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Feminism and the scientific method

  
  

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Jackie Susann
03:16 / 03.08.02
"Then we're really not talking about the SM at all, are we?"

For Christ's sake! I *think* what we're talking about whether or not there exists some sort of pure, abstract SM, or whether it's something that does not exist outside its application. The argument isn't 'there is SM and then there are its applications, and I think we should talk about the latter', but, 'there is no SM but application, and talking about anything else is mystification'. Obviously we disagree on this point... (and Lurid, I don't think you can get around this by projecting a 'totality of applications' with particular properties, although it might be worth trying...)

On the other hand, if "science is an enterprise to uncover or project observer independent knowledge about the material universe', I think SM is a singularly bad method, because it does not seem (to me) to do this. One of the things I think is interesting about the way the 6 steps are laid out, is that they do not allow for establishing facts as such, or observer independent knowledge, only working hypotheses. So the 'truth value' of anything you work out by SM isn't so much an objective value, as how much you can do with it. I do not mean it as a criticism; I think it's pretty cool, actually. (I think Stengers says something like this; that science is not so much about falsifiability as risk, how much you are willing to stake on the possibility that any particular hypothesis is wrong...)

But to establish any fact, it seems to me, is to leap beyond the bounds of SM via some kind of metaphysical fiat. I mean, it's pretty undeniable that water boils at a constant temperature or whatever, but you don't get to make that a fact via SM, you only get to make predictions based on that assumption.
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:50 / 03.08.02
DPC. Though I tend to agree with the thrust of what you are saying, it introduces complications that I was deliberately glossing over. And it tilts on a semantic, rather than an actual difference in viewpoint.

Yes, the SM can only offer one working hypotheses rather than "truth" or some such metaphysical object. But... I'd say that the observer independent knowledge consists precisely of these theories. After all, a well established scientific theory offers predictions that are really astoundingly precise, and which can be used to construct the technological observer independent effects that we agree on.

Although you do raise good points about the tentative nature of science, it seems a strange use of language to me. 'No scientific knowledge was used to construct planes or go to the moon. Science has no knowledge, only theories.'

Fair enough, in a sense. Though it is such an exacting use of the word "knoweledge", that its hard to see how one could use it in any context.
 
 
Jackie Susann
05:46 / 06.08.02
i'm sorry, but when we started arguing about whether there's a difference between method and application we all gave up all right to complain that people were talking semantics.
 
 
Lurid Archive
09:05 / 06.08.02
It wasn't meant as a complaint and I didn't realise how much people objected to it. ah well.
 
 
Jackie Susann
02:02 / 09.08.02
well i was trying to be funny but obviously it didn't come across.

anyway, i don't think it is a semantic point at all. the difference in these basic conceptions of science - motivated by a search for unproblematised truth or motivated by the search for useful hypotheses - seems to me incredibly important. one licenses more or less anything, since truth is its own sorting criteria (never mind that SM doesn't let you achieve it, except by slippage). one makes you think about the outcomes of what you're doing. i think we disagree about whether this is a good or bad thing, but whatever - just wanted to point out there is more than a semantic issue at stake (and i.e. the feminist philosopher of science nancy kilpatrick has argued that the laws of physics are useful only insofar as they are untrue - will try to unpack that later)
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:36 / 09.08.02
Ah yes. A sense of humour. I tried having one of those once, but it didn't work as most of my music collection is from the eighties.

But, DPC, although you are absolutely right in saying that science deals with hypotheses there are a couple of points to make. First, I don't think that any scientist would claim that science is a search for unproblematised truth. In my experience this is a straw man. After all, the last century saw some of the biggest shifts in understanding of physics.

However, I'd still claim that science produces knowledge - problematised, but still knowledge. This is for two reasons. First, one has to have working hypotheses to interpret any part of reality. These can and often are mistaken, yet that doesn't invalidate the use of the word "knowledge".

Second, science offers such startling accurate predictions that it takes a determined amount of disbelief to say that there isn't something "real" approximating the objects of the model. Of course, one has to allow only an approximate correspondence, as any knowledge of Newtonian mechanics vs Relativity will tell you.

However, it is reasonable to say that while Newtonian mechanics is utimaely wrong, any theory that supercedes it must become a very close approximation of it within certain scales and speeds. In other words, in an appropriate context, Newtonian mechanics is more or less true. I think that this is probably a good way to look at scientific knowledge.
 
