7 The contested character of science and the fundamental
7.2 Scientism, sexism and significant truths
It doesn’t take a post-modernist to notice that that science and scientific findings have been long misused in two ways. First, science as an institution has persistently provided more efficient and effective ways of harming people, other organisms and the environment. Second, it has done so in part by providing unwarranted rationalization for policies that effect such harms.
These trends must be granted even among the “friends” of science, indeed, even among those afflicted with scientism. The trends enjoin an obligation among scientists and others who may influence the future of science to reduce as much as possible these untoward consequences in the future.
Among the most influential students of science committed to the improvement of science as a social institution have been feminist philo-sophers of science. Some of these philophilo-sophers begin their examination of science from an epistemological insight, sometimes called “standpoint theory”. This theory begins with the uncontroversial thesis that there are certain facts relevant to the assessment of scientific theories which are only detectable from certain points of view – standpoints. Sometimes the point of view or standpoint in question involves using a certain apparatus; some-times, these philosophers argue, it requires being a woman, or a member of a social class, or racial minority, or having a certain sexual orientation. To be interesting, the thesis needs to be given strong and potentially controversial content. It needs to be understood as claiming not merely that if a male, or a Caucasian, or a corporate executive, or a heterosexual, were in the same epis-temic position as the women or the minority or the relevant social class, the male would detect the same fact; rather, it must claim that they cannot detect such a fact for the same reason they cannot be female. The fact must evidently be a relatively complex, perhaps historical, certainly a theoretical fact not open merely to one equipped with the five senses. And feminist standpoint theorists have not been reluctant to identify such facts. Typically they are facts hard to quantify, or even fully to describe in ordinary or scientific vocabularies, facts about the long-term effects of oppression, subor-dination, discrimination, stereotyping. These are hard facts and undeniable ones, for all the difficulty there may be describing them, and they can lay claim to being facts inaccessible merely from description, or brief and/or simulated personal encounter. One has to live the standpoint to really detect the relevant facts. It is plain that these claims are particularly relevant in the social sciences. Few standpoint theorists allege that physical or chemical facts are missed by failure to attend to the findings from a women’s or other marginalized standpoint, though cases have been made for the occurrence of
such failures in biology. For example, it might be claimed that the initial focus of sociobiologists on evolutionarily optimal male mating strategies (maximize the number of females fertilized, minimize energy-expenditure on offspring) in non-human species and the failure to notice female strat-egies (allow access to males with best genes and demonstrated willingness to commit resources to offspring) were owing to male biologists’ inability to locate themselves from the relevant standpoint.
This example of course reflects the philosophical difficulty facing stand-point theorists. For the opponents of this theory will argue that all it took was for female sociobiologists to draw the attention of their male colleagues to the facts for the entire discipline to revise theory in order to accommodate the facts. What standpoint theorists need to do is very difficult: on the one hand, they need to identify both the facts inaccessible from other stand-points in a way that forces those occupying the other standstand-points to grant the facts’ existence, and they need at the same time to argue that they cannot be grasped, or grasped in the same way, or most accurately, or most completely, from these other standpoints. It remains to be seen whether this epistemological claim can be vindicated.
Standpoint theory does not exhaust feminist philosophy of science and in fact its sternest critics have included feminist philosophers of science, who honor the aspirations of standpoint theory and seek to attain them from other premises, in particular, ones congenial to the empiricist orthodoxy of contemporary non-feminist philosophy of science. The aspirations of stand-point theory in question include those of emancipation, not just of women, but of all who have suffered from the very failures of “objectivity” and “dis-interestedness” that science officially may extol but scientists actually falls short of.
Feminist empiricist philosophers of science have, like most others, been heavily influenced by Quine and Kuhn. Thus, they are prepared to identify facts that male scientists have missed, not as in principle inaccessible to them, as standpoint theorists allege. But feminist empiricists recognize that such facts require substantial theory to recognize, theory which the non-scientific interests, values, even tastes of scientists brought up in a sexist world have probably prevented them from hitting upon. On the views of these feminists, theories, research programs, paradigms, are not incommen-surable, but they are often impervious to any but a very forceful counter-evidence wielded in politically effective ways.
