The Disunities of Science(s) and Technoscientific Fortuity

Sandra Harding’s name is not unfamiliar to philosophers, sociologists, feminists, historians, scientists, postmoderns, post-Marxists, and postcolonial critics. Her name is now woven into the thick narratives of late twentieth-century advances in and transformative critiques of philosophy, science studies, philosophies of science, philosophies of technology, technoscience, sociology of technology and science, and feminist standpoint epistemologies. Undoubtedly, many of these disciplines and subdisciplines have been given a lease on life because of Harding’s pioneering work. Unquestionably, she is among a handful of woman philosophers who has secured a permanent place on the first page of histories of North American philosophy at the turn of the twenty-first century. She may object to such a formulation, and the assumptions that enable it, namely, that women philosophers are in competition with male philosophers. And I agree with her unease with such a formulation. Yet Harding’s work remains distinctive and indispensable for at least two reasons.

The first is that Harding’s two decades of work on woman and science, science and culture, and the geopolitics of knowledge represents one of the two most important gains of feminist philosophies in the second half of the twentieth century: namely, the now axiomatic claim that Western science, and with it, Western conceptualization of rationality, have been thoroughly andocentric and misogynist. The second is that Harding’s work on rationality, technology, science, gender, imperialism, and colonialism, and the critiques of what she calls Western sciences’ “ontology” of injustice and inequity, is avowedly and unabashedly an ethical-political project. Inasmuch as Harding’s work has been expressly linked to an ethical-political agenda, it also exhibits one of the most notorious and unmistakable characteristics of feminist philosophy in the last half-century: its standing on the side of a moral ideal and agenda. These two agendas—epistemological-methodological critique and ethical-political prescriptions—are woven inextricably into all of Harding’s work.

Such entwinement is eloquently exhibited in her latest book, Science and Social Inequality (SSI), a collection of her essays from the last half-decade. Here, critique has an eminently practical, that is to say moral and political, intent. The book is the obvious product of decades of work on these issues, and most of the chapters presuppose all of Harding’s prior work. For this reason, one must approach SSI with great humility and trepidation, but also with a tremendous sense of gratitude. Because it summarizes two decades of work, Harding’s book serves as a guide to her oeuvre. Science and Social Inequality is essentially Harding on Harding, or Harding on the state of the disciplines.

The essays that make up the chapters of SSI remind me of Jürgen Habermas’s early work, which was made up of what he called Literaturberichtung, or reports on the literature of a particular discipline, problematic, or theme. Like Habermas’s reports on a full shelf of books, the essays that make up SSI are the means through which Harding takes a stance and lays out her positions. Science and Social Inequality has the additional virtue of being synoptic and systematic. Along with an overview of decades of research, and how far both feminist philosophers of science and philosophers in general of technology and science have come, Harding provides us with didactic and memorable mnemonic devices. I anticipate that this book will become a primary text in philosophies of technology and science classes, both graduate and undergraduate. It will surely become a major point of reference for anyone doing work in these regions.

Yet precisely because SSI is both a distillation and précis of at least two decades of original, relentless, and pioneering work, it would be difficult to do justice to all the different issues discussed in it. Thus I focus here on only two issues central both to SSI and to Harding’s overall project. First, I discuss Harding’s engagement with postcolonial science critics, and ask: If all sciences are indeed ethnocentric, then in what sense does it make any sense to speak of science in the singular? It seems to me, on the one hand...