 
Cat Chant
09:59 / 10.08.02
All you people are great. I have nothing to add. Thank you.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:26 / 14.08.02
.I have nothing to add.

You knew I was lying, didn't you? Sadly, whilst I think what I want to add is a bit better formulated than my thinking was at the beginning of the thread, it's still a bit scattered & random. Also, whilst I will try to define my terms as closely as possible, I am not always/only engaging with the topic abstract's specific "feminism" and "scientific method": bear with me, please.

I am also trying very hard not to "argue" in this post, or to impute any particular views to any particular poster or group of posters on this thread (except where I quote or refer to people, obviously). I really don't feel like I'm on one "side" and "the pro-science posters" are on another. I'm just trying to summarize where I've got to, and I might end up being on both "sides" at different times, or neither.

Firstly, I think some of the ways/places in which this thread has got bogged down & confused point to one of my major problems with "science". That is the confusion of "science" with "observer-independent, repeatable truths about the physical universe" (or "objective reality" or whatever). Example: I was at a con a couple of weekends ago and tried to get out of an argument about genetics which was developing at me by saying "I don't believe in science"; the other woman stared at my feet and said "You're standing on the floor, though". "Science", however, is not the same thing as "gravity".

Further, "science" is not the only system of knowledge production which posits and/or seeks to comprehend a nonhuman reality: magick, philosophy, art, and the legal system (as in MC's "rapist" example) also rely on the premise that there is an intractable exteriority to the Self which cannot be reduced to an entirely solipsistic and/or random individual perception. "Science" and the scientific method are - and I don't think anyone's arguing with this - a specific disciplinary/discursive formation with a history, a politics and an economics.

The scientific method is a very good apparatus for autocritique within the disciplinary parameters of science and for transforming the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced: the same method can be used to refute knowledge produced by earlier "bad applications of the scientific method" suggesting, eg, that "born criminals" have a particular pattern of cranial bumps, or that if women are educated above a particular level they will become infertile, or that the sun goes round the earth.

So, the scientific method is in theory autocorrective, which is a very good and useful thing and probably the most necessary & important thing about said method. The problem I have is in the implications of this. Two things: firstly, I don't think that, because the SM is autocorrective, scientific knowledge is therefore autoregulating - necessarily, teleologically, mapping itself more and more closely to a "real world" or a pre-existent set of laws that govern a pre-given material reality. Rather, factors from outside the discipline of science enter in and prompt reconsideration, critique and re-examination of earlier "bad science". Which means, I would argue, that the "scientific method" cannot justify itself in isolation, or ever rigorously isolate itself from the social, cultural, historical and concrete circumstances in which it is practiced.

This leads to my second quibble, which is that, as Lyotard points out, since the scientific method cannot entirely justify itself without reference to any other discourses or disciplines, social metanarratives are brought in to justify it: most notably in this thread "it works" (which, incidentally, the Romans could say about their religious practices guaranteeing the stability of Empire for longer than "the scientific method" has been codified in Europe), but the one Lyotard identifies - and which I find particularly pernicious - is the idea of science as a self-regulating system constantly mapping the "real world" more and more closely. This entails a view of history (perhaps not only this view, but at least this among others) as the progressive increase of pure knowledge-about-reality throughout time. Someone once said to me "People were dying of radiation long before the Curies discovered uranium"*, which sums up for me the arrogance of a world-view which takes the deaths of individuals as mere examples of the rightness of science, and invalidates any other forms of experience or understanding of radiation.

I am not meaning to imply that all pro-scientists set human life at naught compared with their god, objective reality, but I do think that a progressivist belief in science as the progressively more and more accurate mapping of a pre-extant reality has to involve this kind of legitimating world-view, which necessarily excludes certain experiences and practices. (In much the same way, I would argue that reading colonial literature has to involve a certain complicity with racism and sexism, but that's not stopping me reading Stalky & Co for the nth time and perving over it enormously: it also doesn't mean that scientific practice cannot involve some sort of resistance to its legitimating narratives, and ultimately a transformation of them.)

Phew. Well, I had some more stuff to say about reading what happens in an experimental situation, but since I think it would just be repeating my objection to drawing a subject-object distinction between experimenter and material (and no-one ever picked up on that, so I'm guessing no-one's very interested), I'll leave it.

*or whatever: they got the references right, any garbling is entirely my own fault, sorry
 
  

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