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Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research

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Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research Objectivity and Diversity Objectivity and Diversity Another Logic of Scientific Research Sandra Harding The University of Chicago Press :: Chicago and London Sandra Harding is Distinguished Professor of Education and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She is the editor of The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader and the author of Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15â 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN - 13: 978- 0- 226- 24122- 7 (cloth) ISBN - 13: 978- 0- 226- 24136- 4 (paper) ISBN - 13: 978- 0- 226- 24153- 1 (e- book) DOI : 10.7208/chicago/9780226241531.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harding, Sandra G., author. Objectivity and diversity : another logic of scientific research / Sandra Harding. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-24122-7 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-226-24136-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-24153-1 (e-book) 1. Science—Philosophy. 2. Objectivity. 3. Science—Social aspects. I. Title Q 175.H 324 2015 507.2—dc23 2014041598 a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix 1 New Citizens, New Societies: New Sciences, New Philosophies? 1 2 Stronger Objectivity for Sciences from Below 26 3 Women, Gender, Development: Maximally Objective Research? 52 4 Do Micronesian Navigators Practice Science? 80 5 Pluralism, Multiplicity, and the Disunity of Sciences 105 6 Must Sciences Be Secular? 127 7 After Mr. Nowhere: New Proper Scientific Selves 150 Notes 175 Bibliography 189 Index 207 Acknowledgments Many scholars, activists, and friends have improved my thinking on the topics of this book. I am especially grate- ful to Warwick Anderson, Cynthia Enloe, David Hess, Gail Kligman, Francoise Lionnet, Jim Maffie, John Mc- Cumber, Suman Seth, Kim TallBear, J. Ann Tickner, Nancy Tuana, Marguerite Waller, Alice Wexler, and Ali- son Wylie. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the members of the Philosophy Department at Michigan State University, which has hosted me for one month a year from 2010 to 2014. I have tried out drafts of every chapter of the book on them, and have always received valuable feedback. I thank especially Richard Peterson, Kristie Dotson, and Kyle Powys Whyte. Lecture and conference audiences have improved ev- ery chapter. Especially valuable have been responses at the Arctic Center and University of Lapland in Rovani- emi, Finland; the Universities of Praetoria, Western Cape, and KwaZulu- Natal in South Africa; the Max Planck In- stitute at the University of Halle, Germany; and Outside Philosophy in Los Angeles. My colleagues and students in the graduate Depart- ment of Education at UCLA have kept me grounded in the realities of knowledge production and dissemination for a decade and a half. Their commitment to improve ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii the educational resources available to children and their communities around the globe have helped to keep this philosopher focused on the fact that epistemologies and philosophies of science have immense prac- tical consequences for people’s abilities to survive and flourish. I am ex- tremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to get to understand their passion for epistemic equality and their brilliance at designing strategies to advance social justice. Karen Merikangas Darling at the University of Chicago Press has provided me with splendid editorial resources and advice. Comments from the anonymous external reviewers immensely improved the manu- script. Sarah Ruth Lillo and Melissa Goodnight helped me track down relevant sources and organize the typescript. My dear housemates, Emily and Eva Harding- Morick, made every- day life a joy throughout the writing of this book. Preface Worries about objectivity just won’t go away. Issues about what should be the role, if any, of values and in- terests in scientific research are as old as Galileo and the Enlightenment, and as new as the recent public debates about stem cell research, women’s math and science abili- ties, intelligent design, poor people’s high birthrates, and the causes of climate change. In many cases, of course, the invocation of “objectiv- ity” for a knowledge claim has more to do with attempts to boost the status of the claim than with any actual cri- teria the claim has satisfied, as philosopher Ian Hacking (forthcoming) points out. “Objectivity” is just an “eleva- tor word” and we should all please refrain from using it, he argues. While Hacking is undoubtedly right about the proliferation of substantively meaningless claims to ob- jectivity, I think the term remains far too powerful sim- ply to abandon to such boosters. Moreover, there remain ways in which the term has not worn out its usefulness in spite of its overuse as an elevator word. This study pur- sues such possibilities. Continued concern with the term “objectivity” and what it could stand for testifies to the fact that objectivity is good to think with, to borrow a phrase from anthropol- ogy. It is invoked at the juncture of a number of current anxieties and debates about relationships between rapidly PREFACE x transforming societies, multiplying sciences, and increasingly powerful technologies that seem impossible to control as they permeate more and more of our daily lives. This can be a good reason to keep the term in fo- cus. Yet the term itself has never referred to a single idea. Historian Peter Novick (1988) showed that objectivity “is not a single idea, but rather a sprawling collection of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipa- thies. At best it is what the philosopher W. B. Gallie has called an es- sentially contested concept, like social justice or leading a Christian life, the exact meaning of which will always be in dispute.” Robert Proctor (1991) pointed out that the correlate of objectivity, value-neutrality, also has been used as “myth, mask, shield, and sword” (262). Sometimes it is used to advance democratic agendas, and at other times to block them. Sometimes it is used to increase the growth of knowledge, and at other times to restrict knowledge. A central set of concerns with the objectivity and value-freedom of research today is about the fairness and responsibilities of researchers and their philosophies of research. Is a particular piece of research, or a favored way of doing research, maximally fair and responsible to the data and to the severest criticism it does and could receive? Have the fears, desires, and interests of the most economically and politically vul- nerable groups been considered? How will the lives of people in those groups be affected by a particular piece of research, should it come to direct policy—and do those people have a say in whether and how the research will be done? Such questions already raise issues about how science is and should be defined. The term is primarily a modern Western one, and its use is relatively recent. Galileo and Newton were practicing “natural phi- losophy,” in the eyes of their peers. The term “scientist” only began to appear in the mid- nineteenth century, with William Whewell’s (1840) usage. Yet since the emergence of logical empiricism (or logical posi- tivism) in the middle of the twentieth century, each of the various cri- teria proposed for distinguishing modern Western science from other knowledge-seeing practices has slowly but surely withered away. Philos- ophers have wanted to keep distinct Science— that is, modern Western science— from all other knowledge systems, here referred to as “sci- ences.” A distinctive method (induction, deduction), a critical attitude toward traditional belief, a distinctive language (mathematics, observa- tion sentences), a distinctive metaphysics (disenchanted, secular, mate- rial, primary and secondary properties), and a distinctive epistemology (justified true belief)— such proposed criteria for distinguishing Science from science have all withered away under the rigorous critical scrutiny PREFACE xi of philosophers, historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of science as well as scientists themselves. Each of the proffered criteria did indeed identify an important element of the advance of scientific knowledge proposed at particular historical moments. But it did not do so at other times. Moreover, some of these supposedly distinctive features do in fact characterize the practices of many knowers who are not permitted to sit next to scientists at their lab benches. After all, dogs, cats, and even my chickens practice induction and deduction! What about indigenous knowledge? It is often empirically reliable, yet it lacks features desired in modern Western science. Should it be permitted to count as “real” science? On the other hand, how can claims for creationism and intel- ligent design be disallowed as sciences if there are no firm definitional standards for what should count as “real” science? What about Islamic science and Hindu science, both currently promoted by particular cul- tural groups? Then we come to “diversity.” What is the diversity on which I focus here? As indicated above, one central concern is to include in scientific decision making the groups that heretofore have been excluded from participating in decisions about research that has effects on their lives. After all, it is a basic premise of democratic ethics that those who bear the consequences of decisions should have a proportionate share in making them (with exceptions for those not fully competent to do so—another contested issue). As we shall see, many forms of participatory science have appeared. There are “civic science” and “citizen science” in both social and natural sciences.
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