Trust, Reliance, and Objectivity
Ideals of objectivity have a complex history, but this does not diminish their normative force; they are central to the well-functioning of a great many institutions in contemporary societies, including the sciences. We propose an account of objectivity that centers attention on the role of human agency in managing risks of epistemic error or moral failure. At its core is a constructive paradox. The palimpsest of conceptions of objectivity and the context-specific strategies for realizing them in practice that have been recognized by historians and philosophers of science reflect an acute appreciation that we, humans, are inevitably a source of such errors and failures. But at the same time, ideals of objectivity embody a conviction that we – individually and collectively – are also capable of acting in ways that allow us to recognize and avoid, mitigate, or correct for these risks. As philosophers of science have argued since the late 1990s, aperspectival ideals are untenable; objectivity must be conceptualized in thoroughly social terms. Today, this is typically done in terms of norms of trust. We argue for a refinement of trust-based accounts of objectivity that recognizes the role of human agency in mitigating risks of epistemic error and moral failure – even though we human agents are the source of those risks.
Reframing the Sex Binary: Feminist Philosophy of Science and the Medical Politics of Classification
This paper explores how feminist philosophy of science can contribute to rethinking the entrenched medical and political frameworks that uphold the sex binary. Drawing on my dissertation, which critically examines the construction, contestation, and policy implications of binary sex classification, I focus on the epistemic and normative entanglements between philosophy, gender theory, and medicine. While biomedical discourses frequently present the sex binary as a biologically grounded fact, feminist philosophers of science have shown that such classifications are shaped not only by anatomy and physiology but also by deep-seated social and political values.
The paper begins by examining the gamete model and the 3G-sex model—two influential frameworks used in biology and medicine to define sex. Although these models are often treated as objective, I argue that they rely on background assumptions about what kinds of variation count as legitimate or pathological. Through a philosophical analysis, I show how these models obscure the lived experiences of those who do not fit neatly into binary categories and reinforce the marginalization of intersex people.
Building on this analysis, the second part of the paper focuses on the medical management of intersex bodies, particularly the history and ongoing practice of performing non-consensual, “normalizing” surgeries on intersex infants. These interventions are often justified through appeals to medical necessity or social coherence, but I argue that they are rooted in a problematic view of sex as a fixed and essential trait. Using tools from feminist epistemology and the science-and-values literature, I show how such practices reflect contested normative assumptions rather than settled scientific knowledge.
Ultimately, this paper contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary work that calls for more just and inclusive medical practices. It also highlights how feminist philosophy of science can help uncover the hidden value-laden dimensions of biomedical classification and open space for alternative approaches to embodiment, variation, and care.
Dominated Discourse: The Role of Generalisations in Scientific Research: Epistemic (Dis)Advantages and Decision-Making
“Taking out a loan to buy a house is economically beneficial”, “To maximize chances of getting into grad school, do an internship in your second year”, “Intermittent fasting is actually good for you.” Such sentences apply to some members of society and not to others. Specifically, common utterances of this type are often applicable for members of dominant groups and not for members of marginalised groups, disproportionately harming marginalised groups. We call a discourse where such ambiguous advice disproportionately applies to dominant groups a “dominated discourse”, and we claim it is a systemic problem that cannot be solved on an individual basis.
We illustrate the epistemic disadvantage of marginalized groups relative to the dominant group using two simulations—one that mimics a discourse dominated by non-diverse scientific studies and one in which the discourse is dominated due to the biased ignoring of marginalized groups. Using epistemic networks, we show that marginalized groups update on information that is misleading for their decision-making context, leading to strong and clear disadvantages for the marginalized group. In particular, we show that one-sided ignoring, previously considered an epistemic advantage for marginalized groups (Wu, 2023), disadvantages marginalized groups even when they are in the majority. We test whether marginalized groups can overcome the epistemic disadvantage by employing mistrust based on observing differences between them and other individuals (learning whose advice is applicable). We see that, although such strategies allow improvement, marginalised groups consistently remain disadvantaged. This indicates that, at least when agents do not have prior knowledge about which group memberships are relevant to particular decision outcomes, they cannot overcome their disadvantages on an individual level.
