Standpoint theory is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology. Its central insight is that epistemic advantage may accrue to those who are oppressed by structures of domination and discounted as knowers. Feminist standpoint theorists hold that gender is one dimension of social differentiation that can make such a difference. In response to two longstanding objections I argue that epistemically consequential standpoints need not be conceptualized in essentialist terms, and that they do not confer automatic or comprehensive epistemic privilege (...) on those who occupy them. Standpoint theory is best construed as conceptual framework for investigating the ways in which socially situated experience and interests make a contingent difference to what we know (well), and to the resources we have for determining which knowledge claims we can trust. I illustrate the advantages of this account in terms of two examples drawn from archaeological sources. (shrink)

Having encountered landmines in offering a critique of philosophy based on my experience as the mother of a cognitively disabled daughter, I ask, “Should I continue?” I defend the idea that pursuing this project is of a piece with the invisible care labor that is done by people with disabilities and their families. The value of attempting to influence philosophical conceptions of cognitive disability by virtue of this experience is justified by an inextricable relationship between the personal, the political, and (...) the philosophical. If one grants that the “special relationship” between mother and child requires moral recognition, then I need first to make vivid the case that this relationship in the case of a child who lacks some “normal capacities” is indistinguishable from any mother‐child relationship. If this is so, then I believe I can make a case that has as its conclusion that the moral personhood of even the severely cognitively disabled must be granted. Moreover, such recognition, I argue, necessitates the recognition of others who bear no special relationships to the child. (shrink)

REVIEW (1): "Jeff Kochan’s book offers both an original reading of Martin Heidegger’s early writings on science and a powerful defense of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) research program. Science as Social Existence weaves together a compelling argument for the thesis that SSK and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology should be thought of as mutually supporting research programs." (Julian Kiverstein, in Isis) ---- REVIEW (2): "I cannot in the space of this review do justice to the richness and range of Kochan's (...) discussion [...]. There is a great deal in this foundational portion of Kochan's discussion that I find tremendously interesting and engaging [...]." (David R. Cerbone, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) ---- REVIEW (3): "Science as Social Existence will be of interest not only to Heidegger scholars but to anyone engaged in science and technology studies. [...] This is an informative and original book. Kochan should be praised for his clear, pleasant-to-read prose." (Michael Butler, in CHOICE). (shrink)

One question of the bounds of cognition is that of which things have it. A scientifically relevant debate on this question must explain the persistent and selective use of psychological predicates to report findings throughout biology: for example, that neurons prefer, fruit flies and plants decide, and bacteria communicate linguistically. This paper argues that these claims should enjoy default literal interpretation. An epistemic consequence is that these findings can contribute directly to understanding the nature of psychological capacities.

Responsible conduct of research training typically includes only a subset of the issues that ought to be included in science ethics and sometimes makes ethics appear to be a set of externally imposed rules rather than something intrinsic to scientific practice. A new approach to science ethics training based upon Pennock’s notion of the scientific virtues may help avoid such problems. This paper motivates and describes three implementations—theory-centered, exemplar-centered, and concept-centered—that we have developed in courses and workshops to introduce students (...) to this scientific virtue-based approach. (shrink)

This article explores the so-called `postsecular' turn from two different but intersecting angles. The first part of the argument offers a reasoned cartography of the postsecular discourses, both in general and within feminist theory. The former includes the impact of extremism on all monotheistic religions in a global context of neo-conservative politics and perpetual war. The context of international violence has dire consequences for the social space, which is increasingly militarized, but also for academic debates, which become more and more (...) restricted in scope and freedom. The article then shifts to mapping the intersection between feminism and the postsecular condition. The main argument is that the postsecular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality. This statement also implies that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional and thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the production of counter-subjectivities. Subjectivity is rather a process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values, and hence also multiple forms of accountability. The double challenge of linking subjectivity to religious agency, and disengaging both from oppositional consciousness and critique defined as negativity, is one of the main issues this article wants to address. In the conclusion the article raises the issue of the affirmative power of critical theory and the kind of ethical values it may be able to engender. (shrink)

