Helen Longino Quotes on Truth
Helen Longino's analysis of truth — articulated across Science as Social Knowledge (1990) and The Fate of Knowledge (2002) — defends a robustly social epistemology that treats objective truth not as the property of an individual investigator's reasoning but as the property of a community whose practices of transformative criticism convert the contextual values inevitably present at every stage of inquiry into a knowledge product whose particular value-load is corrected for by the community's procedures. The framework departs from both the value-free ideal of traditional philosophy of science and the more radical social-constructivist alternatives that would deny scientific knowledge any distinctive standing among the products of contingent social practices, and supplies the systematic alternative that has organized much of contemporary feminist philosophy of science.
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:
“Where there is no plurality of perspectives, the assumptions of inquiry pass unnoticed and unrevised.”
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“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.”
(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 .