PHIL 336 PART 8 DISC

CHAPTER 9

INDEPENDENCE

INTRODUCTION

Well, you have your theory, it's had some empirical success and on that basis you believe it tells you how the world is, if you're a realist, or how the world could be, if you're a constructive empiricist. But up pops a sociologist and points out that you're a child of your time, the product of specific socio-economic and political conditions, and therefore so is your theory. It says less about how the world is, or could be, and more about those conditions. Now that's a strong line to take but as we'll see, it has some force. In effect, the sociologist is raising the following fundamental question: Is science independent of its social context?

One answer is: Of course not! There is clearly a sense in which the socio-economic and political conditions have to be right for science to flourish. After all, if there isn't appropriate funding, whether from universities, government or private businesses, or appropriate insti- tutional structures which can support the right training and career development, then at the very least science will not have the support it needs. We can even look back at the history again and suggest that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century would not have happened without the shift from a feudal system, or that the great developments of the nineteenth century would not have taken place without the industrial revolution. We can even try to answer the question why the scientific revolution occurred in Western Europe, rather than, say, China, by focusing on these specific socio-economic conditions. But interesting as these suggestions might be, this answer is basically trivial in that it offers no threat to the objectivity of science: the conditions might have to be right for science to flourish

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C o p y r i g h t 2 0 0 7 . C o n t i n u u m .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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but they don't determine the content of scientific theories in the way our sociologist friend seems to suggest.

Another answer is: Of course not! These socio-economic and political conditions are reflected in the actual content of the the- ories, in various ways, perhaps quite subtly. Consider Darwin's theory of evolution, for example, with its emphasis on survival of the fittest. Is this anything more than a reflection of the prevailing Victorian ethos, according to which the 'fittest' happen to be white, British males? This answer is highly non-trivial of course, and undermines the objectivity of science, or at least replaces that notion with a very different one.

By 'objectivity' here is meant something like the following (at least in part): science is value-neutral in the sense that 'contextual' values (i.e., preferences, beliefs, interests, etc.) are subjective values of an individual or the cultural biases of an entire society that have no place in scientific theories or should have no place in scientific the- ories. Here then is this chapter's fundamental question: How might social factors affect science?

SCIENCE AS A SOCIAL ACTIVITY

As we've already indicated, there are clearly senses in which science can be considered a social activity but which do not undermine its objectivity. Here are some of those senses:

1. Social factors may determine what science investigates With limited funding, not every problem, interesting phenomenon, or significant medical condition can be investigated. Here's an example that generated huge debate, not just among lay-people but also among scientists themselves: in the 1980s it was decided to con- struct a huge particle accelerator in Texas, big enough and powerful enough to reach energies sufficient to reveal one of the Holy Grails of particle physics, the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the 'God particle' because it effectively gives everything mass. However, by 1993, costs had spiralled to $12 billion, almost three times the original estimate and equivalent to NASA's entire contribution to the International Space Station. Other scientists, including other physicists, began to raise concerns about the funnelling of federal funds away from other areas of research. Political considerations also came into play as Democrat institutions at both state and federal level questioned

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whether they should be supporting a project begun under the Republicans and at such cost. Eventually the project was cancelled, having spent $2 billion and leaving some very large tunnels under the Texas countryside. The 'God particle' has yet to be observed.

Shifting to medicine and health care, the allocation of resources in these areas has long been a source of controversy. A useful statement of the difficulties involved in setting priorities for funding fundamental research has been given by the Director of the USA's National Institutes for Health at www.nih.gov/about/director/index.htm ('Research Funding: NIH in the Post-Doubling Era: Realities and Strategies'). At some point, social, political and sheer economic con- siderations come into play, leading to the kinds of inequalities that spark concerns among activists, patients and health-care professionals themselves. We'll be looking at examples of these in the next chapter.

Now, do these kinds of considerations undermine the objectivity of science? No; this is just a matter of allocation of resources.

