Theory and Reality

by Peter Godfrey-Smith

  9.2 The Man of Reason

  Feminist thinking about science makes up a diverse movement. It is unified, perhaps, by the idea that science has been part of a structure that has perpetuated inequalities between men and women. Science itself, and mainstream theorizing about science and knowledge, have helped to keep women in a "second-class" position as thinkers, knowers, and intellectual citizens. (Even these generalizations about feminist discussions of science have exceptions.) According to feminist analyses, society has suffered from this, and so has science itself. So reform of some kind is needed. There is disagreement on the appropriate kind of reform-ranging from simple suggestions like the inclusion of more women in the sciences, through the encouragement of a specific kind of female "voice" in science, to dethroning science from its preeminent position in Western culture. Feminist thinking about science was often allied with work in the sociology of science, and Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Wittgenstein were also seen as helpful. Some feminists made more unfortunate alliances with Freudian psychoanalysis.

  We should distinguish feminist philosophical ideas about science from more basic feminist political ideas. Feminism in general aims to understand and fight against inequalities between the sexes, with respect to political rights, economic standing, and social status. This has a simple application to science: women were for many years excluded or discouraged from a life in science, as they were excluded from other high-prestige areas of work. This is a simple matter of equality of opportunity, one that raises questions about policy (such as the appropriateness of affirmative action) but does not raise issues in the philosophy of science itself.

  Other feminist work did engage with philosophical issues about science. The work might be categorized in terms of three overlapping strands. One strand is feminist analysis in the history of ideas and the history of science. A second is feminist analysis of specific scientific fields and theories, especially in social science, biology, and medicine. The third is feminist epistemology, the attempt to analyze rationality, knowledge, and other basic epistemological concepts from a feminist point of view. Here I include analysis of the social structure of science, when that work bears on epistemology.

  I will start by discussing a book written fairly early in the tradition, Genevieve Lloyd's The Man of Reason (1984). Lloyd analyzes the historical roots of ideas about knowledge and rationality and also draws conclusions for epistemology. The discussion that is specifically relevant to us is found in the early chapters, where she considers figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Bacon. The book illustrates what I think has been a common pattern. Lloyd tells a very interesting-sometimes compellingstory in the history of ideas. But it is harder to work out what consequences these historical facts have for epistemology.

  Lloyd argues that the early development of ideas about reason and knowledge were greatly affected by views about the relation between maleness and femaleness. The concept of reason evolved in Western philosophy in a way that associated reasonableness with maleness, and associated the female mind with a set of psychological traits that contrast with reasonableness.

  A key source for this pattern of thinking, according to Lloyd, is the old association between femaleness and nature; the earth is fertile, female, the source of life. Via this association, ideas about the relationship between the mind and nature were modeled on the relationship between male and female. The relations between the sexes also provided a model for theorizing about the relations between different aspects of the mind itself-between perception and thought, and between reason and emotion. The upshot was that the ideas feeding into the early development of science and philosophy in Europe incorporated, in various different forms, an association between reason and maleness. And the development of the idea of femininity was shaped by an opposition between femininity and reason. Femininity was associated with receptivity, intuition, empathy, and emotion.

  Lloyd's best example is the case of Francis Bacon, the seventeenthcentury English thinker who wrote extensively about the new empirical methods of investigation and their promise for mankind. Bacon attacked the ancient Greek picture of knowledge as contemplation. For Bacon, real knowledge is manifested in control of nature: "Knowledge is power." But as Bacon developed this idea, he retained the image of nature as female. His model for the relation between the mind and nature was the model of marriage, a marriage between the knower (man) and nature (woman). The features of a good marriage, as run by the man, correspond to the features of successful knowledge of the world. So what is a good husband like? A good husband is respectful, but he is also firm and definitely in charge. The scientist approaching nature should approach her with respect and restraint. But control is certainly needed; "Nature betrays her secrets more fully when in the grip and under the pressure of art than when in enjoyment of her natural liberty." And the products of what occurs on the "nuptual couch" will be useful knowledge for the improvement of mankind (quoted in Lloyd 1984, 11-1z. Some other feminists have been far tougher on Bacon than Lloyd was: see Harding 1986).

  Cases like this suggest that views about the relations between men and women were important resources in the development of ideas about reason and knowledge. Although the question is difficult, it surely seems likely that these associations did affect both the lives of women and the path taken by science in the early modern period. The harder question is what philosophical consequences these historical facts have for us now, given the massive changes to political life and to science since then. It is not hard to find a residue of these old associations embedded in metaphors that are still around. To pick a simple case, scientists constantly talk about whether or not a phenomenon will "yield" to a particular method of analysis. To my ears (though not to everyone's), this metaphor always has a resonance of sexual conquest. But whether these metaphors have much effect on either society or science today is a more difficult issue.

