Gender, Objectivity, And Realism

Abstract

Evelyn Fox Keller's Reflections on Gender and Science1 was a provocative, interdisciplinary contribution to the feminist critique of science. Keller has con tinued her iconoclastic ways with Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death,2 a collection of essays published in various books and journals after Reflections. She is renowned, in particular, for her intriguing psychoanalytic exploration of the mas culinity of science, which was received with some fanfare, although primarily only among feminists.3 Still, Keller's essay Feminism and Science is the token feminist piece in the gigantic, mainstream teaching anthology The Philosophy of Science,4 so her work has been noticed, and will be scrutinized, by a wider audience. Many scholars occupied with the feminist epistemology project tip their hats to Keller for having done ground-breaking work.5 She proposed, for example, that masculine and scientific have, historically, been yoked to gether, but also that men's (or a masculine) cognitive/emotional style does not have to be the principal or only mode of investigating the world. light of this latter supposition, we are naturally prompted to wonder how far the feminist revamping of science can be pushed. Would women's (or a feminine) cogni tive/emotional style have even more to contribute to our understanding of the world? this paper I examine to what extent Keller's work grounds this exciting, but extreme, idea. Keller's attitude toward science can be situated in the humanist tradition that is more suspicious than congratulatory. get a taste of this antipathy in Bertrand Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook6 voiced sixty years ago some of the concerns that animate Keller in Reflections and Secrets. According to Russell, We may seek knowledge of an object because we love the object or because we wish to have power over it. The former leads to the kind of knowledge that is contemplative, the latter to the kind that is practical (p. 261). The original, ancient for knowledge was the love for the world that sought the ecstacy (p. 262) of contemplating it, not the love for the material benefits of manipulating it. Where science went wrong was in replacing contemplation with manipulation. In the development of science the power has increasing ly prevailed over the love impulse (p. 261), and science became sadistic (p. 263). Russell is here anticipating a motif of Keller's, for in speaking about the