"Is Science Multicultural?": Part 2!

And now, To pile on to Willow’s observations…. This text sent me back to our ongoing discussion of why and how we should be trying to reclaim understandings of science and reason rather than ceding to the center the ability to define and own these ideas as central concepts of debate. Harding engages these questions also—why bother trying to change understandings of “objectivity” and “neutrality” and “science?” Her resulting argument about the rhetorical power of these words and their association with central positions of power echoes our conversations in class, but I can’t help but wonder whether the idea that these words are an important part of the power struggle over what constitutes the discipline is missing a, maybe not more important, but certainly just as important, issue: how do these concepts underlie our ability to seek and produce knowledge, the paths available to us? Given that much of the text actually sheds light on that question, I found it odd not to see it clearly referenced in her direct discussion of why it was important to redefine these terms. Oh, I’m supposed to pose a question about this? How about this one: Why should we be concerned about using these words rather than others? I don’t want to say is their value “just” rhetorical, because I actually think rhetoric is really important and substantive because it shapes our understandings. But what is the purpose of that reshaping? Should some of those possible purposes be considered more important than others? To borrow the statement DeRaismes keeps using, if DeRaismes defines what she does as scientific inquiry that is expanding knowledge, does she have to care if anybody else thinks so, too? I really wanted to be 100% on board with Harding’s thoughts on the “strong objectivity” program of work. Her argument that we should separate objectivity, which she is hesitant to define but links roughly to our desire to produce knowledge consistent with “natural order” or “nature’s regularities,” from neutrality, which she argues masks the politics of the powerful position and inhibits reflection on that positionality, is a compelling one. I do think that a broader reflection on the assumptions, norms, and power distributions that underlie our inquiries would let us expand knowledge and more meaningfully evaluate competing claims of description, explanation, and understanding. But even after re-reading this chapter a few times, I’m left confused as to what this would really look like when we take this approach and use it. Harding is adamant that what she is proposing is distinct from a relativism in which all claims are equally valid, their value claims both examined and undermined by relative evaluation, and their relationship to “facts,” “observations,” or the “natural order” is unimportant. But I’m still struggling to grasp how we would really evaluate competing claims and the extent to which that comparison should be an objective of the process of scientific inquiry. The repeated use of the term “natural order” also gave me pause—the term felt like an attempt to have dualism without being dualist. While I sort of felt what she meant, and I want it to make sense (because it made sense to me), I wonder whether that’s logically possible. This is where the issue of whether we’re reclaiming objectivity for purely rhetorical purposes gets important—as an attempt to assert that reflective work conscious of the scholar as embedded and inevitably influenced by context is still reliable science, can we have our cake and eat it too on the presence of an approximate-able, if unknowable, “natural order” in a world inextricable of our observation of it? I may be second-guessing myself because I liked this book too much, and any time something seems to offer up answers that make sense I get worried it could be too good to be true (and it usually is, because we probably wouldn't spend a lot of time debating these issues if someone had a perfect answer ready to go). But I think there are some instabilities here worth leaning into.