It is argued, that theory sf signs, especially in the tradition of the great philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) can inspire the study of central problems in the philosophy of biology. Three such problems are considered: (1) The nature of biology as a science, where a semiotically informed pluralistic approach to the theory of science is introduced. (2) The peculiarity of the general object of biology, where a realistic interpretation of sign- and information-concepts is required to see sign-processes as immanent (...) in nature. (3) The possibility of an artificial construction of life, hereby discussed as a conceptual problem in the present form of the artificial life project and its implied definition of life. (shrink)

Reason has regularly been portrayed and understood in terms of images and metaphors that involve the exclusion or denigration of some element-body, passion, nature, instinct-that is cast as "feminine." Drawing upon philosophical insight into metaphor, I examine the impact of this gendering of reason. I argue that our conceptions of mind, reason, unreason, female, and male have been distorted. The politics of "rational" discourse has been set up in ways that still subtly but powerfully inhibit the voice and agency of (...) women. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the problematic relation between sex and gender in parallel with the equally problematic relation between nature and science. I also offer a provisional analysis of the political dynamics that work to polarize both kinds of discourse, focusing especially on their intersection (i.e., on discussions of gender and science), and on that group most directly affected by all of the above considerations (i.e., women scientists).

ArgumentThe nineteenth century witnessed the advent of the modern zoo. Nearly everyone who came to watch the exotic animals was a “lay person” in the sense that virtually none had formal training in zoology. This paper provides a typology of these observers: the zoo directors, assistants, keepers, animal painters, and the “common” visitor. What did they observe and what were their motivations? Did they pursue a certain agenda? What kind of knowledge, if any, did they produce? Soon the issue of (...) the reliability of these observations emerged. Lay observers insisted on the veracity of their intimate and personal knowledge of animals while academics complained that their claims could not be generalized and were tainted by anthropomorphism. Hence the focus on the observations of these laymen will reveal contemporary assumptions on what may count as “scientific.” This is closely linked to the question of how far the zoo may qualify as a site of scientific investigation in the first place. The constraints on doing research on animals in a public space such as the zoo were numerous. Yet despite these obstacles the zoological garden contributed to the rise of ecological thinking as well as to the formation of ethology as a scientific discipline. (shrink)

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores (...) these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective. (shrink)

Both geologists and historians study the past, but they have divergent views of the present. Geologists are unambiguously presentist. They believe that the observable present is a crucial resource in understanding the past, because in the observable present we can see and study the processes that have occurred in the unobservable past. For geologists, it is largely uncontroversial that the past not only can but should be interpreted with reference to the present.

I bring several ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology to bear on mainstream animal rights theories, especially on the rights and utilitarian treatments of the animal research issue. Throughout, I show how animal rights issues are feminist issues and clarify the relationship between ecofeminism and animal rights.

Ontology, the ideas we have about the nature of reality, and epistemology, our concepts about how to gain knowledge about the world, are interdependent. Currently, the dominant ontology in science is a materialist model, and associated with it an empiricist epistemology. Historically speaking, there was a more comprehensive notion at the cradle of modern science in the middle ages. Then “experience” meant both inner, or first person, and outer, or third person, experience. With the historical development, experience has come to (...) mean only sense experience of outer reality. This has become associated with the ontology that matter is the most important substance in the universe, everything else—consciousness, mind, values, etc., —being derived thereof or reducible to it. This ontology is insufficient to explain the phenomena we are living with—consciousness, as a precondition of this idea, or anomalous cognitions. These have a robust empirical grounding, although we do not understand them sufficiently. The phenomenology, though, demands some sort of non-local model of the world and one in which consciousness is not derivative of, but coprimary with matter. I propose such a complementarist dual aspect model of consciousness and brain, or mind and matter. This then also entails a different epistemology. For if consciousness is coprimary with matter, then we can also use a deeper exploration of consciousness as happens in contemplative practice to reach an understanding of the deep structure of the world, for instance in mathematical or theoretical intuition, and perhaps also in other areas such as in ethics. This would entail a kind of contemplative science that would also complement our current experiential mode that is exclusively directed to the outside aspect of our world. Such an epistemology might help us with various issues, such as good theoretical and other intuitions. (shrink)

