Kathleen Okruhlik

Feminist critiques of science provide fertile ground for any investigation of the ways in which social influences may shape the content of science. Many authors working in this field are from the natural and social sciences; others are philosophers. For philosophers of science, recent work on sexist and androcentric bias in science raises hard questions about the extent to which reigning accounts of scientific rationality can deal successfully with mounting evidence that gender ideology has had deep and extensive effects on the development of many scientific disciplines.Feminist critiques of biology have been especially important in the political struggle for gender equality because biologically determinist arguments are so often cited to ‘explain’ women’s oppression. They explain why it is ‘natural’ for women to function in a socially subordinate role, why men are smarter and more aggressive than women, why women are destined to be homebodies, and why men rape.

Bas van Fraassen's anti-realist account of science has played a major role in shaping recent philosophy of science. His constructive empiricism, in particular, has been widely discussed and criticized in the journal literature and is a standard topic in philosophy of science course curricula. Other aspects of his empiricism are less well known, including his empiricist account of scientific laws, his relatively recent re-evaluation of what it is to be an empiricist, and his empiricist structuralism. This essay attempts to provide an overview of these diverse aspects of van Fraassen's empiricism and to show how they relate to one another. It also focuses on the nature of van Fraassens's epistemic voluntarism and its relationship to his empiricist philosophy of science

Feminist critiques of science are widely dispersed and often quite inaccessible as a body of literature. We describe briefly some of the influences evident in this literature and identify several key themes which are central to current debates. This is the introduction to a bibliography of general critiques of science, described as the “core literature,” and a selection of feminist critiques of biology. Our objective has been to identify those analyses which raise reflexive (epistemological and methodological) questions about the status of scientific knowledge and practice, both in general terms and in relation to biological research. We have abstracted these listings from a body of material compiled by members of the research project, “Philosophical Feminism: The Critiques of Science,” which covers a range of discipline-specific critiques beyond biology, as well as the more general philosophical critiques which constitute the core of the present bibliography.

Attempts by twentieth-century historians to account for the successes and failures of the Hipparchian-Ptolemaic solar model provide valuable case studies for philosophers who are studying the relationship between observational data and theoretical constructs. A brief survey of recent literature on the solar model reveals that in some cases results which appear to be the product of highly accurate observation are, in fact, based on rather crude observations aided by a large measure of theoretical presupposition. On the other hand, mistaken results, which have sometimes been explained as the outcome of theoretical bias or conscious deceit, can plausibly be accounted for as a result of honest mistakes at the observational level.

This is a collection of twelve essays, most of which have appeared before in diverse places. They cover a broad range of topics and are loosely connected by a recurring set of themes. These themes are best understood as attacks by Midgley on certain characteristics of the philosophical enterprise as it is currently practised in the West. The tendencies and principles she calls into question include individualism, scholasticism, realism, instrumentalist conceptions of rationality, anthropocentrism, reductionism, scientism, and mechanism.

Feminist critiques of science provide fertile ground for any investigation of the ways in which social influences may shape the content of science. Many authors working in this field are from the natural and social sciences; others are philosophers. For philosophers of science, recent work on sexist and androcentric bias in science raises hard questions about the extent to which reigning accounts of scientific rationality can deal successfully with mounting evidence that gender ideology has had deep and extensive effects on the development of many scientific disciplines.Feminist critiques of biology have been especially important in the political struggle for gender equality because biologically determinist arguments are so often cited to ‘explain’ women’s oppression. They explain why it is ‘natural’ for women to function in a socially subordinate role, why men are smarter and more aggressive than women, why women are destined to be homebodies, and why men rape.

Feminist accounts of science expose the ways in which the various sciences exhibit androcentric bias in their theories, practices, and presuppositions. Some, but not all, of these accounts also raise questions about the extent to which our understanding of what it is to be rational, objective, and scientific is itself gender‐laden. The analyses are wide‐ranging and diverse, reflecting a broad range of commitments within philosophy of science and within feminist theory. It is a mistake to treat feminist critiques of science as constituting a monolithic body of literature, since doing so leads to caricature and to the inevitable repression of crucial issues. Moreover, one of the chief lessons to be gleaned from the accumulating research in this area is that the role played by gender in science is exceedingly complex and variable. Popular presentations and offhand references that downplay this complexity and variability misrepresent feminist research, and contribute to maintaining the unfortunate gulf between it and most “mainstream” philosophy of science.