Power, and Knowledge: Description and Term Paper

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Therefore, these strategies identify the problems of contemporary science resulting from male bias. Longino acknowledges that such approach is descriptively adequate to a certain extent, but she demonstrates that it falls short of normative adequacy.

The third section of the article takes into account another strategy used by feminist epistemology, termed multiplying subjects. The strategy is based on the ideal of unconditioned subject. Traditionally it has been acknowledged that individual subjectivities are conditioned, and the unconditioned subjectivity is an achievement; the methods of natural sciences and the scientific methodology in general are the means to that achievement.

The nature of the relationship between observation, data, and theory, which represent scientific discourse have been considered arguments against unconditioned subjectivity and empiricism. The arguments rely on the fact that if the scientific knower is considered an individual who should be freed from external influences in order to produce acceptable knowledge the puzzles introduced by observation and certain evidential relations will remain unsolved.

The feminist point-of-view suggests that scientific knowledge is constructed not by individuals, but by individuals in interaction with one another, in order to modify their observations, theories and hypotheses. The scientific method includes, according to this way of reasoning not only individual activity arising from, for instance hypotheses testing, but also a confrontation of ideas and theories. Scientific knowledge has been considered to arise from a critical dialogue in which different individuals engage.

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The interactive dialogic community generates knowledge only if it facilitates transformative criticism. However, such objective communities are only prescriptions against which the theories can be compared.

The fourth and last part of the article is concerned with clarifying dilemmas of pluralism. One of them is that knowledge depends upon the consensus of a scientific community. The author suggests that in order to overcome this dilemma scientific knowledge should be detached from consensus and also from an ideal of absolute truth. The author gives an example of semantic view, of theories as composed of propositions. The main point is that knowledge is not detached from knowers in a set of propositions but consists in our ability to understand the model and apply it to a portion of the world. In conclusion, she states that knowledge is not contemplative but active. A second possibility to escape the dilemma is by considering scientific knowledge as a permanent inquiry, and not as static and having an end point. This resides from considering science as practice. Moreover, from this point-of-view scientific knowledge is also a body of diverse theories that attempt to response to changing cognitive needs.

The conclusions underline the issues of knowledge-power, inclusiveness-exclusiveness, the advantages of appealing to standards and scientific communities, of replacing the existing authority with others and support the creation of democratic science and a….....

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