11 - Science and Anti-Science: Objectivity and Its Real Enemies

Summary

INTRODUCTION

As the political activist Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote in 1970: “whenever the enemy keeps lobbing bombs into some area you consider unrelated to your defense, it's always worth investigating” (1974, p. 131).

Such an investigation is the primary aim of this essay. There are several interrelated pronouncements that materialize with mystifying but strict regularity whenever “feminism” and “science” are used in the same breath. These include: feminists judge scientific results according to ideological standards instead of truth and evidence, and are recommending that others do the same; feminists are all “relativists” about knowledge, hence they don't understand or don't accept the basic presuppositions of scientific inquiry; feminists – like many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science – wish to replace explanations of scientific success that are based on following the methods of science, with explanations purely in terms of power struggles, dominance, and oppression, and to ignore the role of evidence about the real world; in sum, feminists don't believe in truth, they reject “objectivity” as being oppressive, they are hostile to the goals and ideals of scientific inquiry, and they renounce the very idea of rationality itself.

Given that there is a well-known body of feminist work which has systematically articulated the negation of each of the above beliefs in black and white, there is certainly a mystery here.