  Evelyn Fox Keller is one feminist who thinks there is a real problem here. She holds that the general picture of science we have inherited has real effects on women entering science; the woman scientist has to choose between "inauthenticity" and "subversion." The concept of authenticity is a subtle one drawn from existentialist philosophy, but Keller illustrates her point with an analogy: "Just as surely as inauthenticity is the cost a woman suffers by joining men in misogynist jokes, so it is, equally, the cost suffered by a woman who identifies with an image of the scientist modeled on the patriarchal husband" (zooz, 134-35).

  9.3 The Case of Prmatology

  I turn now to a case that many see as a good, clear example of the role that gender has played in a particular part of science. More specifically, this is often seen as a case in which the gender of researchers has had an effect on the development of ideas, one where science has benefited from an increasing role for women in the field. The example concerns the last thirty years or so in the study of social behavior, especially sexual behavior, in nonhuman primates like chimps and baboons. These phenomena are studied (with slightly different emphases) in the fields of primatology and behavioral ecology.

  These parts of biology initially developed a picture of primate sexual life in which females were seen as rather passive. Social life, and sexual life in particular, were regarded as controlled, sometimes cruelly, by males. That picture was linked to some important pieces of "high theory" in evolutionary biology. In many animals, although by no means all, there is a great deal of variation across individuals in male reproductive success, and less variation in female reproductive success. This is a consequence of the fact that one male can, in principle, impregnate large numbers of females. As it is often said, "sperm are cheap." Female reproductive success is limited in many animals by the high costs of pregnancy.

  This kind of asymmetry between the sexes is of considerable evolutionary importance in the organisms in which it is found. But it has often been used in rather simplistic patterns of explanation, without regard for many ways in which its effects can be modified by other factors. In ear
ly primatology, it was taken to support a view holding that male sexual behavior had been finely honed by natural selection, while female behavior had not, because females could do much less to affect their reproductive success.

  According to Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (zooz), this picture began to shift in the 1970s. Careful observation revealed a far more active and complex role for female primates. It became apparent that many female primates have elaborate sex lives, involving a lot more different kinds of sexual contact than one would expect, based on the old picture. Females seem to engage in subtle patterns of manipulation of male behavior, and much of the manipulation may be directed at influencing male behavior toward offspring. The basic theoretical idea that the high potential variance in male mating success has large effects on the evolution of behavior still stands, but there is now a much more sophisticated picture of the interaction between this factor and other factors, especially the strategies available to females.

  This shift in thinking within primatology coincided, at least roughly, with an influx of women into the field. Primatology is, in fact, one of the scientific fields in which the presence of women is unusually strong. What role did the presence of women have in changing opinions within the field? According to Hrdy (and according to others I have spoken to), the idea that this increasing representation of women had a significant role in shifting people's views about female primate behavior is fairly routinely accepted within primatology. Hrdy adds that this view seems to be accepted more in the United States than in Britain (zooz, 187). Hrdy herself is rather cautious about this issue, but she suggests that women researchers, like herself, did tend to empathize with female primates and watched the details of their behavior more closely than their male colleagues had.

  9.4 Feminist Epistemology

  Let us now look more closely at feminist epistemology, or rather, the part of feminist epistemology that deals with science. This is a diverse and sometimes difficult field. It includes work that uses feminist theory as a basis for criticizing how science handles evidence and assesses theories. It also includes feminist criticism of the social structure and organization of science, where that structure affects epistemological issues. Most ambitiously, some feminist epistemologists have argued that even our fundamental concepts of reason, evidence, and truth are covertly sexist. Feminist epistemology also goes beyond criticism to make suggestions about reform-how to make science better at finding out about the world (if that goal is to be retained), and also how to make science more socially responsible.

  In discussing some of the options here, I will modify some categorizations used by Sandra Harding (1986, 1996). Harding distinguishes three kinds of feminist criticism of science. The earliest and least controversial she calls spontaneous feminist empiricism. This is the project of using a feminist point of view to criticize biases and other problems in scientific work, but doing so in a way that does not challenge the traditional ideals, methods, and norms of science.

  Harding's second category is philosophical feminist empiricism. Helen Longino's work (z99o) is probably the most influential within this camp, and I will discuss it below. Here the aim is to revise and improve traditional ideas about science and knowledge, but to do so in a way that remains faithful to the most basic empiricist themes. Relativism is to be avoided. One hope is that more sophisticated criticisms of particular scientific practices will result.

  The third category I will call radical feminist epistemology. Two main approaches might be distinguished within this grouping. One is what Harding calls feminist postmodernism. This work tends to embrace relativism. Members of different genders, different ethnic groups, and different socioeconomic classes see the world fundamentally differently. The idea of a single "true" description of the world that transcends these different perspectives is a harmful illusion.

