The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND THE FEMINIST LEGACY

Janet A. Kourany

Philosophy of science is concerned with the nature of science, its practices and results. But unlike other fields concerned with science, such as history of science and sociology of science, philosophy of science aims not simply to describe science but to articulate and even improve upon what lies at the very heart of its success, scientific rationality itself. Feminist philosophy of science has furthered this enterprise in a variety of ways. One way, for example, concerns the scope of the enterprise. Traditional philosophy of science failed to consider women whether as scientific researchers, as subjects of scientific research, or as individuals affected by such research, and feminist philosophers of science have done much to rectify that failure. Many of these philosophers have even suggested that women must be included in philosophy of science in at least some of these capacities if scientific rationality is to be captured at all. But there are also other contributions feminist philosophers have made to philosophy of science. In what follows we shall consider some of the most important of these contributions and their impact on science and society as well as philosophy.

Pre-Feminist Philosophy of Science

Start with the way philosophy of science was before the advent of feminism. Most scholars locate its roots in the “Vienna Circle,” that group of scientists, mathematicians, and scientists-turned-philosophers who regularly met in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. What distinguished the group—aside from the illustriousness of many of its members (such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Kurt Gödel) and followers (such as A. J. Ayer, Carl Hempel, and Alfred Tarski)—was the ambitious task it had set for itself: the development of a “scientific world-conception.” What this meant was a worldview based not on a priori speculation, as the metaphysical system-building of the past had been, but instead on the results of empirical science. The plan was to build into a unified whole the individual contributions of scientists from all the various fields of study. And the method adopted to do this was two-fold: both active encouragement of collaboration among scientists from different fields and countries to gear their research toward such a unified result, and logical and epistemological analysis of their contributions using a neutral system of symbols to make explicit the connections among these contributions and thereby their overall unity.

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The most impressive feature of the Vienna Circle’s activities, however, was the overarching goal that motivated them: not only progress in science, but also progress in social life.

One cannot begin to give an account of the Vienna Circle without seeing it not only as a movement for a scientific world conception in terms of its logical, epistemological and methodological content, but also as a movement which conceived of its theoretical contributions as being in the service of social reform, and as, in significant measure, allied with the left social movements of its time.

(Wartofsky 1996: 60)

And one of the important accomplishments of the Vienna Circle, as its 1929 “manifesto” proclaimed, was just such social reform:

We witness the spirit of the scientific world-conception penetrating in growing measure the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing, architecture and the shaping of economic and social life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it.

(Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath 1973 [1929]: 317–318)

By the time “logical empiricism,” as the movement begun by the Vienna Circle came to be called, had been transplanted to the United States after the war, however, this concern with social life and social reform had disappeared. Philosophy of science was still committed to unified science. But the commitment had degenerated from an active movement—seeking to regularize collaboration among scientists from different countries and different academic fields for the improvement of both science and human life—to an academic thesis—a hypothesis concerning the future internal development of science “viewed, so to speak, from across the quadrangle as an independent intellectual project neither requiring nor requesting input from philosophy” (Reisch 2005: 375). And, as time went on, even this very truncated connection with science fell away. By the early 1960s logical empiricism was accused of having become little more than the investigation of abstract logical and epistemological puzzles. What had happened?

According to recent scholarship, a variety of things (see, for various accounts, Giere 1999; McCumber 2001; Howard 2003; and Reisch 2005). For one, the North American social/political context in which the surviving members of the Vienna Circle and their followers found themselves after the war was much more stable, democratic, and liberal than that of pre-war central Europe, much less evocative of the reformist zeal of the Vienna Circle. Conceptualizing science and the philosophy of science within this new context as sources of social transformation must have seemed increasingly out of place.

