Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research

Worries about scientific objectivity just won’t go away, but by now, it’s safe to say, no one who reflects on the appropriate role of values and interests in scientific research thinks it is or could be free of them. It now seems obvious that social, political, and economic values and interests influence research on weapons, for example, or health and the environment. Yet the dominant late twentieth-century philosophies of science have tended to conceptualize the reliability and predictive power of the results of research as damaged by such values and interests, and they continue to do so in spite of powerful analyses of how sciences operate in practice and in spite of the rise around the globe in the last four decades of various forms of participatory action research and citizen science, both of which take their research agendas from the concerns of disadvantaged groups. Why are the epistemic/scientific norm of objectivity and the social/political norm of diversity still perceived as inevitably in conflict with each other? Why aren’t they perceived as in conflict only sometimes, but many times as providing valuable resources for each other? How can we promote science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just? Sandra Harding probes these questions with clarity and concrete cases, and in doing so puts severe pressure on conventional philosophies of science and points to intellectually sounder and politically more progressive ways to think about them. She proposes a new way to relink sciences and their philosophies to democratic social relations, even while these are themselves undergoing transformations. A must read for anyone interested in how to think about the politics of science globally.
Worries about scientific objectivity seem never-ending. Social critics and philosophers of science have argued that invocations of objectivity are often little more than attempts to boost the status of a claim, while calls for value neutrality may be used to suppress otherwise valid dissenting positions. Objectivity is used sometimes to advance democratic agendas, at other times to block them; sometimes for increasing the growth of knowledge, at others to resist it.Sandra Harding is not ready to throw out objectivity quite yet. For all of its problems, she contends that objectivity is too powerful a concept simply to abandon. InObjectivity and Diversity, Harding calls for a science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just, a science that would ask: How are the lives of the most economically and politically vulnerable groups affected by a particular piece of research? Do they have a say in whether and how the research is done? Should empirically reliable systems of indigenous knowledge count as "real science"? Ultimately, Harding argues for a shift from the ideal of a neutral, disinterested science to one that prizes fairness and responsibility.