Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives - Softcover

Harding, Sandra G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801497469 ISBN 13: 9780801497469

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Whose Science, Whose Knowledge? represents a transition from gender to power considerations in Harding's continuous efforts to raise questions about the theory and practice of science.― Shulamit Reinharz ― Gender & Society

Harding's is a richly informed, radical voice that boldly confronts issues of crucial importance to the future of many academic disciplines. Her book will amply reward readers looking to achieve a more fruitful understanding of the relations between feminism, science, and social life.

Sandra Harding here develops further the themes first addressed in her widely influential book, The Science Question in Feminism, and conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we know.

Following a strong narrative line, Harding sets out her arguments in highly readable prose. In Part 1, she discusses issues that will interest anyone concerned with the social bases of scientific knowledge. In Part 2, she modifies some of her views and then pursues the many issues raised by the feminist position which holds that women's social experience provides a unique vantage point for discovering masculine bias and and questioning conventional claims about nature and social life. In Part 3, Harding looks at the insights that people of color, male feminists, lesbians, and others can bring to these controversies, and concludes by outlining a feminist approach to science in which these insights are central. "Women and men cannot understand or explain the world we live in or the real choices we have," she writes, "as long as the sciences describe and explain the world primarily from the perspectives of the lives of the dominant groups."

About this title

About the Author

Sandra Harding is Professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is also Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

From the Back Cover

With a book that is guaranteed to upset familiar assumptions about or ways of knowing, Sandra Harding again steps into the center of a thorn debate--a debate about the nature of the scientific enterprise and of human knowledge itself. Vigorously and persuasively, she develops further the themes first addressed in The Science Question in Feminism. It that widely influential book, she asked what it is that is distinctive about feminist research. Here she conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we know.

Reviews

In a dozen intriguing, thought-provoking essays viewing science and its practice from a feminist perspective, Harding takes up some of themes from her earlier work The Science Question in Feminism. ``Why `Physics' Is a Bad Model for Physics'' argues that the image of ``pure'' science as value-free and distinct from applied science and technology is an illusion and, further, that science with no socially useful application could ``reasonably be seen as a make-work welfare program for the middle classes.'' ``What Is Feminist Epistemology'' explores feminist empiricism, which asserts that the problem with scientific inquiry lies not in its standards but in the fact that it fails to meet its own standards; Harding also examines the more radical feminist standpoint theories, which claim that what a culture calls ``knowledge'' is itself socially situated, that knowledge looks different from the standpoint of women's lives. ``Reinventing Ourselves as Other,'' while regarding women as science's post-modern ``other,'' approaches ``the Monster Problem: what does and should it mean to be a male feminist?''

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801497469
• ISBN 13: 9780801497469
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336