Elizabeth Potter's introductory textbook — the first of its kind — is a welcome addition to the literature, if only because much of the work she reviews remains oddly obscure.  But in her exclusive focus on the ways in which values and interests assist scientific decision-making, she misses an opportunity to offer a truly comprehensive survey of her subject, one that will attract those exhausted by the Kuhnian debate as to whether we can explain scientific theory choice by referring to internal or constitutive values alone or whether we must invoke external or contextual values as well.  While philosophers of science — feminists and non-feminists alike — will benefit from this rich and compact discussion of value, framing the entire upshot of feminism in this way under-emphasizes the more local work being done in subfields such as confirmation and observation, among others.

Feminist philosophy of science has been an active discipline for more than twenty-five years, but its yield continues to be marginalized and underrepresented.  Not one of the more than 180 papers chosen for the 2006 biennial Philosophy of Science Association conference were presented directly on feminist topics, and only three were presented on topics distantly related to feminism.  Popular philosophy of science anthologies include no more than one or two of such essays pasted into catchall "science and society" sections.  The industry-standard — MIT Press's Boyd-Gasper-Trout anthology (1991) — contains one essay; Routledge's Balashov (2002) and Norton's Curd-Cover (1998) each contain two, while Oxford's Papineau (1996) has none.  The result of this occlusion has had an unfortunate classroom effect, as instructors pack isolated feminism readings into the last week of their courses, creating the impression that this work is, at worst, inexact, and, at best, one of many (merely) critical reactions to logical empiricism. 

Feminist philosophy of science, as Potter presents it, does indeed have a critical spirit.  In reaction to the ways in which logical empiricism reconstructed only the most rational aspects of scientific decision-making, most philosophers over the last forty years have preferred to start their theorizing with historically accurate descriptions of the scientific process.  But Potter and her subjects argue that the new naturalism neglects to describe the many ways in which scientists rely upon values and interests when making choices.  In other words, contemporary casework commits the same crime of selective endorsement.  Through broader and more responsible empirical work, feminist philosophers criticize scientists for failing to recognize just how deeply their masculine biases have affected their experimental conclusions.

Emerging from this more general, negative theme, however, are five positive philosophies of science, Elizabeth Anderson's co-operative model of justification, Sandra Harding's standpoint epistemology, Helen Longino's feminist contextual empiricism, Lynn Hankinson Nelson's naturalized feminist empiricism, and Alison Wylie's project-specific standpoint epistemology. Values and interests play crucial epistemic roles, despite the fact that they also can aggravate and prompt subordination.  Potter organizes her discussion by reserving one chapter for each theorist, and presenting the sequence as a trajectory from the more descriptive theories, such as naturalized feminist empiricism, which simply notice that values do (in fact) help constitute evidence and thus enter into the context of justification, to the more normative theories, such as standpoint theory, which argue that there is an epistemic advantage to arriving at a question from a certain standpoint. 

The book does not include a meaningful study of Donna Haraway, despite the relevance of her work on embodied seeing.  There is no extended discussion of the theorists who focus on rhetoric and metaphor in scientific writing.  There is no mention of the many feminist historians of science whose work is clearly philosophical (especially in our post-Quinean climate), although Peter Galison "pidgin languages" briefly appear.  And although Potter's own philosophers take time to discuss the gender construct in which science is produced, there is no attention to the gender context in which philosophy is produced — the number of female philosophers, their ranks, salaries, editorial roles in journals and major anthologies, differences in training, extra-career obligations, etc.  The last omission, especially, prompts one to wonder what exactly is feminist about Potter's conception of feminist philosophy of science, for although feminists are certainly interested in value intrusion and naturalized epistemology, there is nothing especially feminist about these interests.  A bit more context, for example, about Potter's theorists in relation to Kuhn and Hanson or, more specifically, about Nelson in relation to David Bloor, might underline this last point.

One could argue that the missing subjects belong to science studies and not philosophy.  But that would be a mistake.  The danger in presenting feminist philosophy of science so narrowly is that the internal/external debate is longstanding and, many will feel, played out.  Readers might say something similar about the bogus threat of radical relativism, which appears throughout the text as the only anticipated objection to theories presented.  Isn't the more current question something like:  Given that knowledge is fallible, what makes some of it better than the rest? 