Second was the McCarthyism of 1950s America and its antipathy to anything that even smacked of socialism. That certainly would have squelched the kind of politically engaged philosophy of science championed by the Vienna Circle. The public record, after all, “clearly indicates that philosophy was the most heavily attacked of all the academic disciplines” (McCumber 2001: 37). Philosophers of science who hoped to retain their jobs and flourish in the field would have gotten the message to pursue safe, politically neutral, socially disengaged research.

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Third, the conception of science as a politically detached search for truth had been institutionalized in the United States, thanks largely to Vannevar Bush and his 1945 Science—The Endless Frontier: Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research. It was this conception, in fact, that set science policy for much of the rest of the century. Not surprisingly, therefore, philosophy of science, engaged as it was with science and also modeling itself on science, embarked on its own similarly detached intellectual enterprise.

Doubtless there were also other factors in play in mid-century America besides the above three that moved philosophy of science away from the kind of social engagement exemplified by the Vienna Circle, and doubtless many of these factors (such as the impact of McCarthyism) changed over time. Yet, philosophy of science largely continued its social disengagement right up to the end of the twentieth century. The main exception to this was feminist philosophy of science.

The Birth of Feminist Philosophy of Science

Feminist philosophy of science emerged in the 1980s, and from the start it was a very different sort of enterprise from its parent discipline. True, its proponents were trained in the same ways as other philosophers of science of the time, and their academic employment and advancement largely depended on their pursuing the same kinds of projects as these other philosophers. Yet, by the 1980s other conditions were operating to move them in a different direction.

First, the women’s movement was exposing the inequalities that characterized even liberal, democratic societies like the United States—the inequalities of job opportunities and pay and advancement; the “second shift” of housework, child care, and elder care expected of women even when they worked full-time outside the home; the ever-present threats of rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, and other forms of violence directed at women; the constrictions of feminine gender socialization; and so on.

Second, feminist scientists and historians of science were exposing the role that science had played in perpetuating and even adding to these problems. Of course, the hope had always been that science would help solve these problems—that it would replace prevailing ignorance and prejudice and misinformation about women with more adequate perspectives. But now feminists were showing that science all too frequently had done just the opposite. Indeed, in fields such as anthropology, sociology, political science, medical research, psychology, biology, and archaeology feminist scientists and historians of science were documenting how extensively sexism had infected research. And they documented, as well, the obstacles women scientists faced in such fields.

These events evoked in feminist philosophers of science a kind of reformist zeal very like that previously exemplified by the Vienna Circle: a commitment to work with scientists to reform science in order to reform society. But how? Feminist scientists were not only exposing sexism in their fields, they were also correcting it. Sometimes the corrections were quite straightforward. A great deal of sexist science was, by the lights of traditional scientific methodology, simply bad science—science that failed to satisfy accepted standards of concept formation, experimental design, data analysis, or the like (see, for example, Hubbard 1979; Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1985). Correcting such sexism was simply a matter of enforcing accepted standards. At other times, however, the accepted standards themselves had to be reformed, and feminist scientists proposed and put into effect appropriate revisions to rid their fields of sexism. For example, feminist sociologist Margrit Eichler (1988) proposed a set of general “guidelines for non-sexist research” to supplement what science students and researchers were already expected to live up to. Her guidelines distinguished, illustrated, and offered recipes for eliminating seven different types of sexism in their most frequently occurring forms, and they covered all aspects of the research process, from the title right down to the policy recommendations that might follow from the results. Other scientists proposed more specialized revisions designed specifically for their own areas of research.

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The problem, however—the problem many feminist scientists were loath to acknowledge—was that all these revisions were just as feminist as what they replaced was sexist, and yet they resulted in, not new examples of biased science (though biased in a different way from before), but less biased science (more accurate, more thorough, more comprehensive, and better justified than what had gone before). And how was that possible if science was, or at least was supposed to be, the politically detached search for truth that Vannevar Bush had applauded? It was here that feminist philosophers of science could and did make an important contribution—a very traditionally philosophical contribution that attempted anew to articulate and even improve upon scientific rationality, and yet one whose content in many ways broke with the philosophical tradition as it was thus far formed. Actually, feminist philosophers of science provided a number of such reconceptualizations of scientific rationality, each conflicting with the others (what else would you have expected from philosophers?), and yet each also supplying new insights complementing those of the others.

