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76James Tabery Helen Longino’s Studying Human Behavior is an overdue effort at a nonpartisan evaluation of the many scientific disciplines that study the nature and nurture of human behavior, arguing for the acceptance of the strengths and weaknesses of all approaches. After years of conflict, Longino makes the pluralist case for peaceful coexistence. Her analysis of the approaches raises the following question: how are we to understand the pluralistic relationship among the peacefully coexisting …Read more
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44Gender, sexuality research, and the flight from complexityMetaphilosophy 25 (4): 285-292. 1994.Research on sexual orientation attempts to reduce it to a monocausal phenomenon, whether that be biology (genes, hormones) or social environment (parenting patterns). None of these fully accounts for the diversity of erotic attraction and behavior, and indeed these reductionist strategies either misrepresent many forms of sexual behavior or erase them from our ontology. Understanding is better served by first acknowledging the variety of roles of sexual interaction in human life, rather than t…Read more
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65InferringPhilosophy Research Archives 4 17-26. 1978.This paper is a discussion of the nature of inferring and focusses on the relation between reasons for belief and causes of belief. Two standard approaches to the analysis of inference, the epistemological and the psychological, are identified and discussed. While both approaches incorporate insights concerning, inference, counterexamples show that neither provides by itself an adequate account. A third account is developed and recommended on the grounds that it encompasses the essential insight…Read more
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51Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and EqualityPhilosophical Review 102 (3): 405. 1993.Summarizes author’s contextual empiricism and uses it to analyze the difference between neuro-endocrinological accounts of presumed behavioral sex differences and neuro-selectionist accounts. Contextual empiricism is a philosophical approach that both shows how feminist critique works in the sciences and makes a contribution to general philosophy of science.
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84What Do We Measure When We Measure Aggression?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 32 (4): 685-704. 2001.Biological research on aggression is increasingly consulted for possible answers to the social problems of crime and violence. This paper reviews some contrasting approaches to the biological understanding of behavior—behavioral genetic, social-environmental, physiological, developmental—as a prelude to arguing that approaches to aggression are beset by vagueness and imprecision in their definitions and disunity in their measurement strategies. This vagueness and disunity undermines attempts to …Read more
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355Can There Be A Feminist Science?Hypatia 2 (3). 1987.This paper explores a number of recent proposals regarding "feminist science" and rejects a content-based approach in favor of a process-based approach to characterizing feminist science. Philosophy of science can yield models of scientific reasoning that illuminate the interaction between cultural values and ideology and scientific inquiry. While we can use these models to expose masculine and other forms of bias, we can also use them to defend the introduction of assumptions grounded in femini…Read more
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7The Death Of Nature: Women, Ecology, And The Scientific Revolution (review)Environmental Ethics 3 (4): 365-369. 1981.
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52Alan Sokal's “transgressing boundariesInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 11 (2). 1997.No abstract
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101Scientific Pluralism (edited book)Univ of Minnesota Press. 1956.Scientific pluralism is an issue at the forefront of philosophy of science. This landmark work addresses the question, Can pluralism be advanced as a general, philosophical interpretation of science?
