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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology: An Examination of Gender in Science

Edited by Cassandra Pinnick, Noretta Koertge, and Robert Almeder (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), ISBN: 0-8135-3227-2 (pbk).

Reviewed by Sharyn Clough
Oregon State University, sharyn.clough@oregonstate.edu

The rhetorical direction of the essays collected in Scrutinizing Epistemology is exemplified by a two-part claim spelled out by the editors, Cassandra Pinnick, Noretta Koertge, and Robert Almeder, in their short introduction to the text. First, they claim, philosophers of feminism have begun to have a substantial impact within epistemology and philosophy of science. Second, now that philosophers of feminism have some institutional power, these philosophers are refusing to allow their views to be subject to critical scrutiny (2-3). Hence, conclude the editors, the importance of their book, which claims to offer an antidote to the current situation.

That philosophers of feminism have had a substantial impact within epistemology and philosophy of science is, of course, an empirical claim, but the editors offer no quantitative data to support it. For example, the editors claim that feminism as applied to science and the philosophy of science is being "embraced" in academic settings (2), a development that has led to "course revisions, additions in academic departments, and establishment of special courses in newly created academic departments—women’s studies or gender studies" (2). No data are given to support these informal observations, certainly nothing that would support the claim that feminist approaches in epistemology and philosophy of science are being "embraced." Against such an informal, anecdotal account, philosophers incorporating feminist approaches in their work can marshal their own contrary accounts regarding their troubles with tenure, curriculum review committees, and editorial boards. Clearly, more formal data is needed to make any clear claims one way or the other.

Unphased by the lack of data, the editors of Scrutinizing also note an "increased tendency" to include feminist viewpoints within "traditional philosophy and philosophy of science classes" (2). The evidence the editors provide for this claim is a list of four philosophy of science readers that include sections on "social constructivism" and "feminist dimensions" (2). I think the editors’ claim about the "increased tendency" to include feminist viewpoints is probably true, but on its face the claim does not tell us much. It certainly does not tell us whether the viewpoints are being presented first rather than second-hand, whether the viewpoints are being featured as positive contributions to the philosophy of science literature, or are, instead, tucked into the back of a textbook never to be covered in the average semester-length class, and/or accompanied by discussions of "relativism" that dismiss the feminist contributions through guilt by association. In one of the volumes referenced by the editors, Robert Klee’s Introduction to Philosophy of Science (Oxford, 1997), the ninth chapter of ten, called "The Politics of Epistemology," references the work of Sandra Harding, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, and Helen Longino but also discusses the anti-feminist contributions made by Pinnick and Koertge and is followed by a final response chapter titled "The Actual Way Things Really Are." In Jennifer McErlean’s introductory volume Science, Reason, and Reality (Wadsworth, 2000), referenced by the editors, the penultimate chapter covers feminist issues but also includes essays by Pinnick and Koertge that argue against a number of claims made by feminists. In the third text cited by the editors (S. George Couvalis, The Philosophy of Science, Sage, 1997), the discussion of feminist issues in science comes in the sixth of seven chapters, following a discussion of "Relativism and the Value of Science." Janet Kourany’s text (Scientific Knowledge, Wadsworth, 1998) is the only one of the four cited by the editors that includes feminist themes as positive contributions to each of the sections on traditional subject areas. Of the fifteen or so philosophy of science collections I have been sent by publishers over the last few years, Kourany’s is the only text that does this. I would be pleasantly surprised to hear that my collection of texts is unrepresentative in this respect.

Of course, when gauging the impact of feminist approaches on the field of philosophy of science and epistemology, it is also important to discuss the presence of feminist content in key national conferences. But here, of course, the editors are silent as even they cannot point to any but the most token presence of feminist discussions of science in any Philosophy of Science Association (PSA) meetings over the last decade (the most recent 2004 PSA meeting marked a slight increase in this respect), or in the field’s leading journal, Philosophy of Science. At her session of the 2002 PSA meeting, Noretta Koertge claimed that, during her tenure as editor of the journal, there had been a lack of good feminist work available to publish, as well as a lack of philosophers willing and/or able to review such work positively. It is important to note also that the only discussion of philosophy and feminism at the 2002 PSA meeting was Koertge’s own panel, devoted to criticizing feminist science studies. This observation, along with the inclusion of anti-feminist commentaries in the philosophy of science textbooks cited by the editors, contradicts the editors’ claim that criticism of feminist science studies has been kept from philosophical discourse by the academic policing of feminist philosophers.

Of course, there have been a number of smaller specialized conferences over the last decade that have focused positively on feminist approaches to science and the philosophy of science (e.g., "The Women, Gender and Science Question" conference in 1995 at the University of Minnesota; the "enGendering Rationalities" conference in 1997 at the University of Oregon; the "Feminism and Naturalism" conference in 1999 at the University of St. Louis at Missouri), but here it is impossible to ignore the internal critical engagement with, and examination of, feminism, epistemology, and science evidenced in the programs of these meetings. Very little is taken for granted at these conferences. The same feminist scholars that Pinnick et al. claim are unwilling to question "the feminist story" (3) spend much of their time doing just that.

So much, then, for the sloppy and unsupported arguments about the influence of feminist philosophy of science that are provided by the editors in their introduction to Scrutinizing. The essays that make up the rest of the book offer little to improve the quality of analysis. I should note that a number of insightful and fairly detailed reviews of these essays are already available online,1 so I will continue with more general and thematic comments.

