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  • Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues
  • Sharyn Clough (bio)
Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues. By Sandra Harding. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

As was apparent in her groundbreaking text, The Science Question in Feminism (1987), one of Sandra Harding's many strengths is her ability to review and synthesize an otherwise disparate body of critical literature, creating at the same time new typologies for new audiences (witness her creation of the tripartite division of feminist criticisms of science into feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint, and feminism postmodernism). In her new book, Science and Social Inequality, this skill once again comes to the fore, as she brings insights from her work with "Southern" postcolonial critics of science back "North" to a "post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science audience.

Harding's synthesis and review treatment is both a strength and a weakness of the book, however. She too often sketches or hints at arguments by using footnotes that refer readers to entire texts, rather than engaging in detailed arguments about those texts. To be sure, Harding is capable of offering such detailed arguments herself; many of the footnotes in Science and Social Inequality refer the reader back to arguments that have appeared elsewhere in her own books, especially Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991) and Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Epistemologies (1998). Indeed, readers curious for more clarity and detail on a number of the issues treated in Science and Social Inequality would do well to turn to these two earlier texts.1

A number of chapters in Science and Social Equality do engage with newer material in a little more detail, especially chapter 5, "Discriminatory Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science," where Harding discusses the work of her Northern colleagues in feminist philosophy of science and epistemology. The book contains nine chapters in total, ranging from arguments about the multicultural nature of Northern science (chapter 2, "Seeing Ourselves as Others See U.S.: Postcolonial Science Studies") to the nature of truth claims in popular science ideals (chapter 8, "Are Truth Claims in Science Dysfunctional?"). Harding asks important questions of her readers, and given her extensive work in global science studies, she is in a good place to answer them. The following questions are illustrative:

What is at stake, and who should get to decide, in disputes over what counts as science? . . . What are effective strategies to avoid a "tolerant pluralism" that leaves unchallenged the existing hegemonous global political economy? What are strategies to avoid merely substituting an insistence on particularism for the earlier insistence on universalism, and thereby abandoning [End Page 197] the project of more accurately and usefully identifying shared conditions of human life and thought?

(6–7)

Accuracy and usefulness are criteria for scientific theories that Harding champions throughout her book, but she often refers to these two criteria as distinct concepts without reference to arguments pragmatist feminists have made about the intersection of these concepts. Nonetheless, appeals to accuracy serve as some defense against notions of epistemological relativism. More on the success of this appeal shortly.

After providing a global survey of a number of "effective knowledge systems" that fall outside the boundaries of modern scientific practice in the global North/West, Harding argues that there are good reasons to conceptualize these alternative systems as "science" (11). Harding explains that "science" as she uses the term, refers to "any systematic empirical study of ourselves and the world around us" (10). Describing science in these broad terms is an appropriate move, I think, but it then makes her claims for a multiplicity of "sciences" hard to conceptualize methodologically. There seems on this broad definition to be only one method, namely "a systematic empirical study," practiced by any number of peoples across time and cultures, each likely to be focused on different aspects of the world being featured. Indeed, Harding argues that one of the virtues of taking a more ecumenical view of science is that it allows us in the North/West to examine the knowledge systems of other cultures as science . The consequence of such examination, she believes, is that "our imaginations are invited to explore how our own knowledge systems and the...

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