Hard On Science

This is a follow-up to a recent video I did on how gender figures within some of the language around science, and by implication within the covert understandings that are brought to bear. There are a couple of qualifications and additions that need to be made to that. One is that no feminist epistemology (as far as I know) questions the validity of fundemental findings in science, mathematics and logic. No one is saying that the boiling point of water is different when seen from a female perspective. The arguement are far more prevalent, and start to become valid, in the 'softer' sciences of sociology, political science, some branches of psychology etc. When the facts that are being produced are often social facts then the position of the investigator within that social medium is going to be relevant. Two further things fall out of this for me; firstly is this metaphorical understanding of some kinds of science as 'hard' and some as 'soft. Obviously what is happening here is a schematic mapping of certain aspects of the different knowledge outcomes onto a gradient of hardness and softness (along with other gradients such as boundedness, fixity, weight, proximity, height etc). Secondly, this metaphorical understanding of different sciences as 'hard' and 'soft' seems to overlapping with an understanding of male and female gender as hard and soft respectively (after Cixous). Maybe this associative overlap compounds the sense that some sciences are more 'female' than others.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• science
• epistemology
• female
• male
• feminism
• gender
• sex
• hard
• soft
• erection
• metaphor
• figurative
• language
• knowledge

[conferencereport]

| would say that assessing the truth of some statements in the 'soft' sciences is sometimes tricky, which may be why these sciences are sometimes given lower value.

Whilst some discourses do allow for the production of hard clear facts, others don't, and to apply the criteria of one to other is absolutely to invite error, as you say. I'm not sure if I would call that sexism though.

[leawardseif]

If a statement is soft, fuzzy and indistinct how are we discern its truth conditions so as to verify whether or not it is a fact?

Also, what if we privilege the hard, the clear and the distinct in epistemic discourse not because of sexism, but because to do otherwise is to invite error?