The essays are divided into four sections: 1) The Strange Status of Feminist Epistemology; 2) Testing Feminist Claims about Scientific Practice; 3) Philosophical and Political Critiques of Feminist Epistemology; and 4) Future Prospects of Feminist Epistemology. Five of the thirteen essays are reprints from Susan Haack, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Pinnick. Koertge contributes two original essays, as do philosophers of feminism Kourany and Sharon Crasnow. Of the original contributions to the collection, these latter two stand out, as both philosophers make a valiant effort to stem the tide of sloppy, ad hominum argumentation that characterizes most of the other essays. In the end, however, Kourany and Crasnow are overwhelmed by the company they keep. One expert on the feminist science studies literature, Alan Soble (who knew?) contributes an original essay about Evelyn Fox Keller’s work on Barbara McClintock, though only if one means by "original" something like "contains critical arguments made better, elsewhere, by other feminists, ten years ago." (More on the lack of originality below.) The collection would definitely have benefited from the inclusion of essays by Harding, Longino, and Keller, whose work is criticized in a number of the essays in Scrutinizing. These three prominent feminist theorists have responded to these sorts of criticisms before and have modified their views in important ways over the last ten years. None of this is obvious from the way that their work is treated in this book.

The first section of the book is clearly the most important. As the editors emphasize, the essays it contains "lay out the groundwork for the more detailed critiques that follow" (6). The reader will be dismayed to discover, then, that the editors’ introduction to the section begins with a characterization of feminist epistemology that so misses the point of what feminists have been up to that any remaining trust the reader might have in the expertise and competency of the editors is bound to be badly shaken.

The editors begin: "Epistemology is the study of the acquisition and structure of knowledge. Feminists advocate the rights of women. But what might a ‘feminist epistemology’ be?" (4). The editors offer two alternatives. The first is that, perhaps, feminist epistemology is that sort of epistemology that "will help liberate women in a much more direct and efficient way than will traditional accounts of knowledge" (4). The second is that, instead of informing the content of the epistemology in question, perhaps feminist epistemology is that sort of epistemology that has been practiced, historically, by philosophers who were animated by feminist political goals (4). The editors decide that it is probably a mix of these two.

Unfortunately, the main project of feminist epistemology is not captured by either of these descriptions but is rather best expressed something like this: "Feminist epistemology focuses on a particular failure of objectivity, namely, sexism, and aims to rearticulate epistemological guidelines, and notions of objectivity, that would guard against this failure." Is this not what it is all about? How could the feminist interest in, indeed impassioned focus on, objectivity, and various failures to achieve it, not feature in a description of feminist epistemology?

Perhaps the failure to acknowledge the feminist focus on objectivity is related to the fact that so many of the authors in this text accuse feminist epistemologists of embracing relativism. I happen to agree that many feminist epistemologists end up with some version of relativism,2 but the reason that I have bothered to make this observation is because I know that it has incredible normative force with the very feminists I criticize. All of the feminist philosophers discussed in Scrutinizing are committed to objectivity. Responsible criticisms of these feminist projects need, at the very least, to acknowledge that these projects share the goal of objectivity, even, or perhaps especially, if the criticism is meant to highlight their failure to achieve this goal. Crasnow’s essay "Can Science be Objective?" is one of the only contributions to this collection that gets this right.

I conclude my review with a brief discussion of the essays that comprise this foundational, first section of the book. The section begins with a reprint of Haack’s "Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist," first published in 1993, reprinted for her own collection of essays in 1998, and resurrected here. Given that Scrutinizing promises to give us "the first systematic evaluation of feminist epistemology," the reasons for reprinting Haack’s essays here are unclear. Similarly for the second essay, a reprint of Pinnick’s 1994 essay, "Feminist Epistemology."

Perhaps the editors mean to offer a systematic evaluation of feminist epistemology from the 1970s and 1980s, but, then, theirs would be by no means the first. Many feminist philosophers have critically and systematically examined work from this earlier period and found it wanting. And while the editors of and contributors to Scrutinizing might want to claim that feminist philosophers "embraced" by the academy have been busy keeping these internal feminist criticisms from being published, the facts say otherwise. The very journals that have been supportive of feminist science studies have been the site of a number of critical debates (recall, for example, the special issue of Signs debating the details of Nancy Chodorow’s object-relations theory3; the debates about the problems of essentialism in feminist standpoint theory collected in a special issue on the topic4; and also the criticisms of standpoint theory, in favor of feminist empiricism, in Longino’s comprehensive literature review5).

In this first section of the book, reprints of these (or any) critical works by feminists within feminist science studies would have been a welcome inclusion. Indeed, the absence of this sort of critical engagement with the very literature about which the editors and contributors claim to have expertise informs my main complaint with the book as a whole.

Endnotes

1. E.g., Elizabeth Potter’s review is available at http://www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview/archive/2004/10/highlt.html#potter; and Elizabeth Andersen’s review is available at http://www/personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/hownotreview.html

2. See, e.g., Sharon Clough, Beyond Epistemology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

3. Signs, 6:3 (1981).

4. Signs, 22:2 (1997).

5. Signs, 19:1 (1993): 201-12.

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APA Newsletters

Fall 2006 Volume 06, Number 1

Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1