In neocolonial contexts of globalization, the epistemological terrain of radical diversity poses significant ethical challenges to transnational feminisms. In view of historical associations between knowledge and discourses of love which were conditioned by imperialist brands of humanism and benevolence under colonialism, this paper argues for a deconstructionist approach to conceptualizing love in relation to knowledge and for an ethics that severs the association with benevolence, instead making alterity the basis for its account.

What humans know about the soil has material implications for the future of life on Earth. This paper looks at how soil is in the process of becoming visible as a living world at the heart of an epoch marked by technoscientific management of the environment. Scientific knowledge of the natural world is encountering a range of collectives and individuals striving to renew humans’ relationships with non human and organic ways of life. Soil is an interesting case for the study (...) of absence: all around, yet hardly apparent for many of us. Drawing upon Susan Leigh Star’s approach to “residues” and “infrastructures” allows soil to appear in all its ecological significance, as the final home to all residues and the dismissed infrastructure of bios. The aim of this essay is not only contributing to make soil visible, but to treat its passing into visibility as an event in its own right that reveals soil’s ambivalent material and cultural significance. As ecological visions come to reclaim this mistreated living ecosystem, it is not only the knowledge about soil that could be transformed but the soil itself. (shrink)

Much recent discussion in the aesthetics of nature has focused on Scientific cognitivism, the view that in order to engage in a deep and appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature, one must possess certain kinds of scientific knowledge. The most pressing difficulty faced by this view is an apparent tension between the very notion of aesthetic appreciation and the nature of scientific knowledge. In this essay, I describe this difficulty, trace some of its roots and argue that attempts to dismiss it (...) fail. I then develop a response to the problem, drawing on the notion of the theory-ladenness of observation. I conclude by considering the relationship between this response and one common approach to the problem, the appeal to expressive qualities in nature. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to integrate two outstanding problems within the philosophy of science. The first concerns what role aesthetics plays in scientific thinking. The second is the problem of how logically testable ideas are generated (the so-called "psychology of research" versus "logic of (dis)proof" problem). I argue that aesthetic sensibility is the basis for what scientists often call intuition, and that intuition in turn embodies (in a literal physiological sense) ways of thinking that have their own meta-logic. (...) Thus, aesthetics is a form of cognition. Scientists think not in equations or words or other logical abstractions, but emotionally and sensually, using visual and aural images, kinesthetic and other proprioceptive feelings, sensations, patterns, and analogies. These aesthetic forms of thinking have their own logics that I call "synosia", from the root words synaesthesia (a combining of senses) and gnosis, "to know". Synosia denotes understanding that integrates feeling that one knows with feeling what one knows. Eminent scientists universally describe an explicitly secondary process in which such personal knowledge must be "translated" into a formal language, such as words or equations, in order to be communicated to other people. Many of the unsolved problems that philosophers of science (as well as psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers) have had in making sense of scientific thinking have arisen from confusing the form and content of the final translations with the hidden means by which scientific insights are actually achieved. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers of science have produced an exciting array of works in the last several years, from critiques of androcentrism in traditional science to theories about what might constitute feminist science. I suggest here another possibility: that gynocentric science has existed all along, then the task of identifying a feminist alternative to androcentric science should be a suitable candidate for empirical investigation. Such empirical investigation could provide a solid ground for further theorizing about feminist science at a time when that (...) solid ground is looking rather necessary. (shrink)

This article considers the reception of British cytogeneticist C.D. Darlington's controversial 1932 book, Recent Advances in Cytology. Darlington's cytogenetic work, and the manner in which he made it relevant to evolutionary biology, marked an abrupt shift in the status and role of cytology in the life sciences. By focusing on Darlington's scientific method -- a stark departure from anti-theoretical, empirical reasoning to a theoretical and speculative approach based on deduction from genetic first principles -- the article characterises the relationships defining (...) the "disciplinary landscape" of the life sciences of the time, namely those between cytology, genetics, and evolutionary theory. (shrink)

