Helen Longino b. 1944

Helen Longino is an American philosopher of science, professor emerita at Stanford University, and one of the leading defenders of social epistemology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Science as Social Knowledge and The Fate of Knowledge argued that the objectivity of science is not a property of individual researchers but of the social practices, transformative criticism, and institutional norms by which scientific communities sift their results. Studying Human Behavior applied her contextual empiricism to the contested case of behavioral genetics, while her many essays on feminism and the philosophy of science helped to found contemporary feminist epistemology.

Helen Elizabeth Longino was born in 1944. She took her bachelor's at Barnard College in 1966, her master's at the University of Sussex, and her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University in 1973. She taught at Mills College, at Rice, at the University of Minnesota, and from 2005 at Stanford University, where she is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy. She has served as president of the Philosophy of Science Association.

Her books are Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (1990), The Fate of Knowledge (2002), and Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (2013), together with the edited collections Feminism and Science (1996, with Evelyn Fox Keller) and Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology.

Longino developed contextual empiricism as a sustained alternative to both classical scientific realism and relativist sociology of science: the objectivity of scientific knowledge is the achievement of well-designed communities of critical practice, and contextual values play an indispensable role in the inferential practice of the sciences. She has applied the framework with particular care to the contested study of human behaviour, where competing research traditions on aggression and sexuality reflect both empirical evidence and the values that organise it.