The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science - The Department ...

Lynn Hankinson Nelson
aids, financial aid, and grants, for female graduate students; a lower “reinvestment
potential” of women’s credentials relative to similar credentials among men; and
discrimination in hiring and placement. 5 In this and later decades, feminists’ analyses
of social processes characterizing and/or impacting on the sciences would also
explore barriers based on race, ethnicity, and culture (Collins, 1991; Harding,
1986, 1991), and social arrangements “internal” to science – including divisions
in cognitive authority within research programs, and prestige hierarchies within
and among the sciences (Addelson, 1983).
Conventionally, the first two sets of issues are viewed as unrelated to the epistemology
of science, and thus of little or no interest to the philosophy of science.
But feminists are among those who argue that one cannot simply assume that
factors conventionally regarded as “external” to science, including the social
identities and contextual values of scientists, have no impact on the directions or
content of scientific research. As I earlier noted, feminist critiques of the “content”
of various sciences arguably constitute evidence of just such relationships. Nor,
feminists have argued, can one simply assume that social processes internal to
science – for example, peer review and funding mechanisms – ensure that the most
promising hypotheses and research programs are eventually funded and pursued.
Research undertaken in various science studies disciplines indicates that prestige
hierarchies and conservatism also have a role in determining such outcomes
(Addelson, 1983; Harding, 1986; Longino, 1990; Nelson, 1990).
In the early 1970s, feminist scientists and historians of science turned to the
content of science. Feminists in the social sciences and psychology identified
androcentrism in the goals, research questions, methods, organizing principles,
and theories in their disciplines. In anthropology, sociology, history, economics,
and political science, feminists criticized methodological approaches to and
accounts of social life that emphasized men’s behavior and activities as defining of
the so-called public sphere and “culture” and that associated women (explicitly or
implicitly) with the so-called private sphere and reproductive activities, in turn
treated as “natural” and invariant. Feminist social scientists also criticized the
central questions of mainstream research in their disciplines as largely ignoring
issues of concern to women, including gender discrimination in the workplace and
violence against women; see, for example Wylie (1996a) for an overview of these
critiques.
The problem, feminist social scientists argued, was not simply that accounts of
social life so characterized are empirically inadequate, ignoring or distorting as they
do the productive and diverse nature of women’s activities in specific historical
and cultural contexts, their variability along the axes of race and class, and
phenomena such as domestic violence. As problematic were the associations of
men with culture and production and of women with nature and reproduction.
By theoretically dichotomizing these connections, they obscure the actual and
significant inter-relationships between the domains or spheres. For example,
mainstream accounts of the economic structure of twentieth-century capitalism
did not address how women’s unpaid labor in the so-called private sphere
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