Scientific Rationality through Feminist Eyes

Consider just four of these reconceptualizations of scientific rationality offered by feminist philosophers of science. Probably the most sophisticated is “critical contextual empiricism” put forward by Helen Longino (see especially Longino 1990; 1993; 2002). According to this approach, the scientific search for truth need not be politically detached (that is, value-free). What it needs to be is rational. For it is rationality that will get scientists to the truth, if anything will. But contrary to what feminist scientists assumed, rationality is to be understood in social terms, as a characteristic of scientific communities, not in individual terms, as a characteristic of the methods or attitudes or behavior of individual scientists. Why is that?

According to Longino, scientists are “situated” in particular social/cultural (gender, racial/ethnic, class, sexual-orientation, political, etc.) as well as spatial-temporal locations (these are the “contextual” factors Longino wants to emphasize). As a result, scientists conduct their research from particular—and different—spatial-temporal-social/cultural vantage points, and these can have a decided effect on the nature of that research. Though scientists might be trained in comparable ways and might use comparable research methods, neither the training nor the methods, however rigorous and however rigorously applied, can be guaranteed to screen out the difference in vantage points from which scientists approach their research. Indeed, such vantage points, and the histories, interests, values, and sensitivities they incorporate, can and do affect which questions scientists investigate and which they ignore, which background assumptions they accept and which they reject, which observational or experimental data they select to study and the way they interpret those data, and so on.

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Now rationality, the effective search for truth, depends on limiting the intrusion of these individual scientists’ subjective inputs into the scientific community’s shared beliefs, its “knowledge,” and, hence, depends on the scientific community’s critical scrutiny of each scientist’s particular vantage point and resulting scientific work. But rationality in this sense is a matter of degree. More specifically, it depends on the degree to which a scientific community satisfies four conditions. First, the community must have public venues for criticism, such as journals and conferences. Second, it must have publicly recognized standards—shared values as well as substantive principles—by reference to which the criticism can be made. Third, it must be responsive to the criticism. That is, the beliefs of the community as a whole and over time—as measured by such public phenomena as the content of textbooks, the distribution of grants and awards, and the flexibility of dominant worldviews—must change in response to the critical discussion taking place within it (“uptake”). And fourth, the community must recognize the equal intellectual authority of all the parties qualified to engage in the debate (“tempered equality”), among whom all relevant points of view that can serve as sources of criticism must be represented.

A science will, then, be rational to the degree that it satisfies these four conditions—to the degree that it permits what Longino calls “transformative criticism.” And the output of such a science will constitute knowledge, even if that output is inspired and informed by social/political values, if the community that practices it meets these conditions and the output conforms sufficiently to its objects to enable the members of the community to carry out their projects with respect to those objects.

Since feminist scientists starting in the 1970s were frequently new additions to their fields, and since they approached their fields from vantage points different from those of their colleagues (among other things, they were women whereas their colleagues were men, and they shared feminist commitments not frequently shared by the men), they provided new points of view from which to criticize the scientific contributions of the men and, hence, they increased the rationality of the resulting science. Small wonder what resulted was less biased than before.