The work of feminists in science may seem less voluminous and less theoretical than the feminist scholarship in some humanities and social science disciplines. However, the recent burst of scholarship on women and science allows categorization of feminist work into six distinct but related categories: 1) teaching and curriculum transformation in science, 2) history of women in science, 3) current status of women in science, 4) feminist critique of science, 5) feminine science, 6) feminist theory of science. More feminists in (...) science are needed to further explore science and its relationships to women and feminism in order to change traditional science to a feminist science. (shrink)

This essay is a case study of the self-destruction that occurs in the work of a social-constructionist historian of science who embraces a radical philosophy of science. It focuses on Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud in arguing that a history of science committed to the social construction of science and to the central theses of Kuhnian, Duhemian, and Quinean philosophy of science is incoherent through self-reference. Laqueur's text is examined in detail in order (...) to make the main point; a similar phenomenon in the work of the feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller is then briefly discussed. (shrink)

Scientists of the Human Genome Project tend to rely on three metaphors to describe their work, each of which implicitly tells much the same story. Whether they claim to interpret the ultimate "book," to fix a flawed "machine," or to map a mysterious "wilderness," they invariably cast the researcher as one who dominates and exploits the Other. This essay, which explores the ways such a story conflicts with feminist values, proposes an alternative.

Physical literacy, a concept introduced by Britain’s physical education and phenomenological scholar, Margaret Whitehead, who aligned the term with her monist view of the human condition and emphasis that we are essentially embodied beings in-the-world, is a foundational hub of recent physical education curricular revision. The adoption of the term serves a political purpose as it helps stakeholders advocate for the educational, specifically literacy, rights of the whole child. Yet, one might wonder what impact conceptual shifts of becoming “physically literate” (...) in lieu of becoming “physically educated” have on physical education research and practice. Terms such as “reading” the game and metaphors that describe the body as an “instrument of expression” are entering the lexicon of physical education but from a seemingly cognitive frame of reference. Arguably, the extent to which the adoption of physical literacy has on dissolving Cartesian views of the body and the mechanization of movement it performs has yet to be questioned. This article thus acts as an invitation to explore physical literacy in a Merleau-Pontian inspired act of inscribing the world through movement and how a reading of a reversible imprint might awaken a more fluent sense of what it means to become physically literate as new curricular pathways in the field of physical education emerge. (shrink)

Some exceptional and surprising mistakes of scholarship made in the writings of a number of feminist academics (Ruth Bleier, Ruth Hubbard, Susan Bordo, Sandra Harding, and Rae Langton) are examined in detail. This essay offers the psychological hypothesis that these mistakes were the result of political passion and concludes with some remarks about the ability of the social sciences to study the effect of the politics of the researcher on the quality of his or her research.

The aim of this paper is to show that science, understood as pure research, ought not to be affected by non-epistemic values and thus to defend the traditional ideal of value-free science. First, we will trace the distinction between science and technology, arguing that science should be identified with pure research and that any non-epistemic concern should be di­rected toward technology and technological research. Second, we will examine different kinds of values and the roles they can play in scientific research (...) to argue that science understood as pure research is mostly and in any case ought to be value-free. Third, we will consider and dismiss some widespread arguments that aim to defend, especially at a normative level, the inevitable value-ladenness of science. Finally, we will briefly return to the connections among science, technology, and values. (shrink)

Loyal Rue suggests that religion is not about God as such but about the cultivation of personal and social well-being. Religion may employ cultural resources that include concepts of supernatural agencies, but religion's essential functionalities are not dependent on that particular resource. I largely endorse Rue's view of religion and employ Rue as a guide to thinking through its consequences for the future of Christianity. For Rue, two challenges face Christianity: the erosion of confidence in personal-god concepts and the ecological (...) crisis engulfing the planet. In the face of these twin momentous changes, I suggest ways in which certain cultural tropes in the Christian matrix will rise to the fore and others will erode. (shrink)

