Feminist Philosophy of Science
Feminist philosophy of science arises at the intersection of feminist interests in science and philosophical studies of science. Feminists have taken an active interest in the sciences both as a key resource in understanding and contesting sexist institutions and systems of belief, and as an important locus of gender inequality and source of legitimation for this inequality. Feminist practitioners in many sciences, especially in the life and social sciences, typically engage two lines of critique: They document inequalities in the training, representation, and recognition of women in the sciences, and they identify myriad ways in which, far from eliminating the contextual biases of a pervasively sexist society, standard scientific methodologies frequently reproduce them in the content of even the most credible and well-established scientific theories.
The work of feminist philosophers of science is continuous with these critiques. Some feminist philosophers contribute to the analysis of androcentrism in the content and practice of particular sciences, in some cases linking these to inequities in the role played by women in science. The form these analyses take necessarily varies with the type of science in question. Critiques of disciplines concerned with an overtly gendered subject matter—the social and behavioral sciences and some branches of the life sciences—draw attention to ways in which unexamined, often stereotypic, assumptions about gender roles, relations, and identities delimit the subject of inquiry, define categories of analysis and description, shape assessments of plausibility that define the range of hypotheses to be taken seriously (e.g., in comparative evaluation), and inform judgments about the bearing of evidence on these hypotheses.
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