Abstract
As political activist Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote in 1970: “whenever the enemy keeps lobbing bombs into some area you consider unrelated to your defense, it’s always worth investigating.”1
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Notes and References
Amazon Odyssey (New York, NY: Links Books, 1974), p. 131.
Gerald Holton,Science and Anti-Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 143.
Holton, pp. 152–154; my emphasis.
Holton, p. 181; my emphasis.
Lewis Wolpert,The Unnatural Nature of Science: Why science does not make (common) sense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 101; my emphasis.
Wolpert, p. 103; my emphasis.
Wolpert, p. 115; my emphasis.
Wolpert, p. 117; my emphasis.
M. F. Perutz, “The Pioneer Defended”; Review of Gerald L. Geison’s The Private Science of Louis Pasteur’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press),New York Review of Books, XLII (20) (December 21, 1995), p. 54; my emphasis.
Perutz, p. 54; my emphasis.
Paul Gross and Norman Levitt,Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), p. 9.
Gross and Levitt, p. 2; my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 45–46. That is, strong cultural constructivists “view science as a wholly social product, a mere set of conventions generated by social practice” (1994, p. 11, their emphasis).
Gross and Levitt, p. 45; my emphasis. Or, it “affords no special leverage among competing versions of the story of the world” (1994, p. 38; my emphasis).
Gross and Levitt, p. 47.
Gross and Levitt, p. 4. Cf. p. 15, on the potential for these authors having a “great and pernicious social effect.”
Gross and Levitt, p. 7.
See David Hull’s important analysis and documentation of a variety of dynamics in scientific inquiry, in David L. Hull,Science as a Process (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
In describing the value of social analyses of science to scientific success, Sandra Harding writes: “we can hold that certain social conditions make it possible for humans to produce more reliable explana tions of patterns in nature just as other social conditions make it more difficult to do so,” ‘Why “Physics” is a Bad Model for Physics,’ in The End of Science? Attack and Defense (25th Nobel Conference, 1989) (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), p. 7. Cf. Gross and Levitt’s claim: “scientists welcome the sort of ‘social’ explanation that examines minutely and honestly the intellectual, attitudinal, and … the moral preconditions of culture that encourage and sustain the practice of science” (1994, p. 128).
E.g., Holton, 1993, pp. 114–123
155–156
181–184
Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 110
Wolpert, 1992, Ch. 8.
See their section heading, “The Face of the Enemy” (1994, p. 34).
“The central appeal of [science studies] is the pretext is provides to disparage the natural sciences — to dismiss their astounding achievements as so much legerdemain on the part of a ruling elite” (Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 240; my emphasis).
Helga Nowotny and Hilary Rose, ed. (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel, 1979).
1994, pp. 245–257.
“Modern science is seen, by virtually all of its critics, to be both a powerful instrument of the reigning order and an ideological guarantor of its legitimacy” (Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 12; my emphasis). Do they think the sciences play important, legitimating, social roles, or not?
Quoted in Wolpert, 1992, p. 170.
Wolpert, p. 178.
Gross and Levitt, p. 68; my emphasis.
Wolpert, pp. 113–114.
Wolpert, p. 110; my emphasis.
Harding, 1992, p. 19; my emphasis.
Again, these authors claim they’re not against pursuing the questions asked in history, philosophy, anthropology, or sociology of science; they are only against how these studies are actually done (Gross and Levitt, 1994, p. 69; but see nn. 21 and 23). Their proposals for a proper or more appropriate standard of practice for these studies will be discussed in later sections; at this point, however, the burden of proof is on them to reject the present standards in science studies.
Gross and Levitt, p. 58; their emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 58; their emphasis.
Harding, 1992, p. 14. Harding also emphasizes the unsuitability of the training of natural scientists for the task at hand: “Natural scientists are trained in context stripping, while the science of science, like other social sciences, requires training in context seeking” (1992, p. 16).
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Shapin and Schaffer, p. 283, quoted in Gross and Levitt, p. 63; my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 64.
Gross and Levitt, p. 63; surely Gross and Levitt would not want to deny this.
Gross and Levitt, p. 64; my emphasis.
Shapin and Schaffer, p. 344, quoted in Gross and Levitt, p. 65.
Gross and Levitt, p. 65.
Gross and Levitt, p. 67; their emphasis. One hotly debated question at the time concerned the proper role of mathematics, scientifically; the issue was especially pressing, given the prominent place that Descartes had given mathematics in the definition of knowledge itself, contrasted with the deficiencies of his physics. Gross and Levitt ignore this.
Gross and Levitt, p. 67.
Gross and Levitt, p. 68.
Gross and Levitt, p. 65; my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 234.
Gross and Levitt, p. 49.
Gross and Levitt, p. 49; my emphasis. Given this view of appropriate explanation and evidence, we must wonder about the ingenuousness of Gross and Levitt’s disclaimer that “working scientists are not entitled to special immunity from the scrutiny of social science” (1994, p. 42).
Gross and Levitt, p. 49; their emphasis.
Wolpert, p. 116
my emphasis. Andrew Pickering,Constructing Quarks: a sociological history of particle physics (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1984).
