Standpoint Theory: Feminist Philosophy of Science

This the third in a series where I provide a brief overview of a famous concept

Feminist standpoint theory claims that all knowledge is situated i.e. all knowledge is generated from a particular human standpoint or point of view.

Many if not most scientists have liked to claim that knowledge can be objective i.e. scientific enquiry should be about finding out and describing the truth of the world/ presenting accurate descriptions of reality and that ideally politics, ethics, aesthetics etc will be kept separate from the practice of science because the introduction of politics, aesthetics, ethics etc will only distort/ contaminate science and the pursuit of real/ true knowledge.

The history we are told to support this view of ideal glorified science as hermetically sealed and isolated from society is usually one of science fighting for its liberation from the dogmatic practices of religion or State institutions featuring a cast of heroes such as Galileo, Socrates or Copernicus who dared to go against the dictates of the institutions of their time (conveniently these simplistic narratives fail to mention figures like Newton and Robert Boyle which we will get to at the very end of this article).

In this story, science has had a long and arduous march to freedom In this story where science is the hero, science has fought hard to free itself from the shackles of society. And an ideal society is one that secures for science a space where it can freely pursue "truth" - free from the political, social or cultural concerns of society at large. (People who endorse such a view might turn their nose up at or tch tch or smh impatiently at the Modi government sponsoring research into the benefits of cow dung and cow urine as "unscientific or pseudoscientific")

The slogan for people who claim such a privileged status for science is "knowledge for knowledge sake".

The classic argument from this camp would be that science merely describes reality or produces things - say Atomic or Nuclear Energy. It is a question then and only then for politicians or law makers to decide what to do with atomic or nuclear energy. Questions of ethics or politics is better left to professional politicians or lawyers while discovering the true nature of reality is better left to professional scientists.

Sociologists, philosophers and historians of science have endeavoured to show why this is a very naive and potentially dangerous view. People working in science studies have tried to show how ethics and politics is always already implicated/ entwined in the practices of science i.e. scientists cannot be apolitical or agnostic towards ethics and politics even if they want to.

Let us consider for a moment a hypothetical community of Jain scientists. Would these Jain scientists consider dissecting animals? They would probably not. The fact that Europeans don't find it problematic to dissect and murder living beings for the work of science shows how they have a different ethics from the Jains and how ethics is already always implicated in the practice of science.

This effectively means that Jaina science will be different from Western science. Since men and women are socially, biologically and culturally different, the sort of science men do will be different from the sort of science women do. So now we don't have any monolithic thing called science - we have different kinds of science (say masculine science; feminine science; bahujan science; upper caste science) and consequently different, even conflicting and competing descriptions of reality

I will now highlight 2-3 things from Ruth Hubbard's classic essay "Have only Men evolved?"Ruth Hubbard was the first tenured female professor of biology at Harvard University but as her career progressed her interests increasingly shifted towards political and social activism.

During his voyage on the Beagle, Charles Darwin was able to amass a wealth of facts and information regarding variation and differentiation among species. He struggled however for quite some time to make sense of all of this data. What puzzled him, even after he returned to England was how exactly did the environment influence the evolution of species i.e. by what mechanism did the environment cause animals to be one way and not another? The answer did not come to Darwin immediately. He tried out different ideas - he wondered frequently whether the environment somehow acted directly on the womb; he toyed for some time with Lamarck's inheritance of traits idea - that characteristics were passed on from one generation to the next - from parent to offspring but ultimately rejected this explanation; he interviewed animal and plant breeders on how they produced novel hybrids but could find no such mechanism in nature wherein attributes seem to be selected by the sort of conscious choice a breeder exhibits.

It was an economic treatise that finally provided Darwin his solution. In 1838, Darwin read Thomas Malthus' "An essay on the principle of population."

Malthus argued that the population doubles every 25 years or so and with this you have a decrease in wages for labour and an increase in poverty. Malthus saw population control as the chief means of securing economic prosperity.

Malthus showed Darwin that if one began by assuming scarcity of resources, especially food, then competition would ensue and this competition would then force animals to adapt to their environment - an idea which is now glossed under the famous phrase "survival of the fittest."

Darwin inherited a very stark vision of the world from Malthus - a vision in which creatures have to constantly fight with and compete with each other in order to survive. Darwin's vision is a very masculine one with tropes of violence, dominance and aggression.

^^ This is a direct quote from Darwin. Darwin primarily characterizes life through the tropes of strife, struggle and warfare.

What is missing from this brutish characterization of life is moments of nurturing, care, cooperation, sharing, affection, love, empathy etc. Traits typically considered feminine.

One could ask (as many have asked) why scarcity and competition as the main theme rather than plenitude and cooperation?

Feminist biologists and archaeologists in recent years have critiqued the prominence given to tool use and hunting in many accounts of evolution. They have instead advocated considering how activities such as gathering rather than hunting might have contributed to human evolution - gathering as a practice that may (and we dont know this for sure at all so may with many pinches of salt and caveats) have been carried out predominantly by women rather than men.

But this is the crucial thing to understand about feminist standpoint theory. The idea is not that one corrects one's idea of what evolution was like by adding to its stock of concepts of say strife and competition, concepts like nurturing, care and affections. Feminist standpoint theorists do not claim that we will keep expanding these menu of concepts so that ultimately we will have a "true" or accurate description of reality.

The really radical claim of feminist standpoint theory is that all knowledge is situated and that it is impossible to ultimately give a description of reality that is objective i.e. a Godlike view from nowhere.

Another example here might help: biologists have usually stressed the role of our brain size and intelligence as a major turning point in our evolution. This in itself might turn out to be an idea rooted in the notion that what makes us special or different from other animals is our ability to think: more intelligently etc.

But biologists and anthropologists have now started wondering whether it was our ability to walk on 2 feet rather than our ability to think that was a major break or turning point?

Let us consider for a moment something like tool use. The conventional story is that humans were smart and intelligent and using the powers of their intellect start imagining or dreaming up tools in their head that they then crafted with their hands. Some anthropologists and biologists have now started wondering the opposite i.e. whether it was our hands that made it possible for our minds to start thinking about tools in the first place?

When we began walking on 2 feet - it freed up our hands and our face. For animals that walk on 4 legs, the mouth and teeth are heavily engaged in activities of grasping, pulling, feeling, breaking and tearing apart etc. The new story we are piecing together flips the relation between mind and body. Walking on 2 feet freed our hands up for well literally "handling" things - grasping, pulling etc. This also freed our mouth to do other things - the mouth which was no longer needed for tearing, grasping, pulling things etc could now speak. In this story it is not our brains and our intellect that puts us on a new path to evolution - it is our bodies...what is special about Man in this story is not his intellect etc but his ability to walk on 2 feet. Our notion of humans being special by virtue of their brains or intellect was the particular position from which we saw tool use as an artefact of intelligence rather than an outcome of the locomotion of our bodies.

We often hear people tell one another - "you are being biased" or "you need to be more objective about this or that". I think the main lesson we learn from feminist standpoint theory is that we have to discard such notions. Because speaking of biases implies that there is a unbiased description of reality that we can ultimately arrive at. At best this is a pipe dream. At worst, it conveniently allows us to ignore how sexism, classism, racism, casteism etc are already implicated in both scientific practices and scientific knowledge.

So if science is always already political - the question is not what biases can we can get rid of but from what position or standpoint should we be generating knowledge? 

The above is a quote from an essay by Michael Gross and Mary Beth Avnill. It clarifies what is at stake for feminist science. Gross and Avnill do not claim that they want to finally have a description of reality that is all encompassing and inclusive - they do not argue for something banal like we need to see more representation of women in science with the underlying assumption that science still will be the same - it will just have more women added to it. Their aim is much more explicitly radical - "to remake the image of nature in metaphors comfortable to women's reality". What feminist scientists want is thus not a "fair science" or an "equal" science, whatever the hell that might mean - what they want is a science that is comfortable for women.

Since it is impossible to have both an objective distance from and an objective description of reality in most cases, what some feminist philosophers of science want is a subjective description of reality that is comfortable for marginalized and disadvantaged people. The aim of science would now be to not describe reality as it is but in some sense to describe reality as we like it to be. The world isn's just given to us to passively study and contemplate - we constantly make and re-make it with our ideas, thoughts, actions and beliefs i.e. reality is not discovered but invented.

By way of summation - let us return to the petition floated by 500 Indian scientists against a government proposal to study the benefits of cow dung and cow urine. The scientists write in their petition that the call for such research is unscientific and pseudoscientific. Standpoint feminist theorists will likely point out that the question is not just one of discriminating between good science and bad science or "real" science and "pseudoscience."

It would be unfair to claim for instance that the grounds for science can never be religious. Robert Boyle who is considered the father of chemistry and Isaac Newton were both deeply, devoutly religious and even saw their scientific ideas as ultimately providing proofs of God - theirs was a science very much grounded/ from the standpoint of religious belief. There is nothing inherent in religion that makes it an illegitimate standpoint from which to do science. This is why this question is not one of science versus non-science but more a question of which science do we want?

The question is one, perhaps primarily, of politics. Do we want to pursue a science grounded in brahmanism or do we not want a science from the standpoint of brahmanical values of a 'holy cow'? To say that we do not want a science grounded in any religious faith or belief is in itself an agnostic or atheistic position/ standpoint - it is not an "objective" or "neutral" position.

Again, the hypothetical counterpoint with Jaina science might help unsettle the desirability and 'neutrality' claimed by an agnostic scientific standpoint. Jains might argue that what they want is not a better science or a more accurate science - what they want is a non-violent science.

PS: For a fascinating discussion of how Robert Boyle used chemistry experiments to prove the resurrection of Jesus Christ, see Alexander Wragge-Morley's Aesthetic Science - https://alexwraggemorley.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/robert-boyles-experimental-proof-of-the-possibility-of-the-resurrection/

For a discussion on how sexism has been pervasive in biology, consider Emily Martin's classic text "The Sperm and the Egg: How Science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles" https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/Martin1991.pdf