  The second radical approach is standpoint epistemology. This is not a relativist view; it is more ambitious than that. Standpoint epistemology stresses the role of the "situatedness" of an investigator or knower-their physical nature, location, and status in the world. The idea is that while traditional epistemology has seen "situatedness" as a potential problem for an investigator, in fact it can be a strength. Standpoint theory holds that there are some facts that are only visible from a special point of view, the point of view of people who have been oppressed or "marginalized" by society. Those at the margins, or the bottom of the heap, will be able to criticize the basics-both in scientific fields and in political discussion-in a way that others cannot. Science will benefit from taking more seriously the ideas developed by people with this special point of view. This is not a relativist position because the marginalized are seen as really having better access to crucial facts than other people have.

  One of the main debates in feminist epistemology has been between forms of philosophical feminist empiricism and views that are more radical, especially standpoint epistemology. The arguments for more radical options have not been convincing. Standpoint theory holds that the experiences of marginalized people have special value. If that is right, what sort of value is this? As Longino argues, it is not likely to be a general superiority of a kind that would justify our treating a marginalized point of view as the most important or reliable. If some facts are more visible to the marginalized and oppressed, other facts will surely be more visible to the privileged. The experiences of the marginalized are more likely to be valuable as a special kind of input into discussion and argument. So the right way to think here is in terms of a "pool" of different ideas, contributed by those with different points of view. Longino argues that the picture that results is a revised version of empiricism.

  Longino calls this revised view "contextual empiricism." This is a form of empiricism that emphasizes the role of social interaction. Longino argues that in order to be able to distinguish rationality from irrationality we should take the social group as our basic unit. Science is rational to the extent that it chooses theories from a diverse pool of options reflecting different points of view, and makes its choice via a critical dialogue that reaches consensus without coercion. Diversity in the ideas in the pool is facilitated by diversity in the backgrounds of those participating in the discussion. Epistemology becomes a field that tries to distinguish good communitylevel procedures from bad ones.

  If this is the right way to incorporate feminist ideas into epistemology, it is a way that follows a fairly old tradition (as Longino would not deny). Paul Feyerabend, as we saw in chapter 7, argued for the importance of maintaining diversity in scientific communities. And as Elisabeth Lloyd argues, Feyerabend was extending and radicalizing a line of argument from John Stuart Mill (Lloyd 1997). Diversity, for Mill, provides the raw materials for social and intellectual progress, via a vigorous "marketplace of ideas."

  The idea that a diversity of viewpoints improves critical discussion is definitely appealing. The role of gender in the mix is a separate question, as writers like Longino accept. Is it really true that men and women in modern Western societies have different perspectives of a kind that is relevant to science? Feminists accept that other differences, especially class differences and ethnic differences, may have as much of an effect as do gender differences, or even more than that. But many feminists expect there to be some definite "patterning" in the great soup of intellectual diversity that is due to gender differences.

  So might we expect women to have a different style of theorizing or reasoning that derives from their different experience? Certainly there will be some facts that women will tend to have a different perspective on. The physical experience of being a woman or a man will make a difference to how some aspects of life are experienced. And at least for the near future, the early education and acculturation of girls and boys will have this effect as well. But we should be careful of claims that go far beyond this. It is a much harder question whether or not the experience and viewpoint of women is systematically different from that of men in a way that is likely to matter to scientific disputes. The
re is a risk of lapsing into simplistic generalizations here.

  This problem takes us back to some issues discussed in the previous section. In some situations it can be argued that a particular bias, or neglect of options, found in a scientific field may be due to gender. Primatology is one area where this argument has been taken seriously. It is also possible to go beyond this and argue that there is a distinctive way of thinking, and interacting with the world, found in women scientists. If so, this might be partly due to a distinctive way that women tend to think, and it might also be partly due to their situation and experience in male-dominated fields. A famous example is Evelyn Fox Keller's work on Barbara McClintock, the geneticist who discovered "jumping genes" that move around within the genome of an organism. The jumping-genes idea was for some time considered to be a very strange hypothesis, but McClintock turned out to be right. McClintock was very much an outsider in genetics, and Keller also argues that McClintock had a "feeling for the organism" that enabled her to do a different style of science from that of her male colleagues (1983). Keller is rather cautious in her claims here; she does not want to argue that there will be a "sharp differentiation" between women's and men's work in science (zooz, 134). But she does seem to think there will be some systematic differences. Many would object to the suggestion that a "feeling for the organism" is likely to be an example, however. A case could be made that this psychological trait is found in many good biologists and that it has nothing to do with gender. Feminists themselves (including Keller) are also very wary about the possibility of contributing to a stereotyping of female contributions to scientific thinking. ("We must have a woman on this team, Jim, so someone will pick up on the holistic, interconnected stuff that might be going on in these reactions!")