Potter never addresses these atmospheric concerns.  But she has the resources to do so, for there is much in this literature that takes us well beyond classroom dialectic.  For instance, Alison Wylie's consilience model of confirmation is a terrific complication of Hanson et al.  As Potter explains, Wylie diffuses theory-ladenness worries after closely attending to the details of archeological case studies:  The independence and sheer number of ladening theories results in a kind of mitigated objectivity.  And Elizabeth Anderson's argument that science cares not for facts, but significant (i.e. valuable) facts leads to the creative position that we might uncover ways to use facts, for example, emotional evidence, to correct our values.  Philosophers tired of theory-ladenness and the realism/relativism debates should not use their fatigue as an excuse to ignore Anderson and Wylie.  As Potter's exposition makes clear, there is much of interest.  And given that the editor of the journal Philosophy of Science indicated at a special PSA conference session that he would like to see more submissions on value, much of use. 

Especially absorbing in this book is Potter's meta-level critical attention to the prominence of casework in the philosophy of science.  After hearing philosophers complain abstractly of bias, readers want to see the money, and these authors do not disappoint.  Potter summarizes at least one case to illustrate and assist each author's argument.  But even more importantly, her last chapter criticizes the unconscious way in which contemporary philosophers of science select and handle their case studies, an under-theorized research area.  Given our wisdom when it comes to the reliability of observation and induction, for instance, why exactly have we reduced philosophy of science to casework?  Could this be an over-correction?  Potter writes: "[W]e can treat philosophies of science as science scholars treat the sciences, i.e. we can analyze them to see whether in fact they are neutral among contextual values and, if not, we can find the locations at which values influence them" (FPS 173).  She finds that even naturalist philosophers of science rationally (i.e unnaturally) reconstruct their examples.  (How could they not?)  She then argues that philosophers who unknowingly follow certain metaphilosophical norms beg the question against their feminist colleagues.  For instance, as a philosopher, you might decide not to work on a case because values and interests have entered into the context of justification; the case is "bad science," so it could not possibly have anything to teach us about explanation, laws, confirmation, etc.  One now sees how ignoring all such cases could quickly sponsor the impression that values and interests do not (and then should not) enter into the context of justification.  The argumentative strategy here has a long history — from Sextus Empiricus, through Chisholm, Longino, and many others, to the picket line:  If all of the tenure-track philosophers in the room have nannies and work around the clock, it might come to seem one must make those choices to be a good philosopher.  Of course, this strategy works both ways.  How is Potter able to say that contemporary philosophers reconstruct unnaturally?

Locally, Potter has written a nice introduction to feminist philosophy of science that will be useful primarily for instructors preparing undergraduate and graduate seminars on feminist philosophy of science, graduate students in feminist philosophy of science who are beginning their thesis work, and women's studies faculty and students who wish to broaden and deepen their knowledge of feminist theory.  As it is always better to assign original sources to students and as several of the chapters are too difficult for average undergraduates, most of whom have little knowledge of logical empiricism and/or Quine and most of whom shy away from formal representations, I don't see a place for this volume on a course syllabus.  And — with the exception of the last chapter — this book will only help to solidify and perhaps organize the knowledge of working scholars.  Potter sticks to straight summaries, offering limited comparisons between the views and even less critical discussion, although she does strive to place some of the theories — particularly Nelson's — in their post-logical empiricist, Quinean context and, as I mentioned, frequently breaks from summarizing to explain why none of the views engender radical relativism.

Beyond the choir, this introduction makes it clear that philosophers interested in the fact/value distinction (that is, all philosophers) ignore feminist philosophy of science at their peril.  Those who haven't studied this literature should start with Longino, Anderson, and Wylie.  But they might find some provocative leads in Potter's introduction.

The way in which major anthologies and conferences underrepresent Potter's theorists is a shame.  No doubt this work is different in style and scope from that which addresses, for example, the various Bayesian approaches to confirmation.  (In the near future, it would be nice to see feminist philosophers of science engage even more than they already have with the canonical literature on the micro-topics of explanation, confirmation, causation, and laws, etc., that is, beyond macro-level of methodology.  For instance, how exactly have Salmon's, Kitcher's, and van Fraassen's theories of explanation faltered due to the philosophical interest in rational reconstruction and/or constitutive values alone?)  But, in the extension of Kuhn's legacy and commitment to the policing of bias in contemporary science, feminist work surely figures as mainstream philosophy of science.  Even more importantly, these approaches to the study of science serve as more complex and thoughtful instantiations of the naturalized epistemology research program and, in so serving, are uniquely well placed to question our field's overwhelming embrace of the case study.

© 2007 Alexandra Bradner

Alexandra Bradner, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Denison University

Categories: Philosophical