CIAO DATE: 1/99

Gender, Development, and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Science

Abstract

Recent "gender, environment, and sustainable development" accounts raise pointed questions about the complicity of Enlightenment philosophies of science with the failures of third world development policies and the current environmental crisis. This essay shows in broad outline how the strength of these analyses comes from the ways they link androcentric, econmistic and nature-blind aspects of development thinking to "the Enlightenment dream", that is, from the distinctive character of their feminist framework, and also from the resources and perspectives they share with other influential schools of science studies that have emerged since World War II.

1. A View from the Extremeties of the Enlightenment

Since World War II northern agencies have tried to modernize the so-called underdeveloped societies of the south so that their standards of living could catch up to those in the north. Yet there is now general agreement that standards of living have deteriorated during the development decades for the majority of those living in the underdeveloped societies#151;namely, those already most economically and politically vulnerable. Reevaluations of modern science and its philosophy figure in these assessments because development was conceptualized as transferring to the south sciences, technologies, and their philosophies that were presumed to be responsible for industrial development of Europe and North America in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Modern science is also at issue because of the terrifying escalation of environmental destruction in the south as well as globally in which northern philosophies of nature seem to be implicated.

The gender, environment and sustainable development (GED) analyses enter these issues about the global development and environment crisis, as it is called, from the standpoint of the majority of women's lives in the south. These accounts have their origins in the early "women in development" attempts to get governmental and non-governmental development agencies to assess the impact of development policies on women and, usually, to "add women" as recipients of third world development benefits (as they were then understood). In the three decades since, these feminist analyses have come to challenge most of the terms within which the original issues were posed, as have the other critical development analyses with which this branch of feminist thinking has interacted.

In seeking to determine just how development policies should be changed, this literature offers resources to philosophy also that are otherwise undervalued or unavailable. It emerges from locations in global politics that enable the identification of otherwise hard-to-detect assumptions in the philosophies of science which have guided development thinking and which mark these philosophies as considerably less than universally valid. Moreover, these analyses are responding to urgent practical concerns to develop more reliable patterns of knowledge and processes of legitimating it for projects important to the world's ecoomically and politically most vulnerable citizens in non-western cultures#151;and, indeed, to many of the rest of us. Thus they must forfeit the luxurious "handmaid" role favored in mainstream philosophy of science and much of northern science studies: these Owls of Minerva must work a second shift in daylight. Such engaged philosophy sharpens the ability to detect how philosophic assumptions function in daily life. Finally, such concerns have lead the GED movement to an expanded set of coalitions with other progressive science groups, and these coalitions contribute innovative critical perspectives to the project of figuring out how to extract ourselves from the now problematic elements of Enlightenment scientific rationality. ₁

The Enlightenment philosophies defined the growth of scientific knowledge and the social progress this was supposed to bring in ways that devalued women, nature, and "backwards cultures" and their peoples. The new philosophies of knowledge and power emerging from the gender, environment and sustainable development discussions and the analyses on which they draw represent the return of the Enlightenment's others#151;the return of women, nature, and "backwards cultures" from positions of more than instrumental value (at best) in modernity's thinking. Knowledge is power, as the familiar saying goes, and it is from the extremeties of knowledge/power networks that one can best perceive the limitations of how knowledge and power create and nourish each other at the centers.

The project of this paper is, first, to show how the GED debates link together criticisms of androcentric, economistic, and nature-blind aspects of development thinking to challenge the epistemology and philosophy of science of "the Enlightenment dream." ₂ Sections 3 and 4 show how GED analyses can be supported with and in turn support arguments produced in post-Kuhnian and postcolonial science studies. Thus there are three influential post-World War II schools of science studies, in addition to northern feminism, that arrive from somewhat different starting points at common assessments of Enlightenment philosophies of science. The concluding section summarizes how philosophic positions in this collