Hi
On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Gary Klatsky wrote:
> I may be socializing with a biased sample, but all of the
> racial minorities and women I know, although will point out
> western biases in the humanities, education, and some social
> sciences, do not see the same problems with the scientific
> method. There clearly are biases in the politics that may
> drive the science but not the methodology. It would be
> helpful to me, and I assume others on the list to have those
> post modern critiques presented here.
Ever happy to oblige, below are a small sampling of the readily
attainable quotes that critique the methods of science. Having
spent far too much time over the past 20 years reading critiques
of science like this, I can affirm that the challenges are very
deep (although vacuous). I have included a few negative comments
from critics of the critics, in part because they satisfy me that
my reading of this stuff is not completely idosyncratic.
Best wishes
Jim
Anti-Science Quotes
(and Some Comments from Science Supporters)
"It is no longer acceptable for psychology to
continue to be the enforcement branch of the
secularized Judeo-Christian myth. Through the
worshipping of logical positivism, our discipline
has been a coconspirator in the devastation and
the control of those peoples who are not
subsumed under a white, male, heterosexual
Christian subjectivity." (Duran & Duran, 1995, p.
7)
"The radical feminist position holds that
epistemologies, metaphysics, ethics, and politics
of the dominant forms of science are androcentric
and mutually supportive; that despite the deeply
ingrained Western cultural belief in science's
intrinsic progressiveness, science today serves
primarily regressive social tendencies; and that
the social structure of science, many of its
applications and technologies, its modes of
defining research problems and designing
experiments, its ways of constructing and
conferring meanings are not only sexist but also
racist, classist, and culturally coercive." (Harding,
1986, p. 9)
"... all knowledge, necessarily, results from
conditions of its production, is contextually
located, and irrevocably bears the marks of its
origins in the minds and intellectual practices of
... theorists and researchers who give voice to it.
The existing discipline of sociology is neither
neutral nor impartial; it reflects the practices and
knowledge of groups of highly particular white,
middle-class, heterosexual men while seemingly
reflecting universalisms Its sexism is no
'intrusion' or 'mistake'." (Stanley & Wise, 1990,
p. 39)
"Multiple conceptions of human functioning are
invited -- representing various intellectual and
ideological investments, ethnicities, and cultural
realities. The very idea of a 'mainstream'
psychology, or a 'unified positivism' (Staats,
1991), is suspect -- leading as it does to
suppression, myopia, and inflexibility. ... we need
not shudder at the loss of childhood; there is
indeed joy to be derived from the vision of
advanced maturity. As participants in a
postmodern world, we may hope to see a
flourishing of multiple perspectives, advancing
articulation of a relational being, a profusion of
methodologies, and a more enriching and
intensive relationship with our cultural ecology.
There is reason enough to salute and to
celebrate." (Gergen, 1992, Psychology in the
Postmodern Era, 1992, p. 11, p. 14, p. 14)
"Thus, these new sociologists [Bloor, Barnes, ...]
argue that scientific 'knowledge' is knowledge
not because it correctly relates the true state of
the natural world but because it has been
accepted as knowledge by the working body of
scientists involved. The causes of scientific
knowledge, then, are to be sought in the social
relations by which scientists achieve consensus
rather than in the physical constraints of the
external world." (Locke, 1992, Science as
Writing, p. 11)
"Mind vs. nature and the body, reason vs.
emotion and social commitment, subject vs.
object and objectivity vs. subjectivity, the
abstract and general vs. the concrete and
particular -- in each case we are told that the
former must dominate the latter lest human life
be overwhelmed by irrational and alien forces,
forces symbolized in science as the feminine. All
these dichotomies play important roles in the
intellectual structures of science, and all appear
to be associated both historically and in
contemporary psyches with distinctively
masculine sexual and gender identity projects."
(Harding, 1986, The Science Question in
Feminism, p. 125)
"Feminists acknowledge that making science is a
social process and that scientific laws and the
'facts' of science reflect the interests of the
university-educated, economically privileged,
predominantly white men who have produced
them." (Hubbard, 1989, p. 119)
"The epistemological turn in feminist theory --
with its critiques of objectivism, empiricism,
quantification, experimentalism, and positivism --
has added to some psychologists' sense of
estrangement from women's studies. These
tenets have been and remain the dominant
foundational assumptions of most of psychology
and of most of feminist psychology in the United
States. ... A small but growing number of
feminist psychologists have embraced the
epistemological debates in feminist theory and,
indeed, have argued that the foundational
assumptions of psychology, as well as its
conventional practices and procedures, operate to
contain, silence, and sanitize feminism."
