Talk:Sandra Harding

incorrect citation

The quotation "Isaac Newton's Principia ... of female nature'" does NOT appear on p. 264 of Harding 1986 (the page in question is part of the index). Please provide the correct citation.

you can go to amazon and search inside this book and it seems to be on page 113. I can't completely verify, amazon kept crashing an old version of mozilla. 71.223.102.125 06:12, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Assessment of Harding's claims

I removed the following sentence:

In particular, her assertion that men and women produce fundamentally different scientific truths is considered to be nonsense by mainstream scientists.

Harding doesn't actually make this claim (or, if she does, you'll have to show me the citation! Her positions on gender, race etc are far more subtle than this.) Furthermore, a single paragraph on Harding by a mathematician in the AMS notices in no way proves that "mainstream scientists" as a group think any such thing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Scorpia.mossmonn (talk • contribs) 00:46, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

I've added back the Sullivan reference removed by the above WP:SPA, though with softened wording. Here's a short, fair-use quote from that article from pp 1128: "Likewise, men and women would produce masculine and feminine sciences." It seems pretty clear that at least one scientist interprets her writing this way. (Mainstream scientists do, in fact, largely believe this as a group too – to wit, the whole Sokal affair affair was started by this very issue of Social Text which dealt with the "Science Wars".) If you feel that Sullivan is in error, please add additional sources that counter his claim – It is generally unacceptable to remove relevant, sourced material from an article. Thanks, Agricola44 (talk) 17:37, 15 November 2010 (UTC).

From Harding's article in Feminism and Science (ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino, Oxford 1996): "The starting point of standpoint theory--and its claim that is most often misread--is that in societies stratified by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or some other politics shaping the very structure of society, the activities of those at the top both organize and set limits on what persons who perform such activities can understand about themselves and the world around them." (240) In other words, *under conditions of sexism and gendered division of labor*, women will be able to make different knowledge claims than men. At least some "other scientists", including Donna Haraway and Fox Keller, agree (as cited in the same article). Finally, note that Sullivan doesn't refute Harding's claim, he simply states a different position ("it is my view that... the engine is sound".) So, three reasons I cut "relevant, sourced material" from the article: 1) it egregiously misrepresented Harding (and Sullivan, who doesn't cast her as an essentialist); 2) it is factually inaccurate to say that "mainstream scientists" as a group disagree; 3) Sullivan doesn't offer a refutation, let alone show that Harding's work is "nonsense".

Re: point two, I'm adding a "some" to further soften the claim.

The science wars produced a lot of vituperative, uninformed material on both sides. Let's not contribute on Wikipedia, eh?