Wolpert, p. 116; my emphasis.
“We are accusing a powerful faction in modern academic life of intellectual dereliction. This accusa tion has nothing to do with political correctness or ‘subversion’; it has to do, rather, with the craft of scholarship” (Gross and Levitt, p. 239).
See Gross and Levitt’s appeal to scientists’ right to judge, as experts, all work concerning “scientific methodology, history of science, or the very legitimacy of science” (1994, p. 255).
The majority of adult Americans receive their information about the world from TV news, with radio news running second. Among the science scandals aired on national network news within the past 24 months, I would mention: the manufacture of data for the Pittsburgh Breast Cancer study; the reinstatements of eggs into the recommended anti-cholesterol diet; the well-publicized omission of women from nearly all of the most extensive and expensive heart disease studies, which led to a special initiative by Congress; and earlier, the Dalkon Shield devastation; the fanciful claim by President Ronald Reagan that there is no evidence that radiation causes cancer (see Philip Fradkin,Fallout (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989)); or the revelations of the horror of radiation experiments done on unsuspecting civilians from the 1940s through the 1970s. The public perceptions of some of the scientists involved in these events is far from the genius with special insight into nature, and closer to Drs Frankenstein or Mengele.
The fact that ‘executive deniability’ has been an essential part of CIA operations policy since its inception is well-documented; see John Ranelagh’s sympathetic history,The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, 1986.
Perutz, 1995, p. 54.
John F. W. Herschel,A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831). I must note that this distinction has come under sustained criticism within philosophy of science, especially by feminists. My focus here, however, is on the most conservative views of science held by working scientists. The point is that even under these views, objections to the feminist source of specific scientific contributions violates the canons of scientific conduct.
Friedrich A. Kekule, ‘Origin of the Benzene and Structural Theory,’ Chemistry, 38 (1965): 9.
See sections 4.2 and 5.2 for elaboration. For the most recent work on why sexist science is not properly characterized as ‘bad’ science, see Synthese, 104 (September 1995).
Anne Fausto-Sterling,Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 10.
Fausto-Sterling, pp. 8, 60.
Ruth Bleier, ‘Sex Differences Research: Science or Belief?’ Ruth Bleier, ed.,Feminist Approaches to Science, (New York, NY: Pergamon, 1986), p. 149.
Also, Ruth Bleier,Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984).
See esp. Helen Longino, ‘The Essential Tensions — Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science,’ A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 257–272
Longino,Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)
John Dupre,The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
Sandra Harding,Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)
Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity?,’ Feminist pistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), 49–82
Harding, ‘“Strong Objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question,’ Synthese, 104.3 (1995), 331–349
Longino J, ‘Gender, Politics, and the Theoretical Virtues,’ Synthese, 104.3 (1995), 383–397
Lynn Hankinson Nelson,Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990)
Lynn Hankinson Nelson, ‘Epistemological Communities,’ Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), 121–159
Nancy Tuana, ‘The Values of Science: Empiricism from a Feminist Perspective,’ Synthese, 104.3 (1995): 441–461
Tuana, ed.,Feminism and Science (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989)
Alison Wylie, ‘Methodological Essentialism: Comments on philosophy, sex and feminism,’ Atlantis, 13.2 (1988), 11–14
Cf. Paul Feyerabend,Against Method (London, UK: New Left Bookstore, 1975)
John Stuart Mill,On Liberty.
Longino, 1993, p. 266.
1993, p. 266; my emphasis.
Treated at length in E. Lloyd, ‘Objectivity and the Double Standard for Feminist Epistemologies,’ Synthese, 104 (September 1995), 351–381.
1993, p. 265. See also Longino,Science as Social Knowledge, 1990, esp. Chapters 4 and 9.
1995, p. 384. Cf. Wolpert, on science’s “rigorous set of unstated norms for acceptable behaviour”: “Included in these norms are the ideas that science is public knowledge, freely available to all; that there are no privileged sources of scientific knowledge — ideas in science must be judged on their intrinsic merits; and that scientists should take nothing on trust, in the sense that scientific knowledge should be constantly scrutinized” (1992, p. 88). Like Longino, Wolpert emphasizes the community-level process over the individual traits of researchers: “leaving aside the question of whether scientists are more objective, rational, logical and so forth, scientists have developed a procedure in which there are free discussion, accepted standards of behaviour and a means of ensuring that truth will, in the long run, win. Truth will win in the sense that open discussion and observing nature constitute the best way of making progress” (1992, pp. 122–123; my emphasis).
Gross and Levitt assert: “there are as yet no examples…of scientific knowledge informed, reformed, enhanced by feminism” (1994, p. 112). Their strategies for dealing with the numerous feminist contributions to the sciences they subsequently cite are instructive: briefly put, if feminist work is persuasive and is accepted as correct, it’s simply good science; if not, it’s bad science tainted by ideology. In other words, the feminist contributions to science are either not feminist or not contributions.
Fausto-Sterling, p. 213; her emphasis.
Fausto-Sterling, p. 213.
See Donna Haraway,Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989), for a comprehensive bibliography and analysis. I have borrowed from Haraway’s discussion of J. Altmann in presenting this case.