2. Social factors may determine how science investigates There are different ways one might go about doing science; different ways of conducting experiments for example. Some of these might be deemed socially or ethically unacceptable and in this manner social conditions may influence scientific practice. So, for example, scientific research involving human subjects is generally subject to quite rigor- ous ethical standards, which may rule out certain experiments, no matter how scientifically interesting. However, other societies with lower or different standards may have no such compunction. So, Nazi scientists, for example, conducted appalling experiments on concen- tration camp inmates, subjecting them to horrific extremes of tem- perature (by immersing them in ice-cold water, for example), in order to 'test' the resilience of the human body. Clearly we would deem such experiments as utterly unacceptable and would refuse to condone them. But what about the results of the Nazi experiments themselves? Should they be used to help design survival suits for aircraft pilots, say, who may have to ditch in freezing waters? One view would be that the experiments were intrinsically ethically unacceptable and there- fore, their results should not be used for any purposes, not matter how important. The alternative opinion holds that, although the experi- ments themselves were completely unacceptable, their consequences may yet be beneficial. In other words, we should evaluate the ethical dimension here on the basis of the use to which these experiments can

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be put. And if they can be used to help save lives, then the appalling suffering of their subjects will not be in vain.

Or consider the current debate over animal research. One side insists that for many experiments the use of animals is necessary and these experiments and tests will have beneficial consequences for humanity. The other argues that they are unnecessary, even mis- leading, given the different physiologies of the animals involved and humans, and that the subsequent benefits do not outweigh the eth- ically abhorrent nature of the experiments themselves. It may be that legislation is passed which restricts certain kinds of experiments or outlaws them altogether, in which case certain scientific questions will go unanswered and certain developments will not be explored or undertaken. I'm not going to take a stance on these ethical issues here, the question is: Does this undermine the objectivity of science? Again, the answer is surely not; ethical standards may constrain scientific practice in certain ways, just as funding or the lack thereof does, but within such constraints, the nature of experimental results themselves and the content of theories remain unaffected.

3. Social factors may determine the content of scientific beliefs Let's now turn our attention to the claim that social factors cause or bring about the kinds of theories scientists come up with and the ones that they believe in. Now we need to exercise just a little care before we plunge in. First of all, the idea that the discovery of scientific hypotheses and theories is driven by social factors may not be so problematic, particularly if you accept the separation between discovery and justification we discussed in Chapter 2. There, we recall, it was argued that theories may be discovered through all sorts of means but that what is important is how they are justified, or sup- ported by the evidence. Even if the actual content of the theory is clearly determined by socio-economic or political factors - imagine a Darwin who didn't travel on the Beagle, didn't study animal breed- ing and so on, but just reflected on Victorian society and came up with the idea of natural selection and survival of the fittest that way - it shouldn't matter in the long run as long as the theory is thrown to the wolves of experience and rejected or accepted on that basis. However, if that acceptance or rejection is biased by social factors, if, for example, what counts as evidence is so determined, or the impact of that evidence, then we might well conclude that the object- ivity of science has been eroded, perhaps undermined altogether.

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In such cases, we might well conclude that scientists have come to hold irrational beliefs. How then, do we distinguish between rational (objective) and irrational (non-objective) beliefs?

The traditional answer distinguishes between rational and irra- tional beliefs precisely in terms of the influence of social factors: rational beliefs are held because they are true, justified by the evi- dence, etc., and hence are objective', irrational beliefs are held because of the influence of certain social factors. A well-known example of the latter from the history of biology would be the devel- opment of Lysenko's ideas in the old Soviet Union.

Lysenko was an agronomist from the Ukraine who was typically portrayed in the Soviet press as a kind of 'peasant scientist', more interested in practicalities than biological theory. He came to promi- nence through a technique he called 'vernalisation', which allowed winter crops to be obtained from summer planting by soaking and chilling the germinated seeds. This offered hopes of a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity and provided the basis for Lysenko's theory that environmental interaction was more impor- tant for the development of an organism than genetic constitution. With geneticists under attack during the 1930s for their 'reactionary separation of theory and practice', Lysenko positioned himself as someone who had achieved practical successes, unlike the geneticists with their 'useless scholasticism'. Together with a member of the Communist Party, Prezent, Lysenko denounced genetics as

