Pinnick Problems with Feminist Epistemology

Pinnick is criticizing a very specific theory of knowledge proposed by, along with others, Harding. I believe that Harding calls it feminist epistemology, though, of course, it is perfectly conceivable that other rather different theories might lay claim to that description. I'm not talking about them.

Harding says that pretenses to scientific disinterestedness and objectivity are a sham, and that, far from its being a good thing for scientists to pretend to be objective, science would go much better if its practitioners did it from an openly politicized, specifically feminist point of view. The claim is not that women make better scientists than men or even that feminists make better scientists, but rather that feminists who do their scientific work with a feminist agenda make better scientists.

Of course, it isn't completely clear what Harding means by better. If what she means by a better scientist is one who opens up the practice of science to more feminists and who helps to advance the feminist political agenda by finding scientific results to back it up, then she is pretty clearly right. What Pinnick takes her to mean is that feminists would do better science: get better results and more successfully achieve scientific ends. Note that, in taking Harding to mean that, Pinnick is presuming that Harding would agree that there is an objective notion of better results and scientific ends, something that Harding often seems to deny.

Why is Pinnick, along with many others, especially concerned to refute Harding's claim that a feminist politicized science would be better science? There is a long history of harmful politicization of science that scientists have long combated: there was Nazi eugenics, Soviet evolutionary biology, and other examples. There are, as Harding would argue, biases in science today that might be redressed by allowing in people with other biases. It seems to Pinnick that that is the wrong solution. The right one is to attempt to eliminate all biases, to do science objectively. Here is an example: early IQ tests.

In Pinnick's defense, Harding does say that because feminists are marginalized, they have a privileged perspective on nature (paraphrased from 301). That suggests that she thinks that feminists do better science even by the standard Pinnick adopts. Pinnick jumps on that: if it is true, it should be possible to produce empirical evidence (or at least to design studies, ...). Harding does no such thing. That undermines her claim: she doesn't try to support in the way that would be, according to Pinnick, most appropriate. Pinnick has a diagnosis that is, I think, correct: Harding does not think that there really is anything such thing as objective truth, or a "nature" that is independent of our politics. It is therefore impossible to do the studies.

Why does Harding think that there is no such thing as objective, scientific truth? She relies on Kuhn, Quine, and Bloor. Certainly many scientists today and almost all philosophers of science would agree that it is impossible to approach an experiment without assumptions and biases, to be "objective" in a simple sense. They nonetheless believe that objectivity is a useful and important regulative ideal: you should try to objective, evaluate the theories of others on their own merits and so on as best you can.

Harding concludes from Kuhn that a powerful group can maintain a paradigm for as long as they wish despite evidence against it. She also says that it is only outsiders who can see the defects in a reigning paradigm. That is part of her argument that feminists, outsiders, will produce better science. The outsiders argument seems intuitively plausible, but it has been studied in one case (age), and turns out to be wrong. Moreover, just because a theory is old doesn't mean it is wrong. Being unwilling to switch to a new theory is a bad trait in a scientist, but so is being unwilling to hold on to old one.

Harding concludes from Quine that even an empirically successful theory will have equally good rivals, and so the mere fact that there is good evidence for a theory is no reason to assume it correct. ("Underdetermination of theory by evidence.") As we've discussed in detail, Quine was making a logical point. He does not argue that there are actually theories such that we really should consider rivals equally good. He certainly doesn't think that external political factors are a good reason for changing theories. Her use of Quine is ironic, because one of the main things for which he was arguing was a sort of realism: we are committed to one theory as the truth.

Harding concludes from Bloor that the outcome of scientific work is socially determined, not determined by an "objective" "external" world, and that scientific work gets its claim to be authoritative about what is true on the basis of political power not scientific knowledge. Though some social constructivists do seem to make claims that are that strong, Bloor himself (there may be some incautious remarks) does not.

Thus, Harding does not provide a serious argument against a kind of objectivity. Her position seems to faced with some dilemmas: If there is no objectivity, there can be no objective sense in which feminist science is better or worse than any other kind of science (except that internal political one that it is better for feminists). If there is objectivity, then her claim that feminists make better scientists is subject to test, and she has neither done nor suggested appropriate ways of doing such tests and she has given no reason to think her conclusion is correct.

Having said all that, let me something in defense of a claim related to Hardings: science may well go better if scientists are diverse, taken from many groups. Different groups have different interests and expectations, and so they will pick different problems and see different kinds of solutions. Restricting scientific work to Lysenkoists, or sexist males, or feminist females, or the wealthy, is probably a bad idea.

-- ShaughanLavine - 16 Apr 2009