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..........................................Course Developed by Prof. Archana Barua

Feminist Challenges

Taking feminist perspective as an alternate mode of defining reality , it is not at all gender specific in its claim for more respectable position for certain virtues, the so called feminine virtues of care based perspective and for restoration of the mode of knowledge by love and participation as against the detached objectivity of science. “ Why can't one see courage and heroism in the virtues of humility and self-sacrifice?”, feminists wonder. Perhaps this would require a fresh look at the reason -emotion dichotomy to restore love-knowledge perspective to its original respectable position

Some such challenges are aimed at modifying the mainstream ideal of science. Helen Longino has attempted to synthesize, clarify, and defend the proposals for a feminist theory of science by developing a very influential theory of contextual empiricism that includes a social conception of objectivity.

According to Longino, a theory is objective if it has undergone and survived a certain social process of critical scrutiny. Through public critical scrutiny, the background assumptions upon which particular theories depend for their support have the potential to be revealed, and idiosyncratic assumptions can be weeded out. In order to ensure that this system of public scrutiny is working well, Longino sets out four governing norms of interaction in an epistemic community: there must be publicly recognized forums for criticism, uptake of criticism, public standards, and tempered (to allow for differences in intellectual capacity) equality of intellectual authority (Longino 2002).

Goldman, Alvin 2001. "Social Epistemology." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2001/entries/epistemology-social/ >.