Sandra Harding

This article is about the American philosopher not the Australian sociologist and university administrator of the same name.

Sandra G. Harding
Born	1935
Era	20th century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Feminist philosophy, Post-colonialism
Main interests	Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Standpoint theory
Notable ideas	Strong Objectivity

Sandra G. Harding (born 1935) is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology and philosophy of science.

She has contributed to standpoint theory and to the multicultural study of science. She is the author or editor of many books on these topics, and was one of the founders of the fields of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. Her ways of developing standpoint theory and stronger standards for objectivity ("strong objectivity") have been influential in the social sciences as well as in philosophy, and have created discussions in the natural sciences.

She currently is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Sandra Harding earned her PhD from New York University (NYU) in 1973.

Former Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (1996-2000), and co-editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2000-2005), she previously taught at the University of Delaware for many years, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Costa Rica, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. She was an invited lecturer for Phi Beta Kappa in 2007-2008.

She has consulted to a number of international agencies on feminist and postcolonial science issues, including the Pan-American Health Organization, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. She was invited to co-author a chapter on "Science and Technology: The Gender Dimension" for the UNESCO World Science Report 1996.

During what is known now as the "Science Wars", she was part of a debate regarding the value-neutrality of the sciences. This aspect of her work has been criticized by some scientists.

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Bibliography

• (ed.), Can Theories be Refuted? Essays on the Duhem-Quine Thesis, 1976.
• The Science Question in Feminism, 1986.
• with Jean F. O'Barr (ed.), Sex and Scientific Inquiry, 1987.
• (ed.), Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, 1987.
• Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives, 1991.
• (ed.), The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, 1993.
• Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies, 1998.
• with Uma Narayan (ed.), Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, 2000.
• with Robert Figueroa (ed.), Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, 2003.
• with Merrill B. Hintikka (ed.), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Second Edition, 2003 (1983).
• (ed.), Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, 2004.
• Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues, 2006.
• Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities, 2008.

External links

• "Starting from Marginalized Lives: A Conversation with Sandra Harding" by Sidney I. Dobrin and Thomas Kent, JAC 15.2, Spring 1995.
• "Women, Science, and Society" by Sandra Harding, Science, September 11, 1998.