Here’s a publication notice of Sandra Harding’s new book.
Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research, by Sandra Harding. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.)
Today the “view from nowhere” is widely recognized to be incompetent to detect in the results of research social values and interests that are shared across research communities, such as those that promote racism, sexism, class exploitation, coloniality, and heteronormativity. This study presents six arguments for a different “logic of scientific inquiry” that has emerged in empirically more reliable and comprehensive social justice research in the natural and social sciences. This research methodology and epistemology is value- and interest-rich, in contrast with the “view from nowhere.” Yet, standpoint theory’s “strong objectivity” standard promotes real objectivity: it insists on fairness to both the data and to a knowledge claim’s severest critics. Harding is a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, and winner of the 2013 John Desmond Bernal Award of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.
Contents:
1. New citizens, new societies: New sciences, new philosophies?
2. Objectivity for sciences from below
3. Women, gender, development: Maximally objective research?
4. Do Micronesian navigators practice science?
5. Pluralism, multiplicity, and the disunity of sciences
6. Must sciences be secular?
7. After Mr. Nowhere: Today’s proper scientific selfs
