Some feminist scholars of science have suggested that those challenging the “objectivity” of scientific knowledge in order to effect a feminist transformation of science are caught up in the wrong kind of argument—one revolving around how accurately we ‘represent’ an external world. One notable alternative approach to the study of science is pragmatism, a philosophy which encourages a view of scientific inquiry as active and constructive engagement with an environment.
Transcript:
This week, we’re learning about interactions between feminist epistemology and philosophy of science and a philosophical tradition called pragmatism. As you’ve read, there are a number of theorists who argue that their project of feminist critique of science can benefit a great deal from incorporating pragmatist philosophy.
So we are going to look at what these scholars say about the links between the feminist successor science project and pragmatist philosophy of science. And then we’re going to look at some work of John Dewey’s, a prominent early-20th century pragmatist, to examine exactly what pragmatist philosophy teaches us about science and knowledge that is so liberating and useful for feminist science. The Dewey reading for this week may have been a little complicated and it may have been difficult to understand exactly what he was critiquing. This is one of the most abstract, metaphysical readings we’ve had all quarter, so don’t worry if you had a bit of trouble with it. It is a very important and transformative critique, though, with massive implications for how we understand knowledge, truth, and of course therefore science, so I hope you will try to understand it—maybe re-read it once you’ve listened to this lecture—so you can benefit from the powerful shift in perspective it offers.
Let’s start by recapping the feminist successor science project. This is a common name for the demand within feminist epistemology for a reconstruction of scientific practice so as to get rid of its politically oppressive assumptions and consequences.
We’ve examined in this class a number of ways in which science is not a value-free practice of simply discovering what is in nature, as it has been traditionally understood, but is a practice which can have a number of political biases, including biases in its institutionalization or who can access, benefit, or participate in it; biases in its consequences, like what scientific research gets prioritized and what uses it is put towards; and even biases in its content, like value-based assumptions in what it takes to be good evidential support for certain conclusions, which influence the kind of knowledge constructed.
The feminist successor science project is the collection of theories and suggestions about how science should be conceptualized and conducted in order to remove these oppressive values and consequences, and maybe even replace them with more progressive and humane ones. We’ve read these kinds of suggestions in Longino’s work a couple of weeks ago, where she recommended altering certain metaphysical assumptions of scientific research like homogeneity and linearity of causal relationships, and including pragmatic standards of scientific practice like more fairly distributed access to scientific knowledge and more focus on applying scientific resources to the needs of communities.
Clough and Gatens-Robinson both examine the connections between this kind of successor science project and pragmatist philosophy of science and knowledge. While Gatens-Robinson says that there are a number of deep similarities between feminist and pragmatist theories of science, Clough says that feminist approaches have certain limitations and create certain kinds of problems that can be solved if they take a leaf out of pragmatist philosophy’s book.
So first, let’s look at how Clough characterizes the successor projects of Longino, Keller, and Harding—all three of whom we have read by this point in the quarter.
Clough looks at Keller’s rejection of what she calls the “copy theory of truth”—the idea that our theories, beliefs and statements correspond to objects in the world whose state and qualities are independent of any human observation or understanding. This is also sometimes called the mirror-image theory, or the transcript theory, of knowledge and truth. Our ideas, our beliefs, our scientific theories are somehow mirroring or transcribing the objects of the world into a representation of those objects. Our best theories, the ones which are confirmed by experiment and observation and scientific standards of evidence, are those which accurately copy or correspond to the world’s objects.
Now, in rejecting this copy theory of truth, Clough quotes Keller as saying the following:
“Since nature is only accessible to us through representations and since representations are necessarily structured by language (and hence by culture), no representation can ever ‘correspond’ to reality.”
What Clough says about Keller’s critique here is that she is not actually rejecting the correspondence theory of truth. She’s saying that knowledge does in fact take the form of representations which correspond to the world; it’s just that they aren’t capable of corresponding fully or very well, because they must necessarily pass through the filter of language. Since language is a human cultural and psychological thing, it cannot be a simple or straightforward copy of the world; it will always carry with it some form of cultural and subjective bias. For this reason, we need to choose the representations—the forms of imperfect copies of the world in our bodies of knowledge—according to the kinds of political activities and interventions they encourage. To simplify Clough’s characterization of Keller, what Keller is saying is: all our copies of the world are necessarily imperfect and filtered through culture, so let’s pick the ones that are filtered with good progressive culture.
