Transcript Is Glennan’s Theory Complex Enough?

Feminist Perspectives
on the Social Sciences
Philosophy 152
Week 7
2011
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie
1
Outline
I. The need for feminist social science
II. Wylie’s arguments on methodology
II.A. The collectivist model of inquiry
II.B. The ‘self-study’ model of inquiry
III. Standpoint theory
IV. Crasnow on feminist social science
2
I. The need for feminist
social science
3
Historically, women have been marginalized and prevented
from participating in academia as equals (and it’s not
perfect, now):
• Rosalind Franklin did not receive sufficient credit for her
contributions to the discovery of the double helix.
• Jocelyn Bell, the discoverer of pulsars, was not included
in the 1974 Nobel prize for physics. (Her PhD advisor,
Antony Hewish, received it, along with Martin Ryle.)
• Ruth Barcan Marcus, a PhD student in Philosophy at Yale
in the 1940s, was prevented from attending the lectures
for which she was a class teacher.
What are the intellectual worries, aside from equity
concerns?
4
• Much of social science (especially that of the
interpretive tradition) concerns understanding
and explaining the subjective experiences of
persons.
– Whose reports do we rely on when we attempt to
understand and explain the subjective experiences
of a person?
– The exclusion of women ensures that no effective
check exists against passing off stereotypical views
about ‘women’s experience’ as facts.
• Consider the following examples. . .
5
Erik Erikson (1902-1994)
Influential professor of
psychology who taught at
Yale and Harvard.
Erikson:
‘[M]uch of a young
woman’s identity is
already defined in her
kind of attractiveness
and in the selectivity of
her search for the man
(or men) by whom she
wishes to be sought.’
6
Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990)
Influential professor of
psychology who taught at
University of Chicago,
1944-1973.
Bettleheim:
‘We must start with the
realization that, as much
as women want to be
good scientists or
engineers, they want
first and foremost to be
womanly companions of
men and to be mothers.’
7
The ‘view from nowhere’ often represented
clear social interests and concerns (of men).
Sandra Harding: The
women’s movement needed
knowledge that was for
women.
Women had long been the
object of others’ knowledge
projects. Yet the research
disciplines and public policy
that depended upon them
permitted no conceptual
frameworks in which women
became the subjects or
authors of knowledge; the
implied ‘speakers of scientific
knowledge’ were never
women. (1987)
8
Three features of feminist social science
1. A recognition that the problematics of
traditional social science generally reflected the
concerns of men.
Reflection of how social phenomena get defined as
problems in need of explanation in the first place
quickly reveals that there is no such thing as a
problem without a person (or groups of them) who
have this problem: a problem is always a problem for
someone or other. (Harding 1987)
9
Three features of feminist social science
2. An explicit attempt to design research
programs that perform research for women.
[T]he goal of this inquiry is to provide for women
explanations of social phenomena that they want
and need, rather than providing for welfare
departments, manufacturers, advertisers, the
medical establishment, or the judicial system
answers to questions they have. (Harding 1987)
10
Three features of feminist social science
3. An explicit attempt to locate the social
scientific researcher ‘in the same critical plane’
as the subject matter.
The best feminist analysis… insists that the inquirer
her/himself be placed in the same critical plane as
the overt subject matter, therby recovering the
entire research process for scrutiny in the results of
research. (Harding 1987)
11
Sample questions for critical social science
• How did it come to be that violence against women in modern
Western societies was often interpreted by legal systems as
women ‘asking for it’ and/or ‘deviant men’ committing it?
• How did it occur that a double day of work, one unpaid, was
regarded as normal and desirable for women but not for
men?
• Why is it that societal attitudes regarding behavior (e.g., antisocial behavior, sexual promiscuity, etc.) are so asymmetric in
their judgments of actions when committed by a man as
compared to when committed by a woman?
12
Some aims of feminist social science
1. To provide descriptions of the experience of women
that would be recognized as accurate by women. (Recall
the quotes from Erikson and Bettelheim.)
2. To inform women of, and liberate them from, their
oppressed state.
3. To refuse to start off scientific thought and research
using conceptual frameworks taken unreflectively from
traditional disciplines.
A crucial question: what changes need to be made to the
methodology of the social sciences to achieve these ends?
13
II. Wylie’s arguments on
methodology
14
Women’s caucus PSA 2008
Alison Wylie
Nancy Tuana
Lisa Lloyd, Sharon Crasnow, Mieke Boon
15
II. A. Wylie: the Collectivist method
• Focus: the experience of women as research
subjects.
– Researchers should ‘not impose [their] definitions of
reality on those researched.’ (Acker et al., 1983)
• Demands discrepancies between the theoretical
constructs of researchers and the personal
understandings of subjects be identified.
• Acknowledges that women have a ‘credible
theoretical, explanatory grasp of what goes on in
their lives.’
