Helen Longino's work in philosophy of science

¶ … Power, and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science" draws upon the distinctions and tensions between the normative and descriptive traditions in the theory of knowledge, trying to integrate and examine the way in which the feminist accounts of science have impacted the theory of knowledge acquisition. The main focus of the essay is on the epistemology of science. The author also discusses the relationship between the epistemology of science and general epistemology. An important idea that Longino supports is that a good utilization of epistemology is the key to better science. However, the relationship between epistemology or "the theory of what practices produce knowledge" and science defined by "what counts as knowledge" is acknowledged to be more complex than that. Another question the author tries to provide answer to concerns the implication of women both in science and in the knowledge or theories produced by science. Scientific knowledge encapsulates a certain power, which both feminists and scientists desire to grasp. The interlocking aspect of knowledge and power in sciences is another point of interest. The importance of such a discussion is justified by the fact that for a long time women have been excluded from the practice of science, and scientific inquiry has been described as a masculine activity for which women are unsuitable. Moreover, new knowledge has offered women new roles in the socio-economical world; the author puts forth the example of women's implication in the production of artifacts on the microelectronics assembly line. Another fact is the neglect of women's health issues in biomedical research. The examples above suggest in Longino's opinion that the identification of nature as female and the scientific mind as male, and the privileging of explanatory models of control over those constructed around relations of interdependence may question the validity of the scientific method itself. She also suggests that the power of science over natural processes is lop-sided, and is drawn from systematically perpetuating women's cognitive and political disempowerment. Therefore, the questions issuing are whether this appropriation of power is a specific feature of science; and whether it is possible "to seek and possess empowering knowledge without expropriating the power of others." An interesting summarizing question the author formulates at the end of such argumentation is whether seeking knowledge is inevitably an attempt at domination.

The rest of the paper is concerned with providing answers to the above stated questions. The second section of the article refers to the feminist epistemological strategies referred to as modifications or rejection of empiricism and has been termed "changing the subject" or replacement strategies. Whether in modern epistemology the subject of knowledge is individual consciousness, feminists chose different epistemological strategies. For instance, in this paper are considered only three of these: the first holds out the ideal of uncontamined or unconditioned subjectivity, the second identifies bias as a function of social location, and the third identifies bias in the emotive substructure generated by the psychodinamics of individuation. Therefore, these strategies identify the problems of contemporary science resulting from male bias. Longino acknowledges that such approach is descriptively adequate to a certain extent, but she demonstrates that it falls short of normative adequacy.

The third section of the article takes into account another strategy used by feminist epistemology, termed multiplying subjects. The strategy is based on the ideal of unconditioned subject. Traditionally it has been acknowledged that individual subjectivities are conditioned, and the unconditioned subjectivity is an achievement; the methods of natural sciences and the scientific methodology in general are the means to that achievement.

The nature of the relationship between observation, data, and theory, which represent scientific discourse have been considered arguments against unconditioned subjectivity and empiricism. The arguments rely on the fact that if the scientific knower is considered an individual who should be freed from external influences in order to produce acceptable knowledge the puzzles introduced by observation and certain evidential relations will remain unsolved.

The feminist point-of-view suggests that scientific knowledge is constructed not by individuals, but by individuals in interaction with one another, in order to modify their observations, theories and hypotheses. The scientific method includes, according to this way of reasoning not only individual activity arising from, for instance hypotheses testing, but also a confrontation of ideas and theories. Scientific knowledge has been considered to arise from a critical dialogue in which different individuals engage. The interactive dialogic community generates knowledge only if it facilitates transformative criticism. However, such objective communities are only prescriptions against which the theories can be compared.