This paper addresses, and seeks to correct, some frequent misunderstandings concerning the claim that science is socially constructed. It describes several features of scientific inquiry that have been usefully illuminated by constructivist studies of science, including the mundane or tacit skills involved in research, the social relationships in scientific laboratories, the causes of scientific controversy, and the interconnection of science and culture. Social construction, the paper argues, should be seen not as an alternative to but an enhancement of scientists’ own (...) professional understanding of how science is done. The richer, more finely textured accounts of scientific practice that the constructivist approach provides are potentially of great relevance to public policy. (shrink)

In developing an "internal" sociology of science, the sociology of scientific knowledge drew on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to reinterpret traditional epistemological topics in sociological terms. By construing scientific reasoning as rule following within a collective, sociologists David Bloor and Harry Collins effectively blocked outside criticism of a scientific field, whether scientific, philosophical, or political. Ethnomethodologist Michael Lynch developed an alternative, Wittgensteinian reading that similarly blocked philosophical or political critique, while also disallowing analytical appeals to historical or institutional contexts. I criticize (...) these Wittgensteinian sociologies and argue for the historical and contemporary significance of methodological criticisms of scientific practice that conjoin epistemological and political categories. I consider two such cases briefly: the Baconian criticism of Scholastic science in the early Royal Society and the criticism of AIDS drug testing protocols by activists. Key Words: Wittgenstein • sociology of scientific knowledge • ethnomethodology • scientific method • interpretive sociology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

Scientific communities as social groupings and the role that such communities play in scientific change and the production of scientific knowledge is currently under debate. I examine theory change as a complex social interaction among individual scientists and the scientific community, and argue that individuals will be motivated to adopt a more radical or innovative attitude when confronted with striking similarities between model systems and a more robust understanding of specialised vocabulary. Two case studies from the biological sciences, Barbara McClintock (...) and Stanley Prusiner, help motivate the idea that sharing of models and specialised vocabulary fill the gap between discovery and scientific change by promoting the dispersal of important information throughout the scientific community. (shrink)

As the debates over cloning and stem cell research indicate, issues raised by biotechnology combine research into the genetic sciences, perspectives and contexts articulated by the social sciences, and the ethical and anthropological concerns of philosophy. Consequently, I argue that intervening in the debates over biotechnology requires supra-disciplinary critical philosophy and social theory to illuminate the problems and their stakes. In addition, debates over cloning and stem cell research raise exceptionally important challenges to bioethics and a democratic politics of communication.

Drug discovery traditionally has occurred behind closed doors in for-profit corporations hoping to develop best-selling medicines that recoup initial research investment, sustain marketing infrastructures, and pass on healthy returns to shareholders. Only corporate Pharma has the man- and purchasing-power to synthesize the thousands of molecules needed to find a new drug and to conduct the clinical trials that will make the drug legal. Against this view, individual physician-scientists have suggested that the promise of applied genomics work calls for a new (...) form of social organization in order to speed the generation and understanding of new therapeutics. Recent successes in open source drug discovery show it is possible to produce valuable, empirically adequate, and sustainable collective beliefs without secrecy, proprietary attitudes, initial cooperation from Pharma, or outsized monetary incentives. After reviewing and differentiating these successes, I diagnose the source of this healthy new epistemic strategy. (shrink)

I argue that the theological traditions of natural law and wisdom offer helpful meeting points in discussions about evolutionary “purpose” and contingency in relation to theological purpose, and serve to form the basis for a theology of nature. Natural law offers a way of describing the ordered action of God toward complexity in a contingent world without using the language of either “design” or “progress.” The theological tradition of wisdom as implicit in the natural world, learned in the human community, (...) and received as gift of grace offers a further means of interconnecting biological reality with spiritual experience, while retaining distinctions. Wisdom and natural law intersect inasmuch as natural law is participation in Eternal Wisdom, although the latter makes sense only from the prior perspective of faith. (shrink)