. . . reactionary, bourgeois, idealist and formalist. It was held to be contrary to the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism. Its stress on the relative stability of the gene was supposedly a denial of dialectical development as well as an assault on materi- alism. Its emphasis on internality was thought to be a rejection of the interconnectedness of every aspect of nature. Its notion of the randomness and indirectness of mutation was held to undercut both the determinism of natural processes and man's ability to shape nature in a purposeful way.67

In its place, Lysenko developed

. . . a new theory of heredity that rejected the existence of genes and held that the basis of heredity did not lie in some special self-reproducing substance. On the contrary, the cell itself

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. . . developed into an organism, and there was no part of it not subject to evolutionary development. Heredity was based on the interaction between the organism and its environment, through the internalisation of external conditions.68

Hence according to Lysenkoism, there is no distinction between what biologists call the genotype, or the nexus of genes inherited by an individual, and the phenotype, that is, the characteristics of the individual that result from the interaction between heredity and the environment.

With genetics research slandered as being in the service of racism and caricatured as the 'handmaiden' of Nazi propaganda, and with leading geneticists arrested, imprisoned and even executed, Lysenko's theory came to be officially endorsed, with Lysenko himself quoting Engels (co-author with Marx of the Communist Manifesto} in support of it. The effects on Soviet genetics research and on biology in general were devastating, and it wasn't until the politically more tolerant mid-60s that Lysenko was denounced, his theory rejected and his practical success revealed to have been ill- founded and exaggerated. In 1964, the physicist Andrei Sakharov stood up in the General Assembly of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and declared that Lysenko was

. . . responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo- scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.69

Although an understandable desire to achieve practical successes played its part in this story (understandable since Soviet agriculture had suffered terribly from the forced collectivisation of the 1920s), Lysenko's views were accepted and widely adopted on the basis of political considerations and hence this acceptance can be taken as unjustified and, ultimately, irrational.

An alternative answer to the above question of how we distinguish between rational and irrational beliefs throws the distinction itself into doubt and suggests that we should treat all beliefs as on a par, in the sense that so-called 'rational' and 'irrational' beliefs should be subject to the same kind of explanation, where, it turns out, that

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explanation will be in terms of social factors. So, rather than saying that certain beliefs are or should be held because they are true, or justified by the evidence, and others should not, this approach advo- cates equality of treatment - look at the social factors behind the acceptance of all beliefs, without exception. That may sound quite reasonable, but an advocate of answer 1 may well protest that it remains to be shown that the acceptance of scientific theories and hypotheses is driven by these social factors. What is needed, and what the defenders of answer 2 have provided in some cases, is a detailed reconstruction of particular cases of the acceptance of the- ories, explicitly indicating the factors involved and their impact. These studies have of course been disputed, but let's continue to explore this kind of approach.

If the content of theories is determined in this way, in the sense that they are not just discovered due to prevailing social conditions, but accepted for similar reasons, then our picture of science as objec- tive, value-neutral, somehow standing above the socio-economic and political context has to be given up. Scientific theories and scientific Tacts' must now be seen as 'socially constructed'.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC 'FACTS'

The view that theories are accepted, ultimately, for social reasons and that scientific facts are socially constructed has become gener- ally known as 'social constructivism' and one of its most influential schools of thought is widely known as the 'Strong Programme'. The core idea of this position is that there is no reason why the content of all scientific beliefs cannot be explained in terms of social factors. It is founded on the following version of the above idea that we shouldn't introduce distinctions between rational beliefs, which are good, and irrational ones, which are in some sense bad:

The Equivalence Postulate: All beliefs are on a par with one another with respect to the causes of their credibility.

Here's how the two most famous advocates of the Strong Programme put it:

The position we shall defend is that the incidence of all beliefs without exception calls for empirical investigation and must be

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accounted for by finding the specific, local causes of this credi- bility. This means that regardless of whether the sociologist evaluates a belief as true or rational, or as false and irrational, he must search for the causes of its credibility.70

By specific, local causes of credibility here, Barnes and Bloor mean social factors, so the idea is to look for such factors behind the acceptance of all beliefs, without splitting them up into the rational and the irrational.

