Against Epistemological Chasms: The Science Question in Feminism Revisited

Abstract

he rejection of by some feminists has been core to the development of alternative epistemologies, whether standpoint or postmodern (Harding 1986, 1991; Nicholson 1990), despite the argument of others (e.g., Keller 1992). Yet this rejection has often been based on caricatured or outdated conceptions of science. The insights of modern sociology and philosophy of science' need to be integrated in order to revise such conceptions of knowledge, though this is not to argue that there are not many problems relating to the gendering of scientific knowledge.2 Feminist analysis should be bolder about its truth claims, rather than retreating into a defensive stance about partial knowledges. Science is not a mirror of nature (Rorty 1980), but neither is it a mirror of culture. Science is poised both in between and as a part of each of these, and there is a need for concepts and metaphors that avoid the temptation of reductionism in either direction. This article is an attempt to contribute to such an analysis. Signs (1997) has rightly reopened the debate about standpoint epistemology, and this article seeks to build on Susan Hekman's (1997) critique while offering an alternative resolution to the dilemmas she exposes. The defensive posture of feminist analysis initially adopted in the 1970s and 1980s has become embedded within epistemologies that emphasize the difference between the knowledge derived from women's experiences and those of men, and, later, also the knowledges among women from different cultures. Standpoint epistemology is based on the presumption of a chasm between the knowledge of the oppressed and that of the oppressor, in which the oppressed develop their own practices in order to develop better knowledge. Yet contemporary philosophy and sociology of science (Quine