According to Clough, Harding does a very similar thing: she criticizes the idea of perfect, objective copies of the world in our knowledge, but she does not actually deconstruct the model of knowledge -as-correspondence, or knowledge-as-representation. What Harding says is, when we seek objective knowledge, we actually cannot achieve a 1:1 correspondence between the representations we use and the world’s objects and qualities, because a person’s social standpoint sets limits on their understanding of the world. You always know the world from a point of view, and those points of view will be different depending on your relative social position. Harding says we should therefore replace traditional notions of objectivity with “strong objectivity,” which includes a critical examination of our background beliefs that block or limit our understanding of the world’s objects, to reduce as much as we can the inevitable influence of subjective perspective on our knowledge. So we’re still aiming for representation and correspondence in our theories; it’s just that this always has limitations due to perspective. We should therefore include a critical examination of the perspective being used in constructing knowledge so as to maximize objectivity and limit the distorting effects of this perspectival influence.
Clough says that Longino’s suggestions carry a similar kind of implicit acceptance of representational theory, or correspondence theory of truth. She says scientific knowledge is always necessarily biased (or susceptible to bias) due to contextual values, and we should expand the scope of objectivity and standards of scientific inquiry to include an evaluation of the values involved in particular interpretive frameworks. “Bad Science” is not science filtered with values, because all science is necessarily filtered with values. Bad Science is science filtered with bad values, or science which is not conscious or aware of its values.
So now let’s think a little more carefully about what Clough says is wrong with these approaches, before we go on to look at how she and Gatens-Robinson suggest pragmatism can overcome their problems.
One of the most significant problems facing feminist epistemology, as we have seen in past weeks, is the issue of objectivity. Feminist epistemologists want to challenge the prevalent idea that science is value-free so that they can criticize harmful scientific practices and institutions, and this involves criticizing common understandings of scientific objectivity. Now, the other side of the coin of this problem of value-free objectivity is relativism—or the idea that truth is relative to a perspective and that competing truth claims between differently situated individuals cannot be adjudicated by some fair and reliable standard of evidence for belief. This kind of relativism is often where people’s minds go when they hear challenged to science’s objectivity. Clough calls this “resigned skepticism”—the notion that all knowledge is relativized to a given conceptual filter, yours, mine, male, female, other cultures, they’re all different. Once we reject the kind of commonsense objectivity that we have previously assumed of scientific method, we are left wondering how we can choose between different interpretations and different knowledge claims. Is there a way we can justify choosing one knowledge claim over another except a political, value-based reason? Is it all up in the air? Can we just choose whichever form of knowledge fits our values?
Now, what Clough says is that the criticisms of objectivity made by Keller, Harding, and Longino fall back into this kind of skepticism and relativism about knowledge. We are left wondering how there can be any way of settling conflicts in our interpretation of evidence except by comparing our politics and values. The reason they are forced to accept this position, according to Clough, is that they are still operating under the banner of representational theories of truth. As she says: the symptom is relativism, and the diagnosis is representationalism. Gatens-Robinson makes a similar point about feminist epistemology and its problem of walking the line between objectivism and relativism.
Although Keller, Harding, and Longino have criticized naïve notions of objectivity, they still each accept what Clough calls “the metaphysical gap” assumed by representationalist theories of truth. That is, the existence of two distinct and separate spheres: an external world of objects out there waiting to be witnessed, giving off raw objective data; and an internal world of the mind which is structured by subjective interpretive filtration systems. According to the framework of this metaphysical gap, our knowledge is constructed from a mixture of input from these two distinct spheres: we take a bit from the fixed independent objects of the world, and a bit from the mind with its culture and values and subjectivity, and that’s how we get our scientific theories. That’s why they’re inevitably relative and that’s why all we can do is select the subjective interpretive framework which suits us best. The mind-ey subjective stuff is always going to be tainting the raw objective data that comes from the external world.
So, how can pragmatism resolve this Scylla and Charybdis problem for us? Well, Gaten-Robinson identifies three aspects of Deweyan philosophy—that is, the philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most influential pragmatists of the early twentieth century—which converge with the goals of the feminist successor science project. You can find these at the bottom of page 422:
- Dewey’s view of the place of knowing within nature allows us to see knowledge as the result of an interaction between a human being and the environment.
- Dewey’s insistence that scientific understanding must be brought back to lived experience and not thought of as an enterprise detached from society and everyday life. For that reason, science has moral and social features intrinsically.
- Dewey’s connection between knowing and processes of education.
We’ll be thinking just about the first two of these in our attempts to understand pragmatist feminist philosophy of science.
I don’t really find Gatens-Robinson’s categories here very useful or intuitive, but concerning her first Deweyan feature, Gatens-Robinson mentions that Dewey criticizes the prevalent “picture of the world of things indifferent to human interests because it is wholly apart from experience.” What Dewey tells us is that we are not just spectators of the world, we are part of the world, and we create it by interacting with it. And one of those interactions we engage in is knowledge and practices of knowing. Feminists and pragmatists both “emphasize knowing as-activity over knowledge-as-the-state.”