Developing a Feminist Approach to the Metaphysics of Science
A few years back, a controversy occurred between feminist and ‘traditional’ metaphysicians on the possibility for metaphysics to remain substantive/meaningful while integrating core elements from feminist philosophy (Barnes 2017; Mikkola 2017; Schaffer 2017; Sider 2017). Of concern was the attachment of ‘traditional’ metaphysics to the ideas of value-neutrality and “fundamentality” (excluding social aspects of reality), while feminist metaphysicians advocate for a philosophy explicitly guided by social justice values – a philosophy whose aim is not so much to establish “truths” (if such a thing is even possible) but to be socially critical and meliorative. Despite granting that non-fundamental concerns may be metaphysically substantive, explicit political commitment was the line that ‘traditional’ metaphysicians were unwilling to cross – attesting to the needs of a radical reform of current metaphysical practices if one wishes to get it up to date with the advances of feminist philosophy/epistemology.
What goes for traditional metaphysics a fortiori stands for its extension: Metaphysics of Science (MoS) – the attempt to explore metaphysical representations compatible with our ‘best’ scientific knowledge. Here I propose a reform of MoS in line with feminist epistemologies (more precisely standpoint theories), enabling it to take on the critical and meliorative functions advocated for by feminist metaphysicians. More specifically, I aim to give MoS the capacities to 1) highlight implicit problematic social/ethical/political values carried by scientific communities in their practices and associated metaphysical worldviews, and 2) guide scientific communities in building more socially/ethically/politically appropriate representations.
The first necessary shift towards a feminist practice of MoS concerns the locus of metaphysical interest within the sciences. Where today’s MoS is concerned almost exclusively with the interpretation of scientific theories as self-sufficient representations of Reality, vindicated by a general commitment to scientific realism, integrating the idea of situated knowledge requires us to instead take as ground for metaphysical analysis a given scientific community and its associated disciplinary matrix; which includes the scientific theories produced by the community but also, crucially, the values and practices giving meaning and legitimacy to said theories.
From thereon, MoS would take both backward-looking (critical) and forward-looking (meliorative) dimensions. In the former, MoS would aim at critically extracting the metaphysical worldviews taken to give meaning to the practices defining the community (Chang 2008). Successively adopting different standpoints (ideally through collaboration with members of marginalized groups, which implies a responsibility to push for more diversity in our metaphysician communities), and taking inspiration from Pihlström (2009), we may highlight implicit social/ethical/political values guiding such practices, therefore contributing to a better understanding of the political and ontological dimensions of the studied community’s standpoint.
In its meliorative dimensions, MoS would then be a collaborative exploration of potential metaphysical systems which would equally give meaning to the practice of the community under study while implementing more appropriate social/ethical/political values. Optimistically, one may thus consider implicit legitimations of social injustices as anomalies of the studied matrix and, through the dialectics of the two dimensions of MoS, guide scientific revolutions on social/ethical/political grounds.
References
Barnes, Elizabeth. 2017. ‘Realism and Social Structure’. Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2417–33.
Chang, Hasok. 2008. ‘Contingent Transcendental Arguments for Metaphysical Principles’. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 63 (October): 113–33.
Mikkola, Mari. 2017. ‘On the Apparent Antagonism between Feminist and Mainstream Metaphysics’. Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2435–48.
Pihlström, Sami. 2009. Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology. London: Continuum.
Schaffer, Jonathan. 2017. ‘Social Construction as Grounding; Or: Fundamentality for Feminists, a Reply to Barnes and Mikkola’. Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2449–65.
Sider, Theodore. 2017. ‘Substantivity in Feminist Metaphysics’. Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2467–78.
Selective Credibility Excess – A Case Study in Psychiatric Diagnosis
The theory of epistemic injustice is concerned with wrongs we suffer in our capacity as knowers. Testimonial injustice, which we suffer when our testimony is unfairly misjudged, is one of the major kinds of epistemic injustice. Paradigmatically, it has been applied to cases of unfairly lowering the credibility of a speaker due to identity prejudice. Since the original conception, scholars have argued that cases of excess credibility are more often objectionable than the canonical discussion by Miranda Fricker suggested. The existing debate has focused on the connection of excess credibility in one type of agent with a corresponding deficit in another. We wish to direct attention to another concern with excess credibility, and illustrate it with a case study from the diagnostic practices in psychiatry.