Now this raises a further interesting question: How is credibility established? In most cases, we don't get to work on that many scientific theories. Even if your particular theory, discovered and justified and accepted in the ways we have considered here, wins you a Nobel Prize, it is unlikely that you will have personally considered, evaluated and judged the evidence yourself. Typically we - whether scientists or lay-people - rely on the judgments of others, particu- larly experts in their fields. An important component of this reliance is obviously trust. So, this raises the further interesting question, who or what can you trust?

One answer, which might be viewed as the traditional one, pre- viously discussed in Chapter 4, is that you can trust the evidence of your own senses. It is this that supposedly grounds the objectivity of science. A more modern alternative is that you can trust the experts, but who are they? When you think of an expert you might immediately think of the TV image of the doctor or lab tech in the white coat, but why should you trust someone in a white coat?! Well, it's supposed to reflect a particular social status, achieved after a certain level of training, and the person wearing it is sup- posed to inspire a certain level of trust. That's all fine and good when it comes to the iconography of TV ads but where does this leave objectivity? Again, the traditional view is that it leaves it exactly where it should be, since the expert is transparently objec- tive. What this means is that the expert stands in a kind of chain, leading from someone making the observations to you, and all he or she does is to transmit the facts, as it were, along the chain, without adding to them, or taking anything away, without distort- ing them or modifying them in any way. The objectivity we achieve from observation is passed on through the expert and that is why we can trust them, on this view: the expert is a transparent transmitter of the facts.

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This is fine as long as we can be assured that the expert remains transparent and free from bias. But how plausible is this? The soci- ologist will insist that it is not very plausible at all, since he or she is immersed in a particular social context and hence will be subject to all the contingent social, political and cultural factors associated with that context. By shifting objectivity from the facts to the expert, immersed in a particular social context, it has become socially deter- mined, and hence, according to the traditional view, is not bias-free, social-factor-free objectivity at all!

Now you might ask, can't we admit that trust is crucial to estab- lishing scientists' knowledge claims but insist that facts still play a role? In this way, 'objectivity' might not be completely socially determined. Some sociologists reject even this insistence and claim that social factors determine the facts themselves. On this view, scientific 'facts' are nothing more than social artefacts or constructs. Researching the early history of modern science, Shapin and Shaffer focus on the work of Boyle, today perhaps most well known for 'Boyle's Law' of gases. In particular they examine his experi- mental work and they argue that this has to be understood as an attempt to establish secure knowledge and scientific order in the context of the changing political order following the English Civil War. And radically, perhaps, they point to Boyle as the architect of the view that the scientist, who was of course a gentleman, should be seen as a modest witness, whose apparently 'objective' language helped establish 'matters of fact' in the context of a community of like-minded individuals. They write: The objectivity of the experi- mental matter of fact was an artifact of certain forms of discourse and certain modes of social solidarity.'71 What could this mean? How are we to understand the claim that so-called scientific facts are 'socially constructed'? The sociologists' answer is that scientific knowledge is constructed through social interaction, that is, through a form of negotiation, between experts in laboratories. External reality is hence not seen as the cause of scientific know- ledge; rather scientists establish 'reality' through the claims they make as purveyors of truth. This is quite a radical position to adopt and we can immediately appreciate that the social construction of facts leads to a form of relativism, since if the facts depend on the social context, then a different social context (at a different time, or in a different place) will lead to a different set of facts and different scientific knowledge.

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SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM AND RELATIVISM

Let's look at this consequence a little more closely. One formulation of relativism takes it to hold that there is no privileged standard for the justification of beliefs. In other words, you cannot say that certain beliefs are justified and hence rational to hold because they are supported by the facts - what counts as a fact depends on the social context. Here's what Barnes and Bloor say: Tor the relativist there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such.'72

How do we arrive at such a position? Here are the three (easy) steps to relativism:

1) Different social groups hold different beliefs on a given issue.

2) What you believe is relative to the locally accepted standards of justification, i.e., the standards accepted by a specific social group (e.g., scientists, theologians, shamans, etc.).

3) Since there is no socially independent standard of justification, all beliefs are on a par.

