Comment on Haraway's "In the Beginning Was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory"

Abstract

I am grateful to Donna Haraway for her critical attention to the writings of some feminist scientists, including mine (Signs 6, no. 3 [Spring 1981]: 469-81). As we who are working scientists raise issues about science and its methodologies, we are bound to confront critical philosophical and historical questions which can only benefit from dialogue with philosopher-historians like Haraway, Elizabeth Fee, and other feminist theoreticians working in other disciplines. I agree that my article contains contradictions concerning the nature and use of evidence that I did not then address. It is not the same article I would write today, three years later. In this commentary, rather than contradict Haraway, I should like to acknowledge and respond to some of the problems that she raises-with, however, one small exception. In my discussion of the traditional use of the term harem to describe singlemale troops of primates, I cited the observations of Jane Lancaster as contradicting that anthropomorphic assumption about the social relationships within such a troop. Whether or not that indicates my acceptance of a feminist interpretation as real as Haraway suggests, I do believe that there is a qualitative difference between primate studies that impute particular relationships to primates because they look like humans (though a bit hairier) and studies that attempt to perceive what the relationships may be by actually observing interactions among individuals in the troop. Of course, the latter type of studies also have been and will continue to be influenced, perhaps to an immeasurable degree, by what the observer is able (i.e., prefers) to see and not see and how she or he interprets the observations. Haraway makes an important point when she describes a contradiction in feminist theory: In attacking the science of biological determinists, some of us use other scientific but how or why are these more valid? The problem is particularly difficult if at the same time we assert the essential subjectivity of all including science, admitting that the realities we attempt to describe, measure, or interpret are circumscribed by our abilities to perceive them and that those perceptive abilities are limited not only technically but conceptually and ideologically. While we recognize that in science, as in any other field, all knowledge, evidence, data, observations, facts, truths are products of the perceptions, judgments, opinions, methodologies, and language of those who describe them, they are, nonetheless, all that we have as the material objects of our discourse; they are our subject matter when we attempt our deconstructions and Signs