Excess credibility, we argue, can be epistemically harmful to a speaker when applied selectively. An agent’s testimony may receive credibility in excess of their reliability on the basis of its content or, more broadly, if it is set in a particular conceptual framework. For instance, a patient may receive undue credibility when framing their experiences in the conceptual framework of mental disorder. Such cases, if they indeed occur, expose the speaker to material risks of inappropriate or excessive treatment. But there is also a genuinely epistemic harm: the agent is not taken seriously due to the uncritical reception of their testimony and may be subject to potential misinterpretations of their own experiences due to the excess credit itself and the downstream offer of a diagnostic category. As it is an empirical question whether this is a real and significant phenomenon, we now turn to our case study.
The anthropological research presented in the paper concerns the process of psychiatric diagnosis in the Polish medical system. The phenomenon discussed is psychiatric diagnoses issued too quickly. A patient who presents with symptoms can obtain a diagnosis for life in a single 45-minute visit, and on the basis of this diagnosis begin pharmacotherapy. Interviewees who obtained a quick psychiatric diagnosis indicated that the psychiatrist accepted all the symptoms they indicated without in-depth medical investigation. In some cases, the interviewees also already had a pre-constituted knowledge of their condition embedded in psychiatric language. The symptoms they indicated during a brief visit received immediate interpretation by a specialist.
The causality and course of this phenomenon are linked to the economic, narrative, and social factors of a given environment. The economic factor favors quick and expensive diagnostic visits. Narrative traditions in psychiatric centers favor rapid interpretation of symptoms according to current standards. Or it is a patient who comes with already constituted psychiatric knowledge about their own mental state, drawn from social media and online sources. Are we surely dealing with selective credibility excess? Or are we facing a changing dynamic of expert and non-expert relationships, or systemic ignorance driven by structural factors?
A Pragmatist Feminist Approach to Causal Selection and Social Determinants of Health
Objectivity has been at the center of debates regarding the social dimensions of scientific knowledge, both within various strands of pragmatism and in feminist philosophy of science. Nevertheless, these contributions have not extended to causality and the importance of the agent or inquirer in selecting what to include in a causal model or explanation. For concepts of causation that refer to an agent or an intervention, the challenge is that what causes what ends up depending on the subject’s perspective in one way or another, so different subjects may take different, sometimes conflicting, causal claims to be true. However, not only explicitly agent-dependent notions of causation face this potential question—decisions about how far to look for components of mechanisms also depend on the purposes of inquiry.
This paper argues for a notion of objectivity distinct from those focusing on reaching a uniform or homogeneous perspective. While these views establish an important point—namely, the minimum conditions for different causal inquirers to understand one another—objectivity can also be spelled out in terms of transparency about assumptions and research purposes, and diversity of perspectives. I argue that pragmatism and feminist philosophy of science can be employed to make a case for these two desiderata, bringing them together under a pragmatist feminist solution to the problem of causal selection. I further illustrate how this solution works in articulating causality involving social determinants of health.
Assumptions regarding the relevance of upstream causes and higher levels where causation occurs—such as the social level—fit the purposes of public health and can be contrasted with the purposes of other disciplines that may focus on downstream causes, such as biomedical research. Moreover, feminist approaches can provide more specific goals connected to diversity of values and social positions, preventing the domination of one approach, and incorporating marginalized perspectives relevant to global health into a broadly pragmatist outlook that emphasizes the purposes of inquiry.
I first introduce the problem of causal selection in connection to interventionist and agency-based approaches, then explore it in the context of perspectivism applied to mechanistic concepts of causation. In contrast with the solutions present in the literature, I propose a notion of objectivity that meets the desiderata of transparency and diversity, which spell out the objectivity of causal claims as a social process. I then explore pragmatist and feminist arguments for this notion of objectivity and for each of the desiderata. I conclude by illustrating how this view would work in the context of social determinants of health.
Rethinking Hierarchies and Power Structures in Academia: A Feminist Epistemology Perspective
Cultivating academic heterotopias, I shall argue in this talk, requires and invites us to consider ontologies and epistemologies alternative to mainstream human-centric ones. I will present decentralized ontologies for the digital society as one example that can help us rethink academic practices and structures, and ultimately challenge academic hierarchies. A decentralized approach replaces individualistic, top-down, prestige-oriented practices with ones in which situatedness, relationality, and care are fostered and promoted. In this perspective, power structures typical of hierarchies are replaced with higher responsibility and care across the pyramid.
Objectivity as Positioned Rationality
In Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988), Donna Haraway argues for a revision of the traditional concept of objectivity as a god-like, all-seeing “view from nowhere” in favour of an embodied objectivity and situated knowledge—a “view from somewhere.” Haraway’s theorem of situated knowledge has since become a paradigm of feminist critique of knowledge and science, even if it is often reduced to a methodological call to list one’s social-political identity markers to avoid the “view from nowhere.”
However, on an ontological level, Haraway’s theorem also contains a radical redefinition of the conventional subject-object relationship in knowledge contexts, and on an epistemological level a concept of positioned rationality. Together, these form the onto-epistemological basis for her feminist concept of objectivity as faithful and responsible situated knowledge. “The scientific question of feminism,” Haraway argues, “is about objectivity as positioned rationality.”
Despite its central role, this concept of positioned rationality has received little attention in feminist philosophy of science—perhaps because Haraway only sketched it out rudimentarily. In this talk, I present an interpretation of this fragmentary concept within her broader framework. First, I outline the background of Haraway’s politically motivated critique of objectivity. I then focus on her reconceptualization of knowledge actors as “porous subjects” and “witty objects.” Finally, I interpret her concept of positioned rationality as a counter-concept to traditional notions of universal rationality, working out four key layers:
The contestability of knowledge
The social constitution of scientific conversations
The context-dependency of rationality
The responsibility of rational knowledge
Rational knowledge thus proves objective to the extent that it does justice to its object—epistemically, ethically, and politically. I conclude by discussing the political relevance of positioned rationality, drawing also on Karen Barad’s development of Haraway’s ideas.
Bibliography
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.
Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Harding, Sandra. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Hekman, Susan. “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited.” Signs 22, no. 2 (1997): 341–365.
Julie Jebeile
Feminist Perspectives on Climate Science
For several decades, climate science has provided the necessary insight to both understand the past and present climate, and to project future climate impacts, which in turn serve mitigation and adaptation policies. However, there is a so-called usability gap between the predictions climate science yields, and what people really need to know for climate change adaptation. The usability gap raises intertwined epistemic and ethical issues, in particular as climate change increases inequalities. The philosophy of climate science has mainly focused on the adequacy of the climate models employed for the purpose of providing reliable information to decision-makers. Yet an adapted philosophical approach is required to understand how to provide reliable and usable information which fairly address the diversity of our needs as stakeholders. In this talk, I will show how feminist epistemology can provide complementary analyses and concepts in order to tackle the usability gap. I will outline a research programme that explores four interrelated avenues: the integration of stakeholders' values in climate services; the use of several climate modelling perspectives; the inclusion of local and indigenous knowledge; and the connection between epistemic injustice and climate injustice.
Feminist Philosophy of Science in Practice: A Foundation Inspection
I want to use the opportunity of this gathering to have a conversation that’s not quite new—and perhaps just a little bit annoying—but one that’s had me pondering enough to pose the question: When we do our work in feminist philosophy of science, which assumptions about the nature of science, of scientific knowledge, of progression and truth underpin it?
Are we pragmatist feminists? Striving for empirical adequacy? Veritistic social epistemologists? Feminist empiricists? Semantic scientific realists? Bayesians with a human face?
How do we navigate contributing to a field marbled by formal philosophy, traditional epistemology, and logical empiricism, if the concerns we’re swayed by are about power, the social, and embodiment? I’ll motivate my frustrations, define the poles, and then open things up to your input.