Sandra Harding and other “standpoint theorists” offer a different analysis (see, e.g., Harding 1986; 1991). According to this analysis, just as the various spatial-temporal-social/cultural vantage points of scientists can have a decided effect on what they understand and can contribute, the various vantage points of everyone else can have a decided effect on what they understand and can contribute. But these various vantage points are not always equally valuable, epistemologically. Individuals who are in the socially disadvantaged positions in society are often able to recognize more readily than those in the more advantaged positions the structures that keep in place the hierarchy of advantage and disadvantage. “They have less to lose by distancing themselves from the social order; thus, the perspective from their lives can more easily generate fresh and critical analyses” (Harding 1991: 126). As a result, the wheelchair-bound person is painfully aware of the architectural choices and conventions (stairs and escalators rather than elevators, for instance) that disenable her mobility while they enable the mobility of the abled; the abled are likely oblivious to all this. Gays and lesbians are aware of the heterosexual expectations and customs that deny their sexuality while straights comfortably take them for granted; women continue to be amazed by the sexism that men fail to see; and so on.

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This epistemological advantage especially holds if the wheelchair-bound, the gays and lesbians, and the women have been engaged in the kinds of consciousness-raising group activities and political activism that have characterized recent movements for social equality, such as the civil rights, gay rights, and disability rights movements and the women’s movement. “Only through such struggles can we begin to see beneath the appearances created by an unjust social order to the reality of how this social order is in fact constructed and maintained” (Harding 1991: 127). Such struggles help to create a more collective vantage point, which Harding calls a “standpoint.” Thus, we can speak of a women’s standpoint or a gay and lesbian standpoint or a disability standpoint. Of course, men, straight persons, and abled persons can learn—have learned—to see things from these less partial, less distorted, collective vantage points, these standpoints, but the ones whose standpoints they are will typically have to be their teachers and will still tend to be the epistemological path-breakers.

So some vantage points—those associated with social disadvantage—can bring with them epistemological advantage. But this holds in science as well as out of it. Women scientists, for example, though they may enjoy the class-related and other social advantages associated with being scientists, still struggle both in and out of science with the gender-related disadvantages associated with being women. And this can provide them with vantage points on gender-related issues in their fields less distorted than the ones available to their male colleagues. Small wonder it was the women scientists whose consciousness had been raised by feminism, not the men, who uncovered and helped to rectify the gender-related shortcomings in the sciences.

“Feminist naturalists” such as Elizabeth Anderson, Louise Antony, and Miriam Solomon provide a still different analysis (see, e.g., Anderson 1995; 2004; Antony 1993; 1995; Solomon 2001). Indeed, their approach rejects a priori prescriptions regarding the proper composition of scientific communities or the proper conduct of inquiry. It rejects, as well, the single-minded focus of the other approaches on scientific practice to the exclusion of scientific outcome. What the naturalist approach advocates instead is a close look at successful scientific practice in order to identify those of its features that contribute to and explain its success. For the naturalist approach, in fact, scientific rationality just is whatever contributes to and explains scientific success.

When we take a close look at successful scientific practice during the last three decades, however, we find that a great deal of that part of it that is gender-relevant has been produced by feminists. We find, that is to say, that the contributions of feminists—the wide-ranging critiques of traditional science in such fields as psychology, sociology, economics, political science, archaeology, anthropology, biology, and medical research, and the new research directions and research results forged in the wake of those critiques—those contributions have been not only free of sexism but also more empirically successful than the sexist science that went before (see, e.g., Schiebinger 1999, and Creager, Lunbeck, and Schiebinger 2001 for the kinds of wide-ranging changes in science that have occurred due to feminism).

Advocates of the naturalist approach hypothesize that those successes are a function of feminists’ political values, where political values, like any other apparently non-epistemic feature of scientific practice (such as competitiveness or the desire for credit for one’s accomplishments) need not function as hindrances but might actually function as aids in the acquisition of objective knowledge. Indeed, supporters of the naturalist approach point out that cases in which feminist values have clearly influenced science (for example, by motivating particular lines of research or the maintenance of particular social structures) have been cases in which the science produced is not only free of sexism but also more developed and more empirically adequate than before (see, e.g., Antony 1993; 1995; Campbell 2001; Anderson 1995; 2004; and Wylie and Nelson 2007). And since feminist values produce greater scientific success than sexist values we have reason to rid science of the latter.