Regarding the second point, Gatens-Robinson says that Dewey rejects a host of dichotomies like nature and the human, subject and object, fact and value. Human interests and meanings cannot be separated from knowledge, because knowledge as an activity is undertaken to meet certain needs, manifest certain values, and create certain meanings. Knowledge is a use-oriented activity, so it carries within it the values of the thing it can be used for.
Now, the way Dewey arrives at this kind of understanding is actually very complicated and counterintuitive. His philosophy challenges many things that have been taken for granted not just by scientists, not just by philosophers, but by most ordinary people, for centuries. You’d probably have to read a little more Dewey before this started becoming clear to you, and that’s OK, but I am going to give you a breakdown of Dewey’s project so you can truly understand the radical reconceptualization he is proposing of knowledge, science, and really the whole world.
For this class, we read Dewey’s 1917 paper, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy.” In this essay, Dewey says that we habitually oppose experience and nature—or mind and nature—to each other, instead of realizing that experience is in fact part of nature. We tend to view experience or mind as primarily “a psychical thing, infected throughout by ‘subjectivity’ ” (Dewey, 1972, p. 6). Experience is viewed as a process which “centers in, or gathers about, or proceeds from a center or subject which is outside the course of natural existence, and set over against it” (ibid., p. 22)—an “antithetical subject” which is variously called a soul, spirit, mind, ego, consciousness, or knower. If experience is outside the course of nature, then nature (or the world, or the universe), in turn, must be “‘external’ to experience” (ibid., p. 18). This is what Clough was talking about when she said that the representationalist model which was inadequately challenged by feminist theorists presupposes two distinct metaphysical spheres—the subjective mind, and the objective world.
The counterpart to this view of the division between experience and nature is ‘the spectator view of knowledge’: a concept of knowledge as a process of “viewing from outside” (ibid., p. 42), which consists in putting together “a transcript” of nature, which is outside the mind or experience (ibid., p. 41). From this framework, in which the experiencing being is set apart from the nature they are seeking to know, the problem naturally arises of whether or not the experiencing being is representing the world accurately. From this arises a corresponding division between reality and distortion. Experience of an object, as something apart from the object and different in kind, “has the power of changing ‘reality’ into appearance, of introducing ‘relativities’ into things as they are in themselves” (ibid., p. 25). We become preoccupied with that which is ‘external’ to and independent of the mind, and therefore an ‘objective’ event.
Dewey and other pragmatists like Rorty—who we haven’t read, but who is mentioned in the Clough reading—have suggested that this framework for understanding experience, nature, and knowledge derives from the seventeenth century, and was adequate and appropriate at that time, but simply doesn’t make sense given the changes in our common sense over the past 4 centuries, and our very different social issues, values, and discoveries today.
Dewey and Rorty have pointed to Bacon, Descartes, and Locke as early originators for this conceptual framework. These theorists were hugely influential at the onset of the scientific revolution, and they helped European culture break away from its former Medieval mindset, ushering in radical new ideas about the power of mathematics, experiment, observation, and such things. But, Dewey claims that “[w]hen Descartes and others broke away from medieval interests, they retained as commonplaces its intellectual apparatus” which, being religious, were “deliberately and systematically other-worldly” (Dewey, 1972, p. 22). So the teachings of the Church and the Bible, the ideas of God, the soul, the afterlife, divinity: these were all the concepts in common circulation through which they abstractly understood the structure of the world. Descartes, Bacon, Locke, and others were attempting to replace or reform these abstract understandings to give science and empirical testing a stronger basis and authority in this new scientific era. But what usually happens when major social-conceptual reforms occur is that certain structural frameworks get retained in the transition.
Among the notions that Descartes and others inherited was that of the mind as a separate entity to nature and of knowledge as a process “exercised by a power that is extra-natural and set over against the world to be known” (ibid., p. 22). Without any available substitute for the concept of the soul at that time to utilize as a means of situating the human being in nature, seventeenth-century thinkers were all but forced to transpose these religious and literally super-natural concepts into “the new terminology furnished by science” (ibid., p. 3).
