Overview

Worries about scientific objectivity seem never-ending. Social critics and philosophers of science have argued that invocations of objectivity are often little more than attempts to boost the status of a claim, while calls for value neutrality may be used to suppress otherwise valid dissenting positions. Objectivity is used sometimes to advance democratic agendas, at other times to block them; sometimes for increasing the growth of knowledge, at others to resist it. Sandra Harding is not ready to throw out objectivity quite yet. For all of its problems, she contends that objectivity is too powerful a concept simply to abandon. In Objectivity and Diversity, Harding calls for a science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just, a science that would ask: How are the lives of the most economically and politically vulnerable groups affected by a particular piece of research? Do they have a say in whether and how the research is done? Should empirically reliable systems of indigenous knowledge count as real science ? Ultimately, Harding argues for a shift from the ideal of a neutral, disinterested science to one that prizes fairness and responsibility.

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Sandra Harding is one of the founders of feminist epistemology. In this important and clearly argued book she addresses some of the big issues of philosophy of science. She revisits her well-known positions on standpoint theory and strong objectivity and shows how they are enriched by encounters with the social sciences in the shape of development policy and post-colonial science and technology studies. She advocates for a philosophy of science for all research disciplines which permits a form of objectivity allied with a deep concern for social justice. --Trevor Pinch, Cornell University

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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.

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