Perhaps because feminist philosophers have been more attentive to devel-opments in social science, they have emphasized the social character of research, the division of scientific labor, and the shaping of its research agenda. By contrast, traditional philosophy of science has embraced a con-ception of science as the enterprise of individuals – Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein. In this, they have perhaps been overly influ-enced by the Cartesian tradition in epistemology, one which begins with Descartes’ solipsistic skepticism and his consequent attempt to construct all
knowledge from his own private experience. Modern science is, of course, an enterprise of teams and groups, communities and societies, indeed, institu-tions and governments. Feminists have noted both the strengths and the weaknesses of this fact about modern science. On the one hand, the scientific community often serves to distribute research tasks in efficient and coherent ways, to support and to scrutinize findings and theories that individuals advance, and to provide a reward (and punishment) structure that gives sci-entists incentives to advance the research frontier. On the other hand, the community can be a source of prejudice, blinding individuals to empirical facts, offering perverse incentives to complicity in such ignorance, and blinding scientists to important human needs and values that should have a role in driving the direction of both pure and applied research. We need to take account of the social character of scientific inquiry, and of its gendered deformation. Feminist philosophers argue that doing so should have an impact on its future and our philosophical assessment of it.
Empiricists usually distinguish facts from values and observe that science has long been characterized by a commitment to “value-freedom”. It is ostensibly committed to not allowing the tastes, preferences, wishes, hopes, likes, dislikes, fears, prejudices, animosities and hatreds – the values of sci-entists – to govern what is accepted as objective knowledge. Doing so com-pletely and effectively may require that we can distinguish factual judgments from value judgments up to the standards Quine, for example, set for real distinctions in philosophy: in particular non-circularity in drawing the fact/value distinction. Some philosophers, both feminists and non-feminists, believe this is impossible. Others, as we shall see, claim that in any case making value judgments in science is unavoidable so that the attempt to rid science of such claims is a mistake.
But isn’t the fixation of factual claims by value judgments just the sort of thing objective, disinterested science should avoid or expunge, difficult though it may be? Of course, it does not always succeed in acting on this commitment, but science is supposed to be self-corrective: the methods of science, and in particular the control of theory by observation, are held, rightly in the eyes of feminist empiricist philosophers, to mitigate and mini-mize these failures. However, this is at most a negative virtue of the scien-tific method. At best, it ensures that in the long run science will not go wrong epistemically. But, first of all, in the long run we are all dead. Femi-nist and other philosophers of science are committed, along with scientists, to seeing that science does not go wrong in the short and the medium term, along with the long run. Second, merely avoiding error is, in their view, not enough. Avoiding error is not a motive that will explain the actual direction in which science has proceeded hitherto, nor how it should proceed here-after. To explain the actual direction, at least in part, we need to identify the values of scientists – groups and individuals who drive it. And if we seek to change its direction, we may need to widen the range of interests represen-ted in the scientific community.
As students of Quine, feminist philosophers of science recognize that theory is underdetermined by observation: the direction of scientific theoriz-ing over time is not driven just by experiment and its epistemic equivalent.
All or most scientific beliefs are insulated from direct observational chal-lenge by the network of other statements, assumptions, auxiliary hypotheses a scientist believes. Following Nelson (1993), some feminist philosophers have argued that, along with other factual assumptions, value judgments can also play a role in fixing beliefs otherwise underdetermined by evidence. If we cannot draw a distinction between factual claims and value judgments, this claim will be in little need of defense. Even if we can, there seems an attractive argument for the claim that values are inextricably bound up in science.
Like all intentional human activities, scientific activity is determined not just by what we believe, but also by what we want. The belief that it is raining won’t send you out with an umbrella, unless you want to stay dry.
Now, scientists don’t just search for the truth, or even for truths. There is an infinite supply of the latter, and we will never make so much as a dent in the number of unknown truths. Science searches for significant truths. But what makes a statement significant and therefore worthy of scientific investiga-tion, or for that matter insignificant and so not worthy? Feminist philo-sophers of science argue that the history of science is full of inquiries about statements deemed to be significant because of values, interests, objectives of the men who dominated science; similarly, many lines of inquiry are absent from its history because on these same values, the questions they explored were insignificant. It is easy to give concrete examples of persistent one-sid-edness in according significance and insignificance to research questions.
