Objectivity: Feminism, Values, and Science

Abstract

Gender, Science, and Values: The Gender and Science Reader (2001), an anthology edited by Muriel Lederman and Ingrid Bartsch, is an ambitious and needed collection addressing the role that gender plays in science and the questions this raises for a feminist science. The stated goals for this anthology are: 1) to provide a teaching tool for science studies; 2) to provide a source book for courses addressing these issues; 3) to increase familiarity for instructors across all disciplines; 4) to impact practitioners of science. The selections support these goals admirably and are suitably interdisciplinary, including selections by scientists, historians, philosophers, and science studies scholars.1 Hugh Lacey's recent book, Is Science Value Free? Values and Scientific Understanding (1999) is, in contrast, a single-author work that investigates the relation between science and values. The question of whether science is value free is closely connected to that of gender and science, since gender itself is laden with social values and it is precisely these sorts of social values that Lacey is wondering about. Lacey acknowledges this in addressing issues of feminism in one of his key chapters. Discussing both of these books when their goals are so different is difficult, but an overlap of subject provides motivation for doing so. Both books, in their different ways, are addressing the question of how the details of the claim that social factors, particularly gender, influence or play a role in science should be understood. They are complementary in that Lacey's analysis can be read as providing a framework from which to address the specific sorts of concerns the readings in the anthology raise. At the same time, many of those readings present a challenge to parts of Lacey's analysis. I will focus on the way the issue of the objectivity of science is raised in these works as a way of organizing the discussion.