First, two (one?) theoretical virtue that feminist epistemology contributes: a preference for ontological heterogeneity.
Difficult to make this out: the idea seems to be that conflation (conflating men and women, equivocating between different meanings of "dominate" to establish that male primates dominate females in the wild) is worse than excess complexity. Or, a commitment to the idea that the world is probably ontologically complex. That conviction is shared by this female philosopher, anyway!
The second theoretical virtue is supposed to be "complexity of relationship" (31), but this also seems to boil down to ontological heterogeneity, under the queasy heading "many faces of power" or "many means of resistance" to oppression: "it opens up opportunities for activists to imagine strategies of resistance to oppression that involve changing the social structure rather than attacking individuals" (31). Is imagination itself supposed to be important here? A connection with Beauvoir: we should conceive of alternatives to underscore the contingency of the way things actually are.
There is some discussion of the social history of a Nation of Islam-published book called The Secret History Between Blacks and Jews, a (mostly) factually accurate but extremely misleading list of claims implying a disproportionately large role was played by Jews in facilitating the slave trade and in owning slaves themselves. In fact, the claims are cherry-picked and the implication is false. The natural reaction, Anderson writes, is that although the book tells the truth it fails badly in telling "the whole" truth. But "the whole" truth about slavery, given the nature of slavery, can't be put in value-neutral terms; even if we reject the values of The Secret History we must espouse some values in order to do what its authors did not, and tell "the whole truth." This is a challenge to a 'value-neutral theorist', Anderson says; "I see no contextually value-neutral way to characterize the whole truth, or the significant truths, about slavery" (39).
One objection by the 'value-neutral' camp to Anderson's position (imagined to come from e.g. Susan Haack) is that value-laden theory choice ought to be restricted to the soft or social sciences. Anderson denies that such a distinction between the sciences can be made, given that e.g. physics, a paradigm hard science, concerned itself with certain claims rather than others because of the need to build an atomic bomb. (Wait a minute. The fact that physicists were interested in this question in no way means this question determined their choice of theories!)
The discussion moves on to question whether there is a value-neutral account of natural kinds. (For all sciences now, I guess.) Anderson relates a change in the way that unemployment rates were measured by the government after 1994, with the result that more women were counted as unemployed (but actively seeking work) (45-46). She suggests that from the point of view of "epistemic grounds", this change in classification was "only vaguely justified" (47); it was better for predicting some things and worse for others. However, in value terms it is clearly superior.
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Do feminists always have to have a point?: a criticism that stings directed at every branch of science? Isn't all the idiocy that's been uncovered in the social sciences good enough to justify the feminist movement and its beneficial effects on the academy? I'm inclined to think it is. My intuitive verdict: the "harder" you go in the sciences, the more resistance to value-laden theory choice you will get. This may even be what people mean by "hard" (or it might be the closest to an acceptable precisification of "hard" that we can come.)
Is there a feminist critique of math? of logic?
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