For example, Francis Bacon compared the mind to “a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (Bacon, 1861a, p. 54). The mind, “far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence. . . is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced” (Bacon, 1861b, p. 276). Descartes, too, employed a foundational distinction between the experiencing being and nature, to the point that “there might be very little correspondence between [a person’s] understanding of the objects they studied and the natures of the objects” (Sorell, 1991, p. 30). Descartes’ novel concept of the mind–body problem instituted “a distinction between two worlds”—one of the mind and its processes, and one of nature (Rorty, 1979, p. 52). Locke subsequently sought to understand the possibility and limitations of knowledge of the external world, characterizing the mind as a blank slate which receives content from the objects of nature, and distinguishing between the ideas of the mind which resemble the objects of nature (primary qualities) and those of its ideas which do not (secondary qualities) (Locke, 1690, Book II). These lines of thought all share a common framework in which experience and nature are severed, rendering multiple elements of experience unreliable indicators of the real qualities of nature. This is like the distinction Clough was talking about with the distinction between “raw data” which is objective and can tell us about the real world, and the mind’s interpretive framework which has values and social and political bias and can’t really tell us what the world is like.
This inherited understanding of experience as set apart from nature has led to the philosophical problems we’ve seen of ‘knowledge in general’—that is, for any instance of knowing, “how is one to get beyond the limits of the subject and subjective occurrences” and come into a truthful, knowing, correspondence relationship with nature? Philosophy has seen the development of theories which, in Rorty’s words, “divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so)” (Rorty, 1979, p. 3).
Dewey argues that this picture of experience, nature, and knowledge, along with its constructed problems of how one comes to know, no longer make sense after theories of evolution have been accepted. These “lessons of evolution,” however, had yet to be incorporated into the philosophical canon at the time Descartes, Bacon, and Locke were writing. Within a post-evolutionary framework, human beings are creatures who are continuous with nature, and require active participation in nature to further their own existence—there is no metaphysical realm of “mind” which hovers above the external world and observes it. The continuity of experience and nature would render this ‘problem of knowledge’ meaningless. If there is not “a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms antithetical to the traits of the world,” then the problem of knowledge becomes about as plausible as an analogous “problem of digestion” (Dewey, 1972, pp. 23–24). If we “conceive the stomach and food-material as inhabiting different worlds,” we could construct a problem as to “the possibility, extent, nature, and genuineness of any transaction between stomach and food” (ibid., p. 24). But just as it’s ridiculous to see the stomach and food as inhabiting different metaphysical realms, the picture of the mind or experience as separable from the rest of the world is contrary to the lessons of evolutionary theory. If that’s true, then “the problem of how self or mind or subjective experience or consciousness can reach knowledge of an external world is assuredly a meaningless problem” (ibid., p. 23). Experience and nature, just like the stomach and food, are parts of continuous material which interact in a locally specific way. Digestion is a process of an organism interacting with the material in its environment in such a way as to further its own existence. Just like digestion, the processes of knowledge consist in successfully interacting with elements of nature in such a way as to further one’s own existence.
Knowledge does not involve the object and “a would-be knower of it, unfortunately condemned by the nature of the knowing apparatus to alter the thing he would know” (Dewey, 1972, pp. 42–43). It is “an affair of the dynamic interaction of two physical agents in producing a third thing, an effect;—an affair of precisely the same kind as in any physical conjoint action, say the operation of hydrogen and oxygen in producing water” (ibid., p. 31). When it comes to the problem of hallucinations, dreams, perspectival difference, and other problems of perception, it is not reality and the mind’s distortion of it that are at play. These phenomena are not “something outside of the regular course of events; they are in and of it. They are not cognitive distortions of real things; they are more real things” (ibid., p. 27).
The kind of relativism that feminist accounts fall into, as described by Clough, therefore doesn’t apply. There is no such thing as “distorting” influences—there is just all of nature, which includes experience, interacting in various ways.
This does not mean that no questions arise whatsoever concerning knowledge. The renewed understanding of experience, nature, and knowledge dissipates the problem of knowledge ‘in general,’ but there still exist “specific instances of success and failure in inquiry” (ibid., p. 23). Maladaptations of digestion can occur and lead to disease; and maladaptive knowledge-processes can lead to erroneous responses to the environment. But instances of neither sort have to do with the distinction between what the world is ‘really like’ and what is ‘distortion.’
The actual “problem of knowledge” in the post-evolutionary framework has to do with the consequences of such real things on future activity. When we adopt certain beliefs, they lead to certain kinds of actions; and when we adopt certain scientific hypotheses, they enable certain kinds of technologies and expanded capacities.
