Epistemology for Toddlers
I mentioned that I’ve been reading Sandra Harding. I have. Therefore I need to vent. I also need to write in short simple clause-free declarative sentences, because that’s the way Harding writes, and it’s catching.
Reading Harding is a very strange experience. I keep wondering – huh? What happened? Why did this book get published? Why didn’t anyone shove it back at her and say (at the very least), ‘I’m sorry but you’ll have to re-write this for grown-ups. Children don’t read books about epistemology.’ Why does she write the way she does? Why do people let her? And then publish it? And then why do other people buy the books and read them? And why, godgivemestrength, why do people cite them and quote them and praise them? As they do? You can google her and find people calling her ‘distinguished.’ A distinguished philosopher. But – seriously – the things she says are beyond wrong, they’re just inane. I’ll give you some examples.
At least one person has pointed this out – this ‘yes but her work is not acceptable’ aspect: Gonzalo Munévar in the collection Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology edited by Cassandra Pinnick, Noretta Koertge and Robert Almeder. An excellent collection, I recommend it highly.
I argue not that Sandra Harding’s epistemology, so highly regarded by feminists [not all of them! ed], is wrong; rather, I intend to show that serious scholars should consider the quality of her work unacceptable…The reader’s embarrassment grows with each amazing example…
It does. I feel actual discomfort reading her – I kind of squirm as I read. I feel like letting out little yips of protest like a dog – not to mention the occasional howl.
So. Want an example or two? Sure you do.
Might our understanding of nature and social life be different if the people who discovered the laws of nature were the same ones who cleaned up after them?
No. Next question.
Furthermore, there are many feminisms, and these can be understood to have started their analyses from the lives of different historical groups of women: liberal feminism from the lives of women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American educated classes…Third World feminism from late twentieth-century Third World women’s lives. Moreover, we all change our minds about all kinds of issues.
Ah! Do we! I hadn’t realized that. That’s good to know. But that’s how she writes, you see. Repetitively. Ploddingly. Pointing out the obviously. Everything she says is either tautologous or obvious or wrong. Oh Third World feminism has to do with Third World women – I see! Thank you for clearing that up.
Okay, that’s enough venting for the moment. I feel slightly cruel – as if I’ve been mocking the afflicted. But she writes these damn books, and some people take them seriously. That’s a symptom of something very odd.
I’ve had this Wolfgang Pauli quote on my mind for the last week or so. It is: “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.” I wonder if it may apply here?
“Might our understanding of nature and social life be different if the people who discovered the laws of nature were the same ones who cleaned up after them?”
Actually, stripped of its feminist pretensions, that statement strikes me as not altogether unreasonable. Do you me to tell me that “epistemology” in a society dependent on the exploitation of human and natural resources by a narrow elite is the same “epistemology” in a society in which resources and conditions are more broadly distributed and equalized? Are not knowledge and reason distributive properties, immune to claims of monopoly, rather than the exclusive possession of an elite that can rise to the level of a Platonic correspondance with “reality”? Is “reality” an intensional rather than extensional property? Perhaps the real and urgent issue is the public mediation of knowledge and reason. Perhaps rather than concern ourselves with “epistemology” and its artificial reasons, we’d best concern ourselves with the distribution of the conditions and opportunities for knowledge and reason. Perhaps then both the special pleadings of particular interests and the exclusive claims of “universal” knowledge would be less urgent. But that’s probably an utopian yearning, in defiance of the “laws” of economics and political violence.
As I read Harding’s sentence she seems to be saying that E=mc2 wouldn’t be the same if it had been discovered by the people who rebuilt Hiroshima rather than by Einstein. No elborate exegesis can disguise the fact that this is utter nonsense.
That quote is also very Harding because it asks a question, then goes on to assume an answer to that question and implying that she has somehow established her answer to be true just by raising the possibility.
Could it be possible that X?…Given that X…Now that we have established that X…
I have a feeling that all quotes from Harding are very Harding – she is nothing if not consistent! But seriously folks; good point. She is indeed long on rhetoric and short (to put it mildly) on argument.
“Perhaps rather than concern ourselves with “epistemology” and its artificial reasons, we’d best concern ourselves with the distribution of the conditions and opportunities for knowledge and reason.”
Hmm. No, don’t think so – think we’d best do both. I certainly think the conditions and opportunities for knowledge and reason ought to be as widely distributed, i.e. universal, as possible, but I don’t think it follows that we therefore ought to stop being concerned with epistemology. It’s no good making a worthless epistemology widely or universally available, now is it.
Sandra who?
If Sandra Harding is one of the doyennes of ‘Women’s Studies’, and if OB’s samples of her performance are representative, one can only conclude that the people who actually read her stuff must be the outcome of some kind of negative selection — the epsilon-minus semi-morons of academia, so to speak.
So it’s no wonder she writes as though her readers have a median mental age of eight. They presumably do.
Perhaps she’s part of some great male chauvinist conspiracy to demonstrate that women who are educated beyond their information processing capacity are a recipe for disaster …
I’d like to nominate myself as being part of a great female conspiracy to demonstrate the men who are educated beyond their information processing capacity are a recipe for disaster (albeit it, in my case, a pretty inconsequential disaster)…
Sandra Harding isn’t even that – she was at the time of the publication of the book I was quoting from – Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? – a professor of philosophy. Which is seriously hard to believe – but it’s true. Also hard to believe is the fact that Cornell U Press published the book. Janet Radcliffe Richards has some pungent things to say about that sort of thing in ‘Feminist Epistemology Isn’t’. I plan to share them in a further N&C on the subject.
The conspiracy thing is almost plausible. Or to put it another way, feminism couldn’t have done a better job of shooting itself in the damn foot if it had been a male chauvinist conspiracy.