Jeanne Altmann, ‘Observational Study of Behavior: Sampling Methods,’ Behaviour, 49, 227–267.
Haraway, p. 307.
‘Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female,’ Feminist Approaches to Science, Ruth Bleier, ed. (New York, NY: Pergamon), 135–136
cf: Linda Fedigan,Primate Paradigms (Montreal, Can: Eden, 1982)
Shirely Strum,Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons (New York, NY: Random House, 1987).
Margarita Levin, ‘Caring New Science: Feminism and Science,’ American Scholar, 57 (Winter 1988), 100; my emphasis.
Levin, p. 100; her emphasis.
Levin, p. 104; my emphasis.
Clifford Geertz, ‘A Lab of One’s Own,’ NY Review of Books, 37 (8 November 1990), 19; my emphasis.
Geertz, p. 23; my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 111.
Gross and Levitt, p. 38.
Gross and Levitt, p. 162; my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 123; my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 145–146.
Gross and Levitt, p. 146.
Gross and Levitt, p. 147; their emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 147.
Other instances can be found in: Levin, 1988
Michael Ruse,Is Science Sexist? And Other Problems in the Biomedical Sciences, (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981); and
John R. Searle, ‘Rationality and Realism: What is at Stake?,’ Daedalus, 122.4 (1993), 55–84.
Longino, 1990, pp. 119
Longino, 1990, 127
Longino, 1990, 131
Longino, 1990, 134
Helen Longino and Ruth Doell, ‘Body, Bias and Behavior: A Comparative Analysis of Reasoning in Two Areas of Biological Science,’ Signs, 9 (1983), 206–227.
(See block quote, above). Bleier, 1984,Science and Gender, Fausto-Sterling, 1985, 133–141. The work of Harvard biologist and feminist Ruth Hubbard is also very important, especially
Anne Fausto-Sterling,Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, (New York: Basic Books, 1985, 133–141. The work of Harvard biologist and feminist Ruth Hubbard is also very important, especially
Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifen, and Barbara Fried, eds,Biological Woman, the Convenient Myth: A Collection of Feminist Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1982)
Ruth Hubbard,The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
Gross and Levitt, p. 125. Since Fausto-Sterling acknowledges the existence of biological differences between males and females throughout her book, it remains mysterious how Gross and Levitt could defend this statement, unless they put all the weight for its truth on whatever they mean by “significant”.
Gross and Levitt, p. 11, their emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 47.
Gross and Levitt, p. 46.
Gross and Levitt, p. 122
quoting the Biology and Gender Study Group, ‘The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology,’ Hypatia, 3 (1): 61–76 (Spring 1988).
Reprinted in Nancy Tuana, ed.,Feminism and Science (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Gross and Levitt, p. 274
also Levin, p. 100.
Gross and Levitt, p. 110.
Gross and Levitt, p. 112.
Gross and Levitt, p. 110.
Gross and Levitt, p. 44.
Gross and Levitt, p. 56; their emphasis.
Levin, p. 100.
Gross and Levitt, p. 112.
My analysis of the inconsistencies and grave evidential problems in recent evolutionary theorizing about women’s orgasm has been met repeatedly with the response that it is ‘simply good science’; this reaction fails to engage the problem I address, namely,why it took decades for these able scientists to become aware that the evidence they cited undermined their own explanations. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, ‘Pre-theoretical Assumptions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality,’ Philosophical Studies, 69(1993), 139–153.
Paul Gross and Norman Levitt,Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), p. 131. They also admit that women’s scientific “contributions have often in the past been undervalued” (1994, p. 123). How do they account for the fact that this happened in the first place? How do they account for the fact that it has, according to them, changed?
Gross and Levitt, pp. 32
Gross and Levitt, pp. 108
Holton, pp. 152, The targets are Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding, respectively.
Holton, pp. 143.
1990, p. 193, my emphasis.
Harding, 1992, p. 1. She also states, “it’s a very conservative notion of objectivity that I’m … proposing here … there are important aspects of the traditional notion of [scientific] objectivity which need not be challenged in order to accomplish the goals that I have in mind” (p. 20).
Gross and Levitt, p. 109; my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, p. 108, my emphasis.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 108.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 122.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 251.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 159.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 235.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 236.
Gross and Levitt, pp. 251.
While Holton clearly is referring to Keller’s work, he perveresely refuses to name her or to cite any of her books or articles (1993, p. 154).
Gross and Levitt’s inclusion of Haraway and Keller among the four chief representatives for feminist views of science belies their earlier aside that “a handful of figures with scientific credentials, as well as the occasional refugee from an unsatisfactory scientific career, can be found on the movement’s fringes” (p. 14; p. 6, my emphasis).
“Sciences will not, in any serious way, be influenced, deflected, restricted, or even inconvenienced by these critics and those they influence” (1994, p. 236; see pp. 3, 11, 112, 253–256).
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Lloyd, E.A. (1996). Science and Anti-Science: Objectivity and Its Real Enemies. In: Nelson, L.H., Nelson, J. (eds) Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library, vol 256. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1742-2_11
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