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PARTISAN REVLEW
physical as well as in the social sciences.)
Those who think that criticisms of sexism in scicntific theorizing re–
quire a new, feminist epistemology insist that we are obliged, in the light
of these criticisms, to acknowledgc political considerations as legitimate
ways
to
decide between theories. But on thc face of it these criticisms
suggest exactly the opposite conclusion - that politics should be kept
out of science.
I can make sense of how things got so startlingly
aujge/when
only by
looking at feminist epistemology, not just as part of a larger develop–
ment in feminism, but also as part of a larger development in epistemol–
ogy. Here the last thirty years or so have seen a major shift: from the old
romantic view, which took scicnce to deserve a kind of epistemic au–
thority in virtue of its peculiarly objective mcthod of inquiry; to a new
cynicism, which sees science as a value-permeated social institution; stresses
the importance of politics, prejudice and propaganda, rather than the
weight of the evidence, in determining what thcories are accepted; and
sometimes goes so far as to suggest that reality is constructed by us, and
"truth" a word not to be used without the precaution of scare quotes.
My diagnosis is that the new cynicism in the philosophy of science
has fed the ambition of the new feminism to colonizc epistemology. The
values with which science is permcated, it is argucd, have bcen , up until
now, inhospitable to the interests of women. Fcminist criticisms of sex–
ism in scientific theorizing, the argument continucs, cannot be seen
merely as criticisms of bad science; the moral to bc drawn is that we
must abandon the quixotic quest for a science that is value-free, in favor
of the achievable goal of a science informed by fcminist valucs. There
would be a genuinely feminist epistemology if the aspiration could be
achieved to legitimate the idca that feminist values should determine
what theories are accepted.
The arguments offered to motivate the shift from feminist criticisms
of sexism in scientific theorizing to feminist epistemology are of precisely
the kind this diagnosis would predict. I can consider here only the two
most important, each of which focuses on a notion dear to the hearts of
the new cynics: underdetermination and value-ladcnness.
The first appeals to "the underdetermination of theories by data,"
claiming that, since there is unavoidable slack with respect to what
theories are accepted, it is proper to allow political preferences to de–
termine theory choice.
In
one version, the appeal to underdetermination
is intended only to point to the fact that sometimes the available evi–
dence is not sufficient to decide between rival thcories, and that in some
cases (for example, with respect to theories about the remote past, "man
the hunter" and all that) additional evidence may be, in practice, unob-