This article reflects on the ‘Philosophy and Gender’ project, which introduced the pedagogical technique known as the ‘Community of Inquiry’ into an undergraduate Gender and the Law course at the University of Western Australia. The Community of Inquiry is a pedagogy developed by Matthew Lipman in the discipline of Philosophy that facilitates collaborative and democratic philosophical thinking in the context of teaching philosophy in schools. Our project was to see if this pedagogy could advance two objectives in Gender and the (...) Law at undergraduate level: ‘reflexive thinking’ and ‘standpoint thinking’. We conclude that the Communities of Inquiry had a significant influence on the development of ‘reflexive thinking’ but appeared to have limited influence on the development of ‘standpoint thinking’. Here we provide a practitioner reflection on an exploratory new approach to teaching in a tertiary setting, with a view to setting an agenda for more systematic research in the future. (shrink)

The introduction to this special issue addresses the production of intimacy in the labour of research. It explores the sensory, emotional and affective relations which form an integral, if often invisible, part of the process through which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate `research'. The article argues that these processes inform the making of knowledge, shape power relations and enable or constrain the practical negotiation of ethical problems. These issues are not, however, often foregrounded in debates on methods or (...) methodology and are frequently erased from researchers' own accounts of their work. The article explores some of the possible reasons for this, which include institutional and cultural conventions of academic practice, the historical legacies with which disciplines often struggle, and the difficult issues and decisions that individual researchers face as they try to negotiate the relations between scholarly research and personal relationships across time, and between scholarly research and, for example, creativity, fiction, or sensationalism. The article concludes with a review of the main themes in the special issue, focusing in particular on the ways in which the contributors use the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis; spatial and temporal proximity and distance; freedom and censorship; subjects and objects. (shrink)

. Gender is a social construct. Technically, it is a grammatical structuring category that may refer to sex, as is typical of Indo‐European languages, or to another set of features such as animate versus inanimate, as is typical of Algonkian languages. Gender in language forces speakers of the language to be continually conscious of application of the category, and they tend to project the categorization into their experience of the world and collocate observations under these broad categories. Western science has (...) been developed by speakers of Indo‐European languages employing male/female genders, and in a cultural tradition that at least since the time of Classical Greece has collocated male with active, creative, rational, and public /dominant , and female with passive, irrational/emotional, and private /subordinate. Religion and science‐organons for rendering existential experience intelligible‐have always been used by the dominant class as instruments of power, and therefore in Western cultures have been entangled with legitimization of a congeries of concepts collocated with male gender. This paper illustrates the social construction of this congeries by contrasting it with non‐Western usages and valuations. (shrink)

Muitos termos possuem um sentido técnico sem que ele seja evidente para todos, por exemplo, a "governança ambiental", termo que remete no contexto atual a uma participação cidadã nesse tipo de questão, por exemplo, da saúde de um ecossistema específico, tal como uma floresta ou um vale agrícola, a partir de preocupações partilhadas e não a partir de uma problemática de controle organizacional. Após ter tornado preciso o que é a expertise e quais são os principais problemas postos pelo recurso (...) à expertise nos contextos da ação cidadã, proponho que as expertises técnicas podem ser postas no mesmo patamar que outros tipos de expertise, referindo principalmente aos saberes comuns, à prática e à experiência concreta, dita "de campo", o que corresponde a uma ampliação. Sugere-se, então, o modelo de fórum híbrido como quadro teórico possível dessa reformulação da concepção de expertise. Many terms have a technical meaning although it is not evident for everyone, for example, the "environmental governance", term that refers in the present context to citizen participation on this type of question, for example, of the health of a specific ecosystem, such as a forest or an agricultural field, from shared preoccupations and not from a problematic of organizational control. After having made precise what is the expertise and what are the main problems posed by the recourse to the expertise in the contexts of citizen action, I propose that technical expertise can be tantamount to other types of expertise, referring mainly to profane knowledge, to the practice and concrete experience called "of field", which corresponds to an enlargement. Then it is suggested the model of an hybrid forum as a possible theoretical frame of this reformulation of the conception of expertise. (shrink)