For example, Dewey uses the example of a person hallucinating that they’re being targeted by people who want to harm them. This example uses mental health problems in quite a cold way, so I’m sorry if this is upsetting to anyone who has had to cope with these kinds of symptoms in themselves or a loved one. It’s a real and difficult problem, not really appropriate for a toy example, but it is the example he uses, and it’s quite an explanatory paragraph, so I’ll just quickly state what his point is. Let’s say the hallucination is a false belief. He says, “to use the hallucination as a sign of organic lesions that menace health means the beneficial result of seeing a physician,” while “to respond to it as a sign of consequences such as actually follow only from being persecuted is to fall into error” (ibid., pp. 39–40). So you have a hallucination and in one scenario, you say wow, I’m having disturbing thoughts, I should see a doctor. In the other scenario, you say oh I should prepare myself for the possibility of being targeted by those who want to hurt me.
The problem is not the fact that the hallucination is unreal or emanating from the distortions of the mind instead of from the objective features of nature. The problem is the fact that, in the case of responding as though one is being persecuted, you’re misinterpreting the events and what they indicate about the future. In Dewey’s words, “conditions do not exist for producing the future consequences which are now anticipated and reacted to” (ibid., pp. 39–40).
Now this point about consequences is very important, because it makes knowledge not a case of obtaining a transcript or representation or copy of nature; it understands knowledge as an activity that humans do in order to successfully navigate the future and their environment and meet their needs for survival, happiness, and thriving. So the ability to understand the hallucination as an indication for the need to see a doctor is great—that is knowledge doing its job. But when you believe the hallucination, there’s no distortion of the world taking place because of the mind, there’s just a misinterpretation or a failure to connect the present circumstances you’re experiencing with the future circumstances we should expect.
Now science is a form of knowledge, right? That’s obvious. That doesn’t change in this picture. In this picture, science is an amazingly powerful, fantastic, incredibly useful knowledge-technique for categorizing the qualities of the world that are reliably connected to each other—what we call causation—and therefore foreseeing what is likely to occur after a given event—what we call prediction—and structuring the world in such a way as to bring about the kind of environment we want and avoiding the kind of features we don’t want—what we call engineering, I suppose.
As Dewey says, “one can discover the conditions conducing to success and failure” in inquiry, which can give rise to sophisticated and reliable techniques of prediction and control over the conditions of life, the likes of which we see in scientific methods. The elements of scientific methods, such as observation, measurement, and testing, have proven valuable in predicting and controlling elements of nature, thereby securing desired outcomes. Scientific practices are therefore able to separate reliable connections from spurious connections between the qualities of our experience and nature.
Science and other processes of knowledge enable control over the qualities of experience and nature, and are therefore indispensable for an organic life which “goes on in and because of an environing medium” (Dewey, 1972, p. 7). Processes of knowing can be successful or unsuccessful in intelligently anticipating consequences and controlling the environment. The function of instituting knowledge-processes in the course of human experiences is not to discover reality and create a correspondence in the form of a representation, but to open up new capacities for changing and improving our conditions of life, and successfully navigating our environment.
This is a new way of approaching knowledge on an abstract level, which allows us to come to the same kinds of conclusions that feminist epistemologists want to reach but without falling into problems of skepticism and relativism. We can now say that knowledge is not about drawing up a transcript of an external nature with a one-to-one correspondence to it. It’s about navigating and building a better world. What kinds of changes we want to make and what constitutes a genuine improvement in our conditions is…a value-based consideration and, given the different situations of members and groups of a society, a political consideration. Better for whom? Better according to whom?
In the pragmatist approach, just like Clough says, we don’t need to talk about how all knowledge is distorted by language and the mind and so it’s necessarily tainted and biased one way or another. Knowledge isn’t even about distortion or correspondence. It’s about, “what can I do with this? What can I predict and avoid and prepare for? What can I change and build and make better?” Therefore, knowledge has values written into it from the get-go. Science is a very powerful and precise form of knowledge. So science also has values written into it from the get-go, and its very power and precision make it all the more important that we take those value-considerations seriously.
That’s as far as we can go this class on the lessons pragmatism can have for knowledge and feminist epistemology. But if you liked learning about this strange and beautiful philosophy called pragmatism, I am giving a class on pragmatism in the spring. It’s not going to be all heavy metaphysical stuff, though there will be some philosophy. Pragmatism was an intellectual movement which started in America in the 1860s and influenced a range of practices and inquiries beyond philosophy, including psychology, poetry, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and economics. My spring class will be looking at all of those. Pragmatism was hopeful, progressive, radical, and unique. It was hugely influential in the early 1900s, and then it dwindled and vanished in the 1950s, somewhat mysteriously, but probably as a result of McCarthyan threats to politicized academia. The class will be hosted by the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science program, so you know where to look in case you are interested.
That’s it for this week. Next week is Thanksgiving, so enjoy your break. And the following week, we have presentations, which I am really looking forward to. See you soon.