According to the relativist, standards for the acceptability or justification of scientific beliefs are socially determined by values that are external to science. There is no privileged 'global' justification, such as being in correspondence with the 'facts'. What counts as a scientific 'fact' is socially determined and so is the truth. Hence science is no 'better' than any other form of belief; all beliefs are equal because there is no valid distinction between what is 'really' objective 'knowledge' and what is locally accepted as such.

You might find such a view absurd and feel that if this relativism is a consequence of the sociological view of objectivity as deter- mined by social context, then the sociological approach must be rejected. However, Barnes and Bloor embrace their inner - and outer - relativist, declaiming:

In the academic world relativism is everywhere abominated. Critics feel free to describe it by words such as 'pernicious' or portray it as a 'threatening tide'. On the political Right relativism

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is held to destroy the defences against Marxism and Totalitarianism. If knowledge is said to be relative to persons and places, culture or history, then is it not but a small step to con- cepts like 'Jewish physics'? On the Left, relativism is held to sap commitment, and the strength needed to overthrow the defences of the established order. How can the distorted vision of bour- geois science be denounced without a standpoint which is itself special and secure?

The majority of critics of relativism subscribe to some version of rationalism and portray relativism as a threat to rational, scientific standards. It is, however, a convention of academic dis- course that might is not right. Numbers may favour the opposite position, but we shall show that the balance of argument favours a relativist theory of knowledge. Far from being a threat to the scientific understanding of forms of knowledge, relativism is required by it. Our claim is that relativism is essential to all those disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, the history of insti- tutions and ideas, and even cognitive psychology, which account for the diversity of systems of knowledge, their distribution and the manner of their change. It is those who oppose relativism and who grant certain forms of knowledge a privileged status, who pose the real threat to a scientific understanding of knowledge and cognition.73

That is, they insist that relativism is essential for understanding how science works. Now this is a provocative view, but it faces certain problems:

Problem 1\ if all views are relative to social context, what about relativism itself?! If the defenders of relativism and the social construction of scientific facts insist that their view is objectively correct, then their relativism is selective. However, there is a straight- forward response to this: the belief that scientific Tacts' are deter- mined by social factors is itself determined by social factors. This is known as 'reflexivity'; the relativist is reflexive in holding that rela- tivism is itself relative. Of course what that means is that you could always respond that social factors lead you to maintain that scientific facts are not determined by social factors but in accepting that your claim that science is objective cannot itself be objectively defended, you've given the game away!

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Problem 2: relativism blocks change, both political as well as scientific. This is potentially a more serious problem. Consider: if what counts as a fact is determined by and relative to political context then communist-biased facts, say, are just as 'objective' on this view as non-communist or 'capitalist-biased' ones and only a change in political context will lead to any change in the relevant science. If what counts as acceptable science is determined by the local community, then if there's no change in the social community there will be no change in science. If we have no objectively justified, rational grounds for accepting one theory rather than another, in what sense can there be scientific progress? The stand- ard position is that progress is towards the truth and is driven by objective, rational factors such as those having to do with the evi- dence. If we accept some form of relativism then this form of progress goes out the window; and all we have left is change through change of social context. If we think there is scientific progress in the standard sense, then we'd be inclined to reject the relativist position.

Problem 3: relativism blocks communication and understanding, whether between different social communities across the world today, or between different scientific eras across time. The fact that we can understand the beliefs of cultures which are very different from ours and of scientists from the eighteenth, seventeenth or pre- AD centuries is surely indicative that not all beliefs are relative; different communities (whether scientific, cultural, or whatever) share some common beliefs. It is in this vein that the rationalist philosopher Lukes insisted that '. . . the existence of a common reality is a necessary precondition of our understanding [another society's] language'.74 What he means by this is not that we must agree on the reality of quantum fields, for example. What he means is that this other society must possess our distinction between truth and falsity, because if it did not '. . . we would be unable even to agree about what counts as the successful identification of public (spatio-temporally located) objects'.75 It is on the basis of such an agreement that a kind of 'bridgehead' between the two cultures or two scientific eras can be constructed. So the idea is that we can begin to piece together an understanding of what Newton or Darwin or Freud believed because they shared our distinction between 'true' and 'false' at the basic level of the kinds of objects we

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can see with our own eyes all around us. And likewise we can begin to understand the beliefs of different scientific communities today, even if some of those beliefs are driven by, say, political considera- tions. So, consider the Lysenko case again: even though Lysenko's theories were developed and widely accepted on the basis of politi- cal factors, opponents were still able to understand them, debate them and, to their cost in many cases, reject them.

