Chapter 8: Science is Political
Through much of the last three hundred years, science has been regarded in Western societies as a progressive, anti-authoritarian force, able to challenge and break down entrenched ideas and arrangements. Science came to be seen as a force in the maintenance of the status quo, especially with respect to political inequalities. The institution of science itself, it was argued, is full of hidden features that exclude some individuals and welcome others. Revealing the connections between scientific institutions and political power would show that “science is political”, rather than being an institution outside of politics that enjoys a special authority derived from neutrality.
The most important manifestation of this new attitude is found in some forms of feminist philosophy of science.
Feminist thinking about science has been unified to some extent by the idea that science has been a part of a structure that has perpetuated inequalities between men and women. Science, as well as mainstream theorizing about science and knowledge, has helped to keep women in a second-class position as thinkings, investigators, and intellectual citizens. According to feminist analyses, society has suffered from this, and so has science itself.
In Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason, she argues that the historical development of ideas about reason and knowledge was greatly affected by views about the relation between maleness and femaleness. The concept of reason evolved in Western philosophy in a way that associated reasonableness with maleness, and associated the female mind with a set of psychological traits that contrast with reasonableness.
Francis Bacon attacked the ancient Greek picture of knowledge as contemplation. For Bacon, real knowledge is manifested in control of nature: knowledge is power. As Bacon developed this idea, he retained the image of nature (fertile, source of life) as female. His model for the relation between the mind and nature was the model of marriage; a marriage between the knower (man) and nature (woman). The features of a good marriage, as run by the man, corresponds to the features of successful knowledge of the world. A good husband is respectful, but he is also firm and definitely in charge - “nature betrays her secrets more fully when in the grip and under the pressure of art than when in enjoyment of her natural liberty”.
Cases like this suggest that views about the relations between men and women were important resources in the development of ideas about reason and knowledge.
The study of social behavior, especially sexual behavior, is a clear example of how the gender og researchers has had an effect on the development of ideas, one where science has benefited from an increasing role for women in the field.
In nonhuman primates, such as chims and baboons, these parts of biology intially developed a picture of primate sexual life in which females were seen as rather passive. Social and sexual life were regarded as controlled, sometimes cruelly, by males. That picture was linked to some influential pieces of “high theory” in evolutionary biology. This asymmetry between the sexes is of considerable evolutionary importance in the organisms in which it is found.
But careful observation revealed a more active and complex role for female primates. It became apparent that many female primates have elaborate sex lives, involving a lot more different kinds of sexual contact than one would expect based on the old picture.
This shift in thinking within primatology coincided with an influx of women into the field. Hrdy suggests that women did tend to empathize with female primates and watched the details of their behavior more closely than their male colleagues had.
Feminist epistemology
Feminist epistemology includes work that uses feminist theory as a basis for criticizing how science handles evidence and assesses theories. It also includes feminist criticism of the social structure and organization of science, where that structure affects epistemological issues. Most ambitiously, some have argued that our familiar concepts of “reason” and “truth” themselves are covertly sexist. Furthermore, feminist epistemology often makes suggestions about how to make science better, and how to make science more socially responsible.
Harding distinguishes between three kinds of feminist criticism of science:
spontaneous feminist empiricism: this is the project of using a feminist point of view to criticize biases and other problems in scientific work, but in a way that does not challenge the traditional ideals, methods, and norms of science.
feminist empiricism: here the aim is to reverse and improve traditional ideas about science and knowledge, but to do so in a way that remains faithful to basic empiricist ideals.
radical feminist epistemology: two main approaches might be distinguished within this group.
- feminist postmodernism: this work tends to embrace relativism, where the members of different genders, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic classes see the world in fundamentally different ways, and the idea of a single “true” description of the world that transcends these different perspectives is a harmful illusion.
- standpoint epistemology: stresses the role of “situatedness” of an investigator or knower, but as a strength. Standpoint theory holds that some facts will be visible only from a special point of view of people who have been oppressed or marginalized by society. Those at the margins will be able to criticize the basics in ways that others cannot. Science will benefit from taking more seriously the ideas developed by people with this point of view. The marginalized are seen as having better access to crucial facts than other people have, making this position not relativist.
Epistemology becomes a field that tries to distinguish good community-level procedures from bad ones. Good communities include diverse points of view, ensure minority voices are heard, and resolve disputes without coercion.
Postmodernism and the Science Wars
Much of the controversial work in science studies has been allied to the movement in the humanities known as postmodernism. The postmodern movement included a rejection of overarching theories and “metanarratives” of all kinds, and the replacement of those arrogant presumptions by a mosaic of local theories. Postmodernism allied itself with traditions that oppose the idea that language should be analyzed as a system used to represent objects and situations in the world. They described and welcomed a “dissolving” not just of traditional ideas of objectivity and truth, but of the idea that stable meanings are a feature of language at all.
At times, postmodernism has become a tremendously obscure way of arguing for extreme forms of relativism.
The backlash occurred in the form of an attack both on science studies and the humanities more generally. The resulting clash became known as the “science wars”.
Some of the attacks on science studies and other work came from the side of conservatism in political and social thought. Advocates of “traditional” education worried that transmission of the treasures and values of Western civilization was being undermined by radical leftist faculty members in schools.
Values in Science
Here is a question that is often asked: should science be value-free?
From one side, the answer is yes. A crucial part of the intellectual style developed in the Scientific Revolution is the dispassionate and disinterested study of nature, and attempting to be guided by data without prejudices of any kind. When values do have an effect, they make science less objective.
The answer from the other side of this standard debate is no. It would be impossible for science to be value-free.
Here, the word “epistemic” refers to knowledge and evidence. We can distinguish between epistemic and nonepistemic values, and between epistemic and nonepistemic goals. Understanding the world is an epistemic value. Protecting the environment, or advancing the power of your nation over other nations, is a nonepistemic goal.
It would be impossible for science to be unaffected by the political values of scientists, their funders, and other social groups. Given that fact, it’s best to accept the situation - to accept the impurity of scientific choices in this respect - and do a better job with it.
However, Rudner says that how sure we need to be before we accept a hypothesis will depend on how serious a mistake would be. Our decision regarding the evidence and respecting how strong is “strong enough”, is going to be a function of the importance, in the typically ethical sense, of making a mistake in accepting or rejecting the hypothesis.