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60Knowledge, bodies, and values: Reproductive technologies and their scientific contextInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 35 (3-4). 1992.This essay sets human reproductive technologies in the context of biological research exploiting the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule in the early 1950s. By setting these technological developments in this research context and then setting the research in the framework of a philosophical analysis of the role of social values in scientific inquiry, it is possible to develop a perspective on these technologies and the aspirations they represent that is relevant to the concerns of the…Read more
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38What's Really Wrong with Quantitative Risk Assessment?PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986. 1986.Quantitative risk assessment suffers from a variety of problems--some internal and others external. Dale Hattis proposes that the problems of risk assessment can be cured by the development of risk assessment theory. I agree that theory can help address some of the internal problems, such as the failure to date to take the interaction of hazardous substances with other substances in the environment into account. I argue that the external problems such as the manipulation of inherent uncertaintie…Read more
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449Gender, politics, and the theoretical virtuesSynthese 104 (3). 1995.Traits like simplicity and explanatory power have traditionally been treated as values internal to the sciences, constitutive rather than contextual. As such they are cognitive virtues. This essay contrasts a traditional set of such virtues with a set of alternative virtues drawn from feminist writings about the sciences. In certain theoretical contexts, the only reasons for preferring a traditional or an alternative virtue are socio-political. This undermines the notion that the traditional vir…Read more
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77Taking Gender Seriously in Philosophy of SciencePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992. 1992.Using the author's social analysis of scientific knowledge, two ways of understanding the importance of gender to the philosophy of science are offered. Given a requirement of openness to multiple critical perspectives, the gender, race and class structure of a scientific community are an important ingredient of its epistemic reliability. Secondly, one can ask whether a gender sensitive scientific community might prefer certain evaluative criteria (or virtues of theory or practice) to others. Si…Read more
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495Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Values in Science: Rethinking the DichotomyIn Lynn Hankinson Nelson & Jack Nelson (eds.), Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, . pp. 39--58. 1996.Underdetermination arguments support the conclusion that no amount of empirical data can uniquely determine theory choice. The full content of a theory outreaches those elements of it (the observational elements) that can be shown to be true (or in agreement with actual observations).2 A number of strategies have been developed to minimize the threat such arguments pose to our aspirations to scientific knowledge. I want to focus on one such strategy: the invocation of additional criteria drawn f…Read more
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319Science and the Common Good: Thoughts on Philip Kitcher’s S cience, Truth, and DemocracyPhilosophy of Science 69 (4): 560-568. 2002.In Science, Truth, and Democracy, Philip Kitcher develops the notion of well-ordered science: scientific inquiry whose research agenda and applications are subject to public control guided by democratic deliberation. Kitcher's primary departure from his earlier views involves rejecting the idea that there is any single standard of scientific significance. The context-dependence of scientific significance opens up many normative issues to philosophical investigation and to resolution through demo…Read more
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12The Pluralist StanceIn Stephen H. Kellert, Helen E. Longino & C. Kenneth Waters (eds.), ¸ Itekellersetal:Sp, . 2006.This essay introduces the volume Scientific Pluralism (Volume 19 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science). Varieties of recent pluralisms are surveyed, the difference between monism and pluralism vis a vis the sciences is clarified, and the authors’ notion of scientific pluralism is advanced.
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113Norms and naturalism: Comments on Miriam Solomon's social empiricismPerspectives on Science 16 (3). 2008.Miriam Solomon's social empiricism is marked by emphasis on community level rationality in science and the refusal to impose a distinction between the epistemic and the non-epistemic character of factors ("decision vectors") that incline scientists for or against a theory. While she attempts to derive some norms from the analysis of cases, her insistent naturalism undermines her effort to articulate norms for the (appropriate) distribution of decision vectors.
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56Review of Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino: Feminism & Science (Oxford Readings in Feminism) (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (4): 618-620. 1997.
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176Feminist Epistemology at Hypatia's 25th AnniversaryHypatia 25 (4): 733-741. 2010.This essay surveys twenty-five years of feminist epistemology in the pages of Hypatia. Feminist contributions have addressed the affective dimensions of knowledge; the natures of justification, rationality, and the cognitive agent; and the nature of truth. They reflect thinking from both analytic and continental philosophical traditions and offer a rich tapestry of ideas from which to continue challenging tradition and forging analytical tools for the problems ahead
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30Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism by Lynn Hankinson Nelson (review)Isis 83 179-179. 1992.
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25The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolutionEnvironmental Ethics 3 (4): 365-369. 1981.
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3Beyond “Bad Science‘Science, Technology, and Human Values 8 (1): 7-17. 1983.It is conventional to treat instances of research where social values have played a role as “bad science.” This article discusses instances of research that meet standards of “good science”, but that are nevertheless inflected by social values and uses these examples to argue that values can enter into research without thereby disqualifying the scientific status of the research. Other categories are needed to accommodate this kind of research.
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89Perilous thoughts: comment on van FraassenPhilosophical Studies 143 (1): 25-32. 2009.Bas van Fraassen’s empiricist reading of Perrin’s achievement invites the question: whose doubts about atoms did Perrin put to rest? This comment recontextualizes the argument and applies the notion of empirical grounding to some contemporary work in behavioral biology.
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Scientific Pluralism, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Vol 19) (edited book)University of Minnesota Press. 2006.
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6Maurice A. Finocchiaro, "History of Science as Explanation" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (2): 279. 1975.
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