Now the relativist might respond that even when it comes to 'public' objects, people in other cultures may have very different beliefs about them. Take a large hill, standing prominently out in the countryside, for example: we might see it as a particular geological formation, but the local culture might view it as a source of magic, or the home of a sleeping king and his retinue who will awake to defend the country in its hour of need. So, there is a form of rela- tivism even here. However, the rationalist is not insisting that members of the other society must identify a hill as a 'hill', in the sense that we do (as a geological formation, say) but that they must be capable of distinguishing it from a tree, for example, or a pool of water. Although the members of the other society may attribute certain properties to hills that we do not - such as possessing magical powers, say - they must attribute enough of the properties that we do in order to distinguish a hill from a small pool of water, say. Such a property might be that of relative impenetrability, so that our friends from the other society will agree in assigning the value True' to the statement 'You can't walk through a hill.' As far as the anti- relativist is concerned, that is all we need to start building our bridgehead with this strange other culture.

That this kind of bridgehead can be built is supported in two ways. First of all, there is the evidence from anthropologists them- selves, who go to strange, far-away places, study cultures very different from ours and observe people studiously not walking through hills. In other words, despite what the relativist says, there are apparently no cases of anthropologists, or historians of science for that matter, returning from their studies empty handed and saying 'Nope, I just couldn't understand that social or scientific com- munity at all.' However, this kind of practice-based reason is not entirely straightforward, since the relativist may counter that neither the anthropologists nor the historians approach the other culture or scientific era with a kind of blank slate; rather, they have their own philosophical predilections which they may bring into play,

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particularly if they have received training themselves in the methods of science and hence our framework of rationality. So, it is not sur- prising that they return with reports of contact of a form that supports such a framework. In other words, the data the anthropol- ogists or historians bring back with them are already laden with our society's (broad) theory of rationality.

We recall our earlier discussion of the theory-ladenness of obser- vation in Chapter 6. It can be tackled in two ways: first, the theory with which the observations are laden is not the theory being tested; second, observations in science are typically 'robust' in the sense that the data remain (broadly) the same across a range of instrumenta- tion with correspondingly different background theories. The first response is not available to the rationalist, since the concern is pre- cisely that data are laden with precisely the theoretical framework that is being tested. The second response is potentially very interest- ing but what would be required would be for anthropologists or his- torians of science from radically different cultural backgrounds to ours to make the necessary observations, and it is hard to see how that could be achieved. Here the rationalist may well throw up her arms and insist that now questions are being begged against her, since she insists that there could be no such radically different cultural backgrounds!

There is also a second reason that is particularly interesting with regard to our discussion of rationality and objectivity in science. Lukes expresses it as follows:

. . . any culture, scientific or not, which engages in successful pre- diction (and it is difficult to see how any society could survive which did not) must presuppose a given reality [and] . . . it is, so to speak, no accident that the predictions of both primitive and modern common-sense and of science come off. Prediction would be absurd unless there were events to predict.76

Now this appears to be nothing more than a form of the infamous 'No Miracles Argument', which underpins scientific realism and which we discussed in Chapter 8. The gist of the argument, we recall, is that the success of science - where this is understood in terms of making predictions - would be a miracle, unless the claims it makes about reality were (broadly) true and the objects it posits also exist. However, as we noted previously, this is highly contentious, and

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SCIENCE: KEY CONCEPTS IN PHILOSOPHY

again, we recall, it is typically presented as a form of inference that the anti-realist rejects as question-begging. Of course, as applied to his project of defending rationalism against the relativist, the ration- alist might reply that such objections are all very well when it comes to the unobservable objects of science, but that what he is concerned with, of course, is everyday reality and its 'public, spatio-temporally located' objects, like rocks and hills. So, consider the following example: the best explanation for the noise behind the skirting board, the nibbled biscuits, etc., is that there is a mouse in the house; therefore there is a mouse in the house. If the relativist is willing to accept this for 'everyday' objects, such as mice, which sit on the bridgehead, then she should be willing to accept the more general form as suggested by Lukes above, and her opposition to universal criteria of rationality and objectivity would be undermined.