Recall the history of investigation of mating strategies in evolutionary biology. Though biologists ignored female reproductive strategies in infra-humans, when it came to contraception, the focus of pharmaceutical inter-vention was on women. On the other hand, in the treatment of depression (a disorder more frequent among women), pharmaceuticals were tested on male samples only, owing to the assumption that differences between male and female physiology were insignificant. Somewhere in the cognitive back-ground of these decisions about how to proceed in science, there were value judgments, ones which neglected the interests of women.
Feminist philosophers of science have come to insist that there are in science vast blind-spots and blank spaces which have resulted from 2,500 years of male domination in the identification of what questions are signific-ant and which are not. What science needs to do now, or rather what women have always needed science to do, is to treat research questions significant to women. And the same goes for any other group, class, race that has been disposed of in the identification of significant and insignificant research questions.
The crucial point in this argument is not that science should forego judg-ments of significance. It cannot do so. There are too many research questions
to choose from in science’s search for truths. Given scarce resources, human needs, and the importance wonder attaches to questions, we have no altern-ative but to order questions by their significance to us. The feminist philo-sopher of science merely insists that we order inquiry on the basis of significance to all of us.
Identifying a role for value judgments in science is not the end of the feminist agenda in the philosophy of science. It is probably closer to the beginning of it. Feminists have argued further that the real besetting sin of scientism is that of mistaking masculine styles of scientific inquiry for all scientific inquiry. Thus, they have argued, for example, that demands for unification in scientific theorizing and explanation are often premature, counterproductive of scientific progress, or unreasonable even in a mature discipline. Feminist philosophy of science encourages “pluralism”. Women, and science as they pursue it, are more prepared than traditional male-dominated science to tolerate multiple, competing, complementary and partial explanations, without the expectation of near-term weighting of importance, placement in a (patriarchal) hierarchy of causes, or unification under a single complete theory. This ability to tolerate and willingness to encourage a variety of approaches to the same scientific problem reflects women’s greater sensitivity to the role of plural values – multiple judgments of significance – in driving scientific research. Since it seems obvious that multiple assessments of significance should be encouraged by the experi-mental attitude of science itself, the feminist commitment to pluralism should be equally embraced by all, at the evident expense of the totalizing and reductionistic proclivities of more traditional science. Similarly, sensi-tivity to feminist discoveries about the role of values – both nefarious and benevolent – in significance-decisions has implications for how the objectiv-ity of science should be understood.
Objectivity cannot after all be a matter of complete disinterestedness, of value neutrality, or detachment of the scientist from the object of inquiry.
For if this were so, there would be no motivation, in judgments of signific-ance, for the inquiry to begin with.
Similarly, some feminist philosophers of science reject the centrality of pre-diction, and especially of control to the scientific enterprise. The suggestion that science optimally should proceed in this way reflects what they hold to be masculine biases which are also reflected in the subordination of women and other marginalized groups. The methodology of prediction and control fails to gain the knowledge that might derive from a more cooperative relationship with the objects of scientific study, be they human or infra-human. Among the oldest account of scientific method is Francis Bacon’s seventeenth-century notion that the scientist subjects mother nature to a sort of torture in order to secure her secrets. Even if this is a metaphor, it may not be an innocent one.
And there are other metaphors at work in scientific explanation that reflect a male bias harmful both to the real objectives of science, and to women inde-pendently of their purported pay-off in scientific understanding.
It is not surprising that by and large the feminist philosophers whose work has had the most influence in the philosophy of science are the empiri-cists and naturalists among them. They have argued that their conclusions about how science proceeds and how it should proceed are perfectly compat-ible with the empiricism and naturalism that characterize much contempor-ary non-feminist philosophy of science. Unlike post-modernists and others who take up an adversarial stance against scientism, these empiricist femin-ists do not challenge science’s aim to provide objective knowledge, but seek to broaden our understanding of what objectivity consists in and how more nearly to attain the goal of objective knowledge. Accordingly, these philo-sophers and those who share their agenda still need to come to grips with the arguments of those who have embraced the more radical epistemic rela-tivism that has characterized much of the post-Kuhnian study of science.