Scientific knowledge can only be ‘strict’ objective if the perspectives of women and other oppressed groups are recognized and taken seriously. Their views are crucial for insight into scientific and social reality.
That was the conviction of the influential American feminist and post-colonial philosopher Sandra G. Harding, who died in the US early March at the age of 89.
In the early 1980s, Harding became an important voice in the emerging field of ‘feminist epistemology’ (knowledge of knowledge). This investigates how knowledge, gender, color and social context are related, a committed form of research with both empirical and normative efforts, aimed at emancipation.
In The Science Question in Feminism (1986) Harding distinguished three approaches of feminist knowledge: empirical, ‘position theoretically’ and postmodern. The first wants to improve existing science by combating patriarchal prejudices, the second emphasizes the ‘position’ of women and other marginalized groups, the third rejects the idea of objective scientific truth.
These are still recognizable positions in feminist philosophy and social science, although many variants and branches have now grown. Harding also combined various epistemological approaches in her own work.
Hegel and Marx
The common thread remained Hardings conviction that scientific knowledge is also not timeless but ‘socially situated’, the product of a social community. That is already at the start of research, the context of discovery: who pays it, which questions are asked? Harding does not reject the idea of objectivity, but ‘strong objectivity’ only arises when knowledge positions are also included from the ‘living experience’ of women, non-white minorities and colonized nations.
According to Harding, they often have sharper insight into social reality than dominant groups, an idea that is indebted to Hegel thinking about the dialectical relationship between ‘master and servant’ or (with Marx) between social classes. The ‘servant’ develops a ‘double consciousness’ because he sees himself and his master as subject, while reducing him into an object.
Sandra Harding was born in San Francisco in 1935, in a family that suffered from the economic crisis of the 1930s. During her studies at Rutgers University, she provided for her living as a waitress and telephone operator. After her marriage, with a philosopher she had met at the university and with whom she had two daughters, she gave mathematics lessons and worked as the editor of texts.
In the early 1970s she resumed her studies, in1973 she promoted to the knowledge of the American philosopher Quine. In those years, Harding was grabbed by the women’s movement. At the University of Delaware, where she was appointed professor in 1986, she set up a program for women’s studies. In the nineties she left for the University of California in Los Angeles, where she became professor of gender and education and led the Center for Women’s Studies.
Harding also worked for feminist and post-colonial science outside the university. From the eighties she was in the editors of the prominent feminist magazine Hypatialater in that of Signs (2000-2005), advised the UN and gave lectures worldwide. In 1987 she stayed in the Netherlands as a guest teacher at the University of Amsterdam. To her best -known work The Scientific Question in Feminism (1986) and Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991).
Resonance and criticism
Her ideas about science and ‘position theory’ found broad resonance, but at the same time evoked criticism and even aversion. In the American Science Wars From the nineties about the value -free character of science, critics such as Richard Dawkins put them on as a spreader of ‘bad science’. As a evidence, in particular, her ‘laughable’ typing of Newton’s mechanics served as a ‘rape manual’, on the basis of violent metaphors about mother nature that must be forced to reveal its secrets. In fact, Harding set in that passage The Science Question in Feminism The provocative but not in advance of nonsensical question why ‘machine’ metaphors in the 17th-century natural science are seen by historians as reasonable and relevant, but not those others.
In the heat of the Culture Wars Spot about her work won the more often of substantive contradiction. Harding was partly a model for the ‘Sokal Hoax’ (1996), a parody of postmodern philosophy that had blown over from Europe to the US and in which, according to physicist Alan Sokal Jargon, it won of analytical clarity.
More substantive critics feared that ‘position-epistology’ slides into relativism, despite her notion of ‘strong objectivity’. Other criticism was that there was a hidden universalism in her work, the assumption that all members of oppressed groups have the same perspective, a reproach that they fought with an appeal to different types of diversity, also within groups.
Hardings work has received shoots in sociology of science and in attention to indigenous perspectives as serious forms of knowledge and not as fascinating folklore. It also touches on a recent notion such as ‘epistemological justice’, developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker. At the same time, criticism of ‘position theory’ has remained a permanent ingredient in intellectual and political Culture Warswho entered into a new phase with the appointment of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
In an interview on YouTube, this is striking that position theory is still extremely controversial. That will stay that way, she says, because: “Every time a new group gets the stage of history, they say: Hey, from our perspective things look very different.”