However, as often is the case in philosophical debates, things are not quite so simple, unfortunately. In the context of the realist-anti-realist debate, a constructive empiricist such as van Fraassen has rejected the move from accepting these kinds of infer- ence for everyday objects, such as mice, to accepting them in general. Van Fraassen is no relativist but he notes that we have to be careful about the form of rationality we put up in opposition to the rela- tivist's view. In particular, he rejects what he calls a 'Prussian' rule- based approach to rationality in favour of an 'English' permissive approach. According to the former, you are rational only if you follow certain rules, whereas on the latter view, you are rational unless you violate certain constraints, such as being consistent (so was Bohr rational in proposing his famously inconsistent theory of the atom?!).

The point is that it is not clear that the rationalist can justify the above reason for rejecting relativism on the grounds that we typically apply it locally in the form of inference to the best explanation, even when it is only 'public' objects that we are concerned about. His rela- tivist opposition might insist that since we are not compelled to accept it at the local level, we are likewise not compelled to adopt it as applied globally

Even worse, the relativist may feel that the whole argument, and in particular, the claim that 'prediction would be absurd unless there were events to predict', begs the very question at issue. The claim that successful prediction would be a miracle or absurd, unless the primitive, common-sense or scientific claims from which such

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INDEPENDENCE

predictions are drawn actually 'matched' reality in some way, presupposes a view of the relative plausibility of miracles which may be particular to our culture. Other cultures may have beliefs accord- ing to which the occurrence of miracles is not so implausible and hence in that context, successful predictions even at the low-level of planting crops and avoiding walking into hills might indeed be regarded as accidental or miraculous.

At this stage of the debate, the rationalist might well protest that the relativist is not herself & member of a society in which miracles are taken to occur on a regular basis, but a member of ours in which they are not. If the relativist refuses to accept the very framework of debate and argument of our culture, then what is the point of any further discussion? Of course, the relativist may insist that she does indeed accept the rules of academic debate but only as contextually determined. In that case, however, the rationalist may feel that her argument goes through, since the point is not whether members of another, so-called 'primitive', society accept the argument, but whether we do. And if we do, even if only on a contextual basis, then relativism is undermined - only in this context, granted, but then, that's the only context that is relevant for these purposes!

At this point we must stop. We have moved far from our original concern with objectivity, rationality and the independence of science from social and political factors. Like many philosophical debates the matter has not been decisively settled, but I hope you have some idea of the issues at stake. We can highlight some of these issues even further by considering a concrete example of the influence of specific factors, such as gender bias, for example, which is the topic of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 10

GENDER BIAS

In the previous chapter we considered whether social factors in general might undermine the objectivity of science and we looked at one view which maintains that they do. Here we will look at one particular factor, or set of factors, and consider the extent to which they threaten that objectivity. The factor concerned has to do with the tricky issue of gender, so our fundamental question will be: Does gender bias undermine the objectivity of science?

SCIENCE AS AN ANDROCENTRIC ACTIVITY

Let's consider the ways in which gender bias might impact on science.

1. Gender bias may determine the proportion of men and women in science This seems entirely plausible. Recent surveys have concluded that although, on average, women account for around 50 per cent of those who have been in higher education and are employed in pro- fessional or technical occupations, across the European Union, compared to just 44 per cent in the total labour force, only 29 per cent of science and engineering posts were held by women.77

Previously, a major cause of gender imbalance in science was lack of education: women were either actively discouraged from pursuing science degrees or at the very least dismissed as oddities or jokes. Since the mid-60s, however, the number of women receiving bach- elor's degrees in science and engineering has increased year on year, and are now roughly half of the total. Nevertheless, it is clear that women face certain gender-related barriers to entry into a scientific

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