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The “political” approach put forward by Janet Kourany (2010) moves in a somewhat different direction. Like the naturalist approach, it advocates a close look at successful scientific practice and what contributes to and explains its success. But it advocates this close look in the context of the wider society in which science takes place. Indeed, it emphasizes that society ultimately pays for science—through taxes and through consumer spending. And it emphasizes that society is deeply affected by science. Science shapes our lives, and perhaps most important, science shapes our conception of ourselves. As philosopher and theologian A. J. Heschel explained half a century ago:

A theory about the stars never becomes a part of the being of the stars. A theory about man enters his consciousness, determines his self-understanding, and modifies his very existence. The image of a man affects the nature of man . . . We become what we think of ourselves.

(Heschel 1965: 7)

As a result, science, so much a shaper of society and so much a beneficiary of society, should be deeply responsive to the needs of society.

The political approach thus suggests that scientific success should be defined in terms of social success—human flourishing, what makes for a good society—as well as epistemic success. But it also suggests, like the naturalist approach, that scientific rationality should be defined in terms of whatever contributes to and explains scientific success. Hence, scientific rationality should be defined in terms of those features of science that contribute to and explain the social as well as epistemic success of science. Regarding gender-related research in particular, since one of the needs of society—of both women and men—is justice, and equality for women is one aspect of that justice, those features should include, in addition to ones that relate to epistemic goals, ones that relate to feminist goals.

Returning, then, to the feminist scientists who, starting in the 1970s, did innovative critical and constructive work in fields such as anthropology, sociology, political science, medical research, psychology, biology, and archaeology, we can easily explain why their work was superior to the sexist work that preceded it, and we can do this without invoking any speculative hypotheses regarding the causes of the improvements. The explanation is simply that they were scientists trying to do epistemically responsible research, that at the same time they were feminist scientists trying to root sexism out of that research, and that rooting sexism out of that research was tantamount to implanting egalitarian social values in it. Thus, their research, unlike that of their colleagues, ended up satisfying both epistemic criteria and criteria related to feminist goals and, thus, fulfilled more stringent standards of scientific rationality than their colleagues’ research.

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The Legacy

Feminist philosophy of science has thus contributed new understandings of scientific rationality that are especially helpful to feminist scientists. For, in each case, these new understandings show that feminism is not antithetical to the requirements of good science. Indeed, in each case they show that feminism is partially constitutive of the requirements of good science.

But these new understandings of scientific rationality are especially helpful to philosophers of science as well. For one thing, they take into account the complex roles of social values in science, and thereby, the complex ways in which science both shapes and is shaped by society. And this answers a need pervasive in philosophy of science since it came into its own as a professional discipline in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, even after the demise of logical empiricism, and even after the historicizing and naturalizing and socializing of philosophy of science that occurred thereafter, science was still treated in twentieth century philosophy of science as detached from its social (political/cultural/economic) surround—as science in a vacuum. The roles of social values in science either failed to enter philosophical discussion at all or they were limited to the choice of research questions in the “context of discovery” and the choice of research applications in the “context of application.” And now, in the twenty-first century, science is still largely treated in the same way—even though questions regarding the social relevance of science and the social responsibilities of scientists have become particularly pressing in the world beyond philosophy of science, and funding from sources such as the US National Science Foundation and the US National Institutes of Health now requires detailed analysis and assessment of the social values that operate in research. In short, the contributions of feminist rationality studies regarding the roles of social values in science continue to be of prime importance to philosophy of science.