(Marecek, 1995, p. 102)
" ... when we consider the main conclusions of
SSS [Social Studies of Science]: that there is no
essential difference between science and other
forms of knowledge production; that there is
nothing intrinsically special about 'the scientific
method'; indeed, even if there is such a thing as
the 'scientific method', much scientific practice
proceeds in spite of the canons of the scientific
method rather than because of them." (Woolgar,
1988, p. 12)
"The displacement of the idea that facts and
evidence matter by the idea that everything boils
down to subjective interests and perspectives is -
- second only to American political campaigns --
the most prominent and pernicious manifestation
of anti-intellectualism in our time." (Laudan,
1990, p. x)
"Embarrassment at racialism and its
consequences of genocide, slavery and
discrimination is I believe behind the all-too-eager
embracing of relativism in the profession. ... I
shall try to show that relativism is intellectually
disastrous because it is no barrier to racialism and
it fosters intellectual attitudes from which
anthropology still suffers. These include sloppy
disregard of contradictions (especially between
rationality and relativism), and abdication from
the classical aim of the social sciences to
enlighten, and improve the lot of, mankind."
(Jarvie, 1984, p. xii)
"I shall criticize these arguments at some length
since they seem to me both philosophically
confused and a source of much confusion
elsewhere, especially among cultural and literary
theorists keen to view science ('postmodern'
science) in the image of their own concerns."
(Norris, 1997, p. viii)
"But these objections must appear ill-
founded if one considers how shaky are their own
premises -- a range of highly debatable ideas
about semantics, discourse, representation, the
'social construction of reality', et. -- as compared
with the cumulative warrant for our trust in the
methods and procedures of the physical sciences.
For in the latter case there is nothing, hyper-
cultivated scepticism aside, that could give
serious reason to doubt the evidence of scientific
progress in various fields of enquiry. If this book
has achieved anything, then I hope it will have
convinced at least a few cultural and social
theorists that anti-realism is far from having won
all the arguments except on its own (decidedly
partisan) terms of reference." (Norris, 1997, p.
321)
"The relativists, in whatever guise -- the
'postmodernists' are but an extravagant,
undiscipline and transient mode of this attitude --
seem to me to offer an accurate and acceptable
account of how we do, and probably of how we
should, order our gastronomy ..., our wallpaper,
and even, for lack of a better alternative, our daily
self-image. ... Their insights apply to the
decorative rather than the real structural and
functional aspects of life. When they try to apply
their insights too far, they constitute a
preposterous travesty of the real role of serious
knowledge in our lives, and even, for what it is
worth, of the actual practice of social science.
Societies are systems of real constraints ... To
pretend otherwise is not merely error but also
self-deception. It is error which is in blatant
conflict with what, in other contexts, we know
perfectly well. It is self-delusion." (Gellner, 1992,
p. 95)
"... all ways of understanding are historically and
culturally relative. ... we should not assume that
our ways of understanding are necessarily any
better (in terms of being any nearer the truth)
than other ways." "Therefore, what we regard as
'truth' ...is a product not of objective observation
of the world, but of the social processes and
interactions in which people are constantly
engaged with each other." (Burr, 1995, p. 4)
"Moreover, available literature on Western
epistemology provides compelling evidence for
the Eurocentric prejudice of conventional social
science in general and its inherent cultural and
racial biases in particular." (Abdo, 1996, p. viii)
"In ... rewriting modern sciences, largely viewed
as a white-male European construct, feminist
scholars dispelled a major myth about the
objectivity/neutrality of science. The
methodologies adopted by most modern
scientists, from Newton to Descartes to Bacon,
feminists assert, are ideological constructs
designed to capture, control, and manipulate the
Other. The Other here represents 'earth/nature'
and the different social/class groups affiliated
with it." (Abdo, 1996, p. 8)
"Assumptions of objectivity, rationality, truth,
individual freedom, and progress are all placed in
jeopardy." (Gergen, 1994, p. ix)
"In each case, accepted scientific practices are
shown to be detrimental to women's interests
and to social equality more generally. ... Feminists
are joined in these critical and exploratory
endeavors by many others, such as those who
decry the ways in which the sciences and their
allied institutions contribute to colonialism...."
(Gergen, 1994, p. xiv)
"Perhaps the chief assumption underlying
contemporary behavioral research is that general
theoretical statements are subject to empirical
evaluation. During the hegemony of logical
positivism the empirical validity of a given
hypothesis was primarily linked to the frequency
of its empirical confirmation. As we have seen,
many feel this view has been supplanted by
Popper's (1968) falsification doctrine." (Gergen,
1994, p. 69)
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James M. Clark (204) 786-9757
Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax
University of Winnipeg 4L05D
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
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