Three Cultures: Fifteen Lectures on the Confrontation of Academic Cultures ed. by G. van Benthum van den Berg, M. C. Brands and E. Mulder (review)

Movement. This list may be extended further to include classism, homophobia and anti-environmentalism. All of these are mentioned by Sandra Harding in her book, The Science Question in Feminism, although her main focus is the matter of gender-bias. This conflation of the various 'isms' is common in feminist literature and is symptomatic of its historical connection with social criticism of the past 30 years or so. (Harding, however, misses the most recent 'ism'- 'Speciesism', introduced by the Animal Rights Movernent.) Male-biased, sexist, androcentric elements in science have been noted before, especially within the so-called 'soft sciences' (itself a sexist term), particularly the Social Sciences. Sociology and Anthropology are notorious for containing ideological biases within their 'theories'; the same is true, of course, for History and Political Science. Psychology, Psychiatry and related fields continually reevaluate diagnostic elements regarding the definition of 'normalcy' (recall, for example, that not long ago homosexuality was regarded as a sexual dysfunction). Other Life Sciences (such as Medicine) have a history of misogyny (in both theory and practice). As well, the 'harder' sciences are not immune to sociopolitical ideology . Not long ago blatant racist ideas were considered 'scientific truths' in Biology. Today the debate over sociobiology is not isolated from its political context; in general, the 'nature' group is more conservative and the 'nurture' crowd more liberal in their allegiance. Similar alliances exist in the debate over Darwin between evolutionists and creationists. None of this is surprising to those who know something of the history of science. But Harding would also include the Physical Sciences with this 'value-laden' context. Some readers may balk at this, but I do not: if a law of nature may have a style (as noted above), then it may also be contaminated with gender-bias. Harding does point out, however, that such matters are less straightforward and more nebulous in the Physical Sciences, but nevertheless they exist. For evidence she focuses on the social basis of scientific ideas (pointing, for example, to the so-called male viewpoint entailed in the seventeenth-eentury shift from an organic to a mechanical worldpicture ). She even argues that Mathematics is value-laden, pointing to Logic itself as a masculine activity. lronically--or, paradoxically-Harding 's book is an extremely logical and tightly-reasoned work. Up to this point in her argument, I think Harding is fundamentally correct . What I'm not convinced of, however, is the rest of her argument, which is based upon the work of the new breed of radical sociologists of science who assert that science lacks an objective basis independent of its theoretical structure and that the reality entailed in these theories is entirely socially constructed. In other words, if one could syphon-off the sociocultural -ideological biases of science, no value-free ('objective') reality would remain. This is an extreme form of ontological relativism, which first grew out of the post-relativist critique of empiricism and continued with the (Neo-Romantic) counterculture attack on science and technology in the 1960s. Believing that science is in toto value-laden, Harding realizes that she is in a paradoxical situation regarding the epistemology of science-which is the real topic of her book-for it seems impossible then to create a non-androcentric (or any other nonbiased) science. How, indeed, can Harding herself be 'nonsubjective '? This then explains the title of the book; or, said another way, it explains why the title is not the "Feminist Question in Science". How does Harding therefore build a 'science' for feminism--or, more specifically, an epistemology for feminism ? Her answer is based on an appeal to 'object-relations theory' in contemporary psychology. This allows her still to focus on gender differences without biological determinants since this 'nurture' theory appeals to the role of child-rearing practices; in present-dayjargon, her theory is 'politically correct'. The theory itself entails a series of dichotomies between 'masculinity' and 'femininity ' such as separation vs. attachment , respectively. 'Separation' as a masculine trait is expressed in the emphasis on the subject/object differentiation in the scientific method. 'Attachment ' as a feminine trait is expressed in the craft tradition of the unity of 'hand, brain and heart'-a notion...