Feminist rationality studies provide other important benefits to philosophy of science as well. As we have seen, they deal with socially important problems—the problems of gender inequality women still contend with and the roles that science has played and is still playing in perpetuating these problems—problems that most non-feminist philosophers of science completely ignore. Moreover, feminist rationality studies suggest well-reasoned responses to these problems. For example, both Longino and Harding argue that the distinctive vantage points from which women scientists pursue their research are crucial to achieving objective results in at least all the fields in which gender is relevant to the subject matter of the field. For Longino these objective results are achieved through the increased critical dialogue to which women’s vantage points contribute. For Harding they are achieved through the decreased distortion potentially present in the women’s vantage points themselves. Either way, the contributions of women scientists are necessary if scientific rationality is to be maximized and genuine scientific knowledge produced, the kind of knowledge needed to correct the prejudice and misinformation about women that still prevails.

Longino goes even further. She suggests that the world may be so complex that a multiplicity of approaches may be required to capture all its various aspects. That is to say, a pluralism in the conduct of inquiry, the pluralism that Longino holds to be methodologically necessary, may also yield as its final outcome an irreducible pluralism of representations, a pluralism that includes women’s distinctive contributions. But, of course, even if the final outcome of inquiry is a single unified representation of the world rather than a pluralism of representations, that single representation may still include women’s distinctive contributions. Either outcome would furnish an additional reason women’s contributions are crucial to science.

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Thus, both Longino and Harding provide reasons to develop affirmative action programs for women in the sciences, affirmative action programs that ultimately will help deal with the problems that women in society still face thanks in significant part to science. Other feminist philosophers of science suggest other policy initiatives to the same end (see, e.g., Kourany 2010 and 2016, regarding the need for change in the professional values and associated research programs of the sciences and some of the ways to bring that about). All this is especially important to philosophy of science right now. For philosophers of science—at least many of them—are now trying to be socially relevant. Thus, organizations such as the Joint Caucus for Socially Engaged Philosophers and Historians of Science (JCSEPHS), the Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and Engineering (SRPoiSE), and the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) have been formed, and their meetings and other activities are designed to develop and/or communicate information about socially relevant projects for philosophers of science to pursue. They are also designed to encourage philosophers of science to pursue these projects. Feminist philosophy of science, however, can offer more than three decades of work on such projects. So, at the very least, it can serve as a source for generating the more impressive sorts of philosophy of science programs that many in the field now desire.

A third benefit feminist rationality studies provide to philosophy of science is attention to the work of women scientists. At a time when women are still not being fully welcomed into the sciences (see, e.g., Hill, Corbett, and Rose 2010; Pollack 2013), and much biological and psychological research is still devoted to finding out whether women are as analytically able to do science as men (see, e.g., Caplan and Caplan 2005; Ceci and Williams 2007, 2010)—that is, whether women really belong in the sciences, or at least the upper reaches of the sciences—it is especially important not to ignore the scientific achievements of women. This is particularly true regarding the scientific achievements of feminists, almost all of whom have been women. For here, the relevant take-home message is not that women were able to do the same kinds of scientific work as even the most distinguished men, but rather that women did importantly different work from these men—work that was more accurate, more thorough, more comprehensive, and better justified than the men’s work that preceded it, and yet at the same time was also more egalitarian, more fair-minded and more helpful to more people than the men’s work. It is valuable, then, to have the case studies and theorizing about women’s research that is provided by feminist philosophers to add to the non-feminist philosophy of science corpus, almost all of which is devoted exclusively to the scientific research of men.

There are, of course, still other benefits feminist philosophy of science provides to philosophy of science: long-overdue attention to the social and biomedical sciences to supplement all the attention that, traditionally, the physical sciences and, more recently, certain parts of the biological sciences have received in philosophy of science; contributions to important work in race studies of science, sexuality studies, disability studies, and a number of other socially important areas whose development is also long overdue; case studies and analyses informed by cutting-edge work in the sciences as well as the social studies of science, and frequently the product of close interdisciplinary collaborations; and so on. But the most important benefit that feminist philosophy of science provides to philosophy of science is an array of fascinating questions on a host of very challenging new topics that philosophers of science are especially well equipped to handle. All in all, an impressive legacy to philosophy of science from one of its own offspring!

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