STS6401 Paper Week 12

From ShawnReevesWiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

Response to readings in STS 6401.

Longino joins the rejection of feminist content, noting the impossibility of identifying a monolithic cognitive framework, but I see alternatives to that other than focusing only on process and practice. (pp. 46-47) The view that women can only do a subset of science or substandard work is not properly feminist, true, but to me that doesn't mean that feminism cannot inform the content itself; to me it merely focuses on the assignation of certain content to certain sexes. The content that all genders of people practice could be better informed by feminist critique.

Back to Longino's argument (p. 47): If we change the practices and processes, are we not then changing the vectors of science and thus eventually the content? In educational programs such as getting more females into the field of science, we don't care so much about good science vs. bad science as we do about more science, broader science. Hmm...Maybe we should. This change-vector, not throwing out the baby with the bath-water, also Haraway mentions. (p. 192)

Haraway describes the value of moving the vector in relation to the value of multiple interpretations of the past in "The Past Is the Contested Zone." In conclusion, she writes that we explore the power of our exploration, "to produce both understanding of meaning and predictive means of control." (p. 42)

on multiple readings

Reading and writing about feminist philosophy is very different from that of history. Susan Bordo visits a wrath on the plural paths of feminist philosophy of the 1970s and 80s. But these authors are using ideas from the history of science. Especially interesting was Bordo's quick dismissal of "hypothesis non fingo" in the methodological attempt to avoid ethnocentrism. (p. 135) We haven't read about it in STS 3301, but we've certainly had to deal in discussion (guilty as charged) with the second philosophy zinged by Bordo, the all-knowing computer. Also, the phrase about Kokopelli and the Cyborg, "they refuse to assume a shape for which they must take responsibility," sounds just like something our professor would say. (p. 144) Thus, the read is a welcomed, accessible, novel standpoint from which I can re-think some of our history.

The value of reading Harding, Bordo, and Longino is a validation of my eagerness to study the possibility of multiple, parallel curricula in a single field like physics. Sciences could be multicultural, if they addressed and re-informed multicultural cares and norms. Vandana Shiva points out the value of third world perspectives can be appreciated by first-world scientists, as in the case of biodiversity.

In "The Contest for Primate Nature," Haraway writes "social forces and daily scientific practice both exist inside...neither is a source of purity or pollution." The careful methods then could not extricate the importance of having certain populations do the primatology. The daughters of Washburn were forging identities. (p. 92)

Haraway touches on the great theme of this week when she writes "I am certainly not arguing that women...have been unscientific in modelling human life or have imported in some illegitimate way the pollutions of women's interests into scientific discourse. Nor have they purified science by importing women's 'natural' insights. (p. 105)