women both in the West and in the Third World, some associated with national liberation struggles.⁷ Other feminist political orientations and traditions can be located within and alongside these: anarchist feminism, Jewish feminism, lesbian and gay feminisms, antimilitarist feminism, ecology-focused feminism, and others. Most of these feminists also work in other intellectual and political movements, as their compound identities indicate. Each of these “movement” orientations brings unique concerns and approaches to discussions of gender, science, and knowledge.

Moreover, feminists work in diverse social settings. In the United States we work in battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers, in agencies for international development and mainstream political orga...