Helen Longino Science As Social Knowledge Pdf Download: The Role of Evidence, Experience, and Values

Helen Longino seeks to break the current deadlock in the ongoing wars between philosophers of science and sociologists of science--academic battles founded on disagreement about the role of social forces in constructing scientific knowledge. While many philosophers of science downplay social forces, claiming that scientific knowledge is best considered as a product of cognitive processes, sociologists tend to argue that numerous noncognitive factors influence what scientists learn, how they package it, and how readily it is accepted. Underlying this disagreement, however, is a common assumption that social forces are a source of bias and irrationality. Longino challenges this assumption, arguing that social interaction actually assists us in securing firm, rationally based knowledge. This important insight allows her to develop a durable and novel account of scientific knowledge that integrates the social and cognitive. Longino begins with a detailed discussion of a wide range of contemporary thinkers who write on scientific knowledge, clarifying the philosophical points at issue. She then critically analyzes the dichotomous understanding of the rational and the social that characterizes both sides of the science studies stalemate and the social account that she sees as necessary for an epistemology of science that includes the full spectrum of cognitive processes. Throughout, her account is responsive both to the normative uses of the term knowledge and to the social conditions in which scientific knowledge is produced. Building on ideas first advanced in her influential book Science as Social Knowledge, Longino brings her account into dialogue with current work in social epistemology and science studies and shows how her critical social approach can help solve a variety of stubborn problems. While the book focuses on epistemological concerns related to the sociality of inquiry, Longino also takes up its implications for scientific pluralism. The social approach, she concludes, best allows us to retain a meaningful concept of knowledge in the face of theoretical plurality and uncertainty.

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Helen Longino Science As Social Knowledge Pdf Download

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The Paradoxes of Bias and Social Construction. Twoapparent paradoxes encapsulate the central problematics of feministempiricism. First, much feminist science criticism consists inexposing androcentric and sexist biases in scientific research. Thiscriticism seems to rest on the view that bias is epistemically bad.Yet, advocates of feminist science argue that science would improve ifit allowed feminist values to inform scientific inquiry. This amountsto a recommendation that science adopt certain biases. This is theparadox of bias. Second, much feminist science criticism exposes theinfluence of social and political factors on science. Scientistsadvance androcentric and sexist theories because they are influencedby sexist values in the wider society. This might suggest adopting anindividualist epistemology to eliminate these social biases. Yet mostfeminists urge that scientific practices should be open todifferent social influences. Call this the paradox of socialconstruction.

The Challenge of Value-Neutrality. Against theproject of feminist science, many philosophers hold that good scienceis neutral among social, moral, and political values. Lacey (1999)distinguishes the following claims of value-neutrality: (1)Autonomy: science progresses best when uninfluenced bysocial/political movements and values. (2) Neutrality:scientific theories do not imply or presuppose judgments aboutnoncognitive values, nor do scientific theories serve any particularnoncognitive values more fully than others. (3) Impartiality:The only grounds for accepting a theory are its relations to theevidence. These grounds are impartial among rival noncognitive values.

The Basic Pragmatic Strategy. The above reflectionsprovide a standard for determining when socially value-laden inquiryhas gone wrong. But how can social values function as an epistemicresource? Some feminist epistemologists stress the pragmaticfunctions of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). All inquiry begins with aquestion. Questions may be motivated by practical interests inunderstanding the nature and causes of situations judged to beproblematic, and in finding out how to improve those situations. Defenders of the value-neutrality of science acknowledge that pragmatic factors legitimately influence the choice of objects of study. Feminist epistemologists argue that practical interests properly shape the product of inquiry by introducing new dimensionsof evaluation to theories. We can ask not only whether theories arebacked by evidence, but whether they are cast in forms that arecognitively accessible to the situated knowers who want to use thesetheories, whether they help these knowers solve their problems, andwhether they answer the questions they were designed to answer. A setof statements can be true, yet fail these pragmatic tests. The basicpragmatic strategy for defending feminist science, and any inquiryshaped by social and political values, is to show how the pragmaticinterests of that inquiry license or require a particular mode ofinfluence of values on the process, product, and uptake of the productof inquiry, while leaving appropriate room for evidence to play itsrole in testing hypotheses. Values do not compete with evidence indetermining conclusions, but play different, cooperative roles inproperly conducted inquiry (Anderson 1995b, 2004).

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A thin conception of the social pervades much philosophical writing in social epistemology. A thicker form of sociality is to be found in scientific practice, as represented in much recent history and philosophy of science. Typical social epistemology problems, such as disagreement and testimony, take on a different aspect when viewed from the perspective of scientific practice. Here interaction among researchers is central to their knowledge making activities and disagreement and testimony are resources, not problems. Whereas much of the disagreement and testimony literature assumes some conception of evidence, or that it is obvious what evidence is, a focus on scientific practice reveals that determining what counts as evidence and for what is determined through the discursive interactions among researchers. This paper concludes with questions about the assumptions about knowledge, cognitive agents, and the right starting point for epistemological reflection that shape the mainstream social epistemological approaches.

We suggest a different approach to evidence and policy, informed by political science and philosophy, which emphasises a theoretically driven approach to evidence production and advocacy (see Wylie, 1987; Anderson, 2004; Cairney, 2016). In this paper, we draw on ideas and theories by feminist philosophers of science, combined with the practices of feminist advocate researchers who critique the use of evidence in domestic and family violence policymaking, to illustrate a politically informed approach to evidence in policymaking. We do not present the approaches taken in our case study as perfect, but seek to discover what we can learn from feminist strategies to combine evidence and advocacy in policymaking. Core among feminist critiques of the naïve EBP approach is that it frames the policymaking process as potentially objective and ignores, specifically, the gendered contexts in which knowledge is produced, used and translated into policy.

In order to account for the information environments that are relevant to complex issues such as those connected to seafood production, technical communicators need techniques for researching them. While these techniques can be important to any design project, they are particularly useful for public outreach, in which the broader ambient rhetorical contexts surrounding an issue matter crucially to whether and how publics are likely to attend to that issue. To address the information environments in which publics form knowledge about intricate issues, technical communicators can analyze the current information environments in which publics understand and deliberate, focused on the rhetorical associations (including affective associations) that users are likely to encounter. Much the same way that we would attempt to understand the physical or social environment for the uptake of a site prior to its use, we can pay attention to similar issues associated with the information environment. Again, we note that while the focus of user-centered design processes has typically focused on a particular user group and on their choices in a singular interface, we are calling for an outward focus that places both the user and the online interface into the context of an information ecology that impacts upon both of them.

In her Rhetoric of Science and Technology course, students have conducted user and task analyses that have provided project stakeholders with lenses into when, where, why, and how people in our community seek out information about seafood production and have used sentiment analysis and mental modeling to map public responses to questions about aquaculture and fisheries knowledge and perceptions. However, they have also researched the context for information about aquaculture and fisheries that is available through social media, search engine returns, and popular TV and movies such as Undercover Boss and Dirty Jobs. Through this research, they have traced the complex ways in which public knowledge about aquaculture becomes intertwined with public understandings and associations with issues such as genetically modified organisms (GMO), hybrid foods and human health, the farm-to-table and local food movements, and tropes about the relationship among wild-caught and farmed fish. 2ff7e9595c