16
• Research must not be exploitative, and research
subjects must not be objectified.
• The myth of the separation between researcher and
the ‘objects of study’ should be discarded.
• Differential power relations between researcher and
subject should be eliminated to the extent possible.
Researchers must be acknowledged to enter the
research relationship as concretely situated (social)
individuals whose subjective experience and social
engagement with the subjects inevitably affect what
they come to understand. (Wylie)
17
Transformed role for research subjects
• In ordinary models of social research, subjects
are effectively passive participants in the
research process.
• In the Collectivist model, research subjects
participate in the research process through
– determining the direction of research
– collaborating in the description and interpretation
of their experience
– formulating and assessing explanatory and
theoretical constructs.
18
Problems in realizing the collectivist model
From reflection and experience:
• Difficulties regarding egalitarian participation.
– Successful involvement of subjects in the research
process – as active participants – requires that
they be ‘very much like’ the researcher. This
excludes many people from participation.
– Functioning as active participants requires that
they be ‘very much like’ the researcher. This
excludes many people from participation.
19
• Difficulties with co-participation in analysis.
– ‘If we were to fulfill the emancipatory aim for the
people we were studying [indeed, as demanded
by them], we had to go beyond the faithful
representation of their experiences, beyond
‘letting them talk for themselves’ and put those
experiences into [a] theoretical framework. . . ‘
(Acker et al., 1983)
– In addition, sometimes one needed to represent
the experiences of subjects in terms that
countered the self-understanding of the research
subjects themselves.
20
II. B. The ‘Self-study’ model of inquiry
• An alternative model that seeks scrupulously to
ground feminist practice (and, hence, feminist
science) in ‘atoms’ of particular experience, taken to
be explanatorily primitive and strictly veracious.
• In articulating this model for social research, Stanley
and Wise (1983) reject:
– treating personal experience as a ‘point of
departure’ for theory construction
– theories which posit structures, processes
– ‘realities’ beyond women’s experience.
21
Reality as a ‘negotiated construct’
Where the commitment to privilege women’s
experience comes into conflict with a demand
for broader theoretical understanding, Stanley
and Wise are prepared to repudiate any mode
of theorizing that might involve reassessment or
displacement of the theories and perceptions of
subjects…Realities are, they argue, negotiated
constructs and any theorizing that suggests
otherwise just constructs a myth, usually an
oppressive myth. [Wylie]
22
Reasons in favor of the Self-study model
• Pragmatic: Any social or structural conditions
relevant for understanding women’s experience and
oppression can, it is claimed, be revealed with (or
through direct analysis of) experience.
• Moral: Feminists have an obligation to resist any
imposition of one person’s reality or standpoint over
another.
– Contradictory reports of experience are handled by
recognizing that, because all realities are constructed,
reality for one subject may not agree with reality for
another.
23
A critical failing of Self-study model
• The relativism it endorses compromises the
potential of feminist research to enlighten and
liberate women from conditions of
oppression.
• Why? Because ‘[w]hen all accounts are
equally valid, the search for “how it actually
works” becomes meaningless.’ (Acker et al.,
1983)
24
III. Standpoint theory
25
What is standpoint theory?
A method of social research built upon the following basic ideas:
• A ‘standpoint’ is an attitude or an outlook on issues (used
here in an all-inclusive sense) which arises from one’s
circumstances and beliefs.
• A person’s standpoint affects how he or she socially
constructs the world. (For more on social constructionism, see
Hacking (1999).)
• People’s standpoints are, in turn, influenced by their
membership in social groups.
26
• The theoretical claims of standpoint theory
require moving beyond mere reporting of what
women (or members of an oppressed group)
say or believe.
• Why? Two reasons:
• Oppressed groups may believe misrepresentations of
social relations generated by the dominant group.
• Members of oppressed groups may report unreliably
about their own experiences (e.g., they may report how
they want to think of their experiences).
27
Standpoint theory thus differs from the Collective model
and the Self-Study model in several key ways:
• Although it attends to the experience of members of
oppressed groups, research subjects need not be active
participants in the research process. This violates the
recommendations of the Collectivist model.
• It explicitly attempts to go beyond personal experience
by mapping the practices of power. This violates the
recommendations of the Self-Study model.
• It retains a privileged position for the researcher with
respect to the subject. This violates both models.
28
Crasnow on feminist social
science: to speak for herself
Some additional readings
• Joan Acker, Kate Berry, and Joke Esseveld. Objectivity and
truth: Problems in doing feminist research. Women’s Studies
International Forum, 6(4):423Ð35, 1983.
• Ian Hacking. The looping effect of human kinds. In Dan
Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack, editors,
Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. Oxford
University Press, 1996.
• Ian Hacking. The Social Construction of What? Harvard
University Press, 1999.
• Sandra Harding. Feminism and Methodology: Social Science
Issues. Indiana University Press, 1987.
•
30