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

Feminist Philosophy of Science
from these general assumptions, divisions by gender in labor and power can be
expected to have epistemological consequences. In Harstock’s (1983) formulation
of an argument calling for a specifically feminist standpoint epistemology, the traditional
division of labor by gender can explain why feminist knowledge claims are
superior to those they criticize. Feminist perspectives are “achieved standpoints,”
made possible by such divisions, and by inherent contradictions between the
realities of women’s lived lives and the dominant ideology. Finally, Harding used
feminist postmodernist approaches, as explored and explicated by Donna Haraway
and Jane Flax, among others, to identify challenges to both feminist empiricism
and standpoint epistemology, particularly the tenability of “universalizing claims”
about the power of reason, science, and the “subject/self ” (p. 28).
Although some of the specific arguments just summarized would turn out
to be influential, particularly in the social sciences, they would also be challenged
by feminist philosophers, including those interested in developing empiricist
approaches to science. Indeed, Harding herself, in both this and later work, would
identify important problems facing standpoint theory, including what some took
to be its tendency toward essentialism and the lack of a convincing argument that
feminists and/or women enjoyed an epistemic advantage. At the same time,
Harding’s analysis, together with debates within feminist theory about essentialism
(concerning gender among other categories), the viability of epistemology,
and the inextricable relationships between gender and other social relations, would
contribute to increased attention to the “situadedness” of knowers and knowledge
claims and to the contingent and pragmatic aspects of scientific practice.
Donna Haraway’s notion of “partial [particularly and specifically embodied]
vision” is representative of feminists’ interests in recovering the embodied, sociallyenabled,
and otherwise concretely-situated aspects of knowing and knowledgemaking.
Often, efforts to analyze these features of knowing were explicitly linked
to concerns with responsibility and with objectivity, and in this regard the following
passage by Haraway is also representative.
not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment,
and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits
and responsibility. . . . Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated
knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. In this way
we might become answerable for what we learn how to see (Haraway, [1988] 1991,
p. 190).
Other important contributions to feminist philosophy of science in the 1980s
included articles in a two-volume special issue of Hypatia devoted to “Feminism
and Science” edited by Nancy Tuana (1987, 1988). In addition to critiques of
specific research programs and theories, a number of contributors explored the
more general implications of feminist science scholarship, including questions concerning
the justification of feminist claims (e.g., Linda Alcoff, Helen E. Longino,
and Elizabeth Potter). Alcoff’s and Potter’s articles focused on questions then very
much at the heart of feminist theorizing: “On what grounds do we challenge non-
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