Helen Longino Quotes on Knowledge
Helen Longino's Science as Social Knowledge (1990) and The Fate of Knowledge (2002) develop the most influential contemporary account of the social epistemology of scientific inquiry. The principal thesis is that the objectivity of scientific knowledge is not the property of an individual investigator's reasoning but the property of a community whose practices of transformative criticism — public venues for criticism, shared standards, uptake of criticism by the community, tempered equality of intellectual authority — convert the contextual values inevitably present at every stage of inquiry into a knowledge product whose contextual value-load is corrected for by the community's procedures rather than eliminated.
Quotes
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Attributed to Helen Longino:
“Objectivity is a social achievement, not the property of an isolated knower.”
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Attributed to Helen Longino:
“Transformative criticism is the heart of scientific practice.”
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Attributed to Helen Longino:
“Knowledge is the product of communities, not of solitary observers.”
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Attributed to Helen Longino:
“Where there is no plurality of perspectives, the assumptions of inquiry pass unnoticed and unrevised.”
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Attributed to Helen Longino:
“Feminist philosophy of science is not a special pleading; it is good philosophy of science under another name.”
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“(Fall 1987) " Can There be a Feminist Science? ". Hypatia 2 (3: Special Issue: Feminism and Science, Part 1): 51–64. DOI : 10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01341.x .”
Feminists—in and out of science—often condemn masculine bias in the sciences from the vantage point of commitment to a value-free science. Androcentric bias, once identified, can then be seen as a violation of the rules, as "bad" science. Feminist science, by contrast, can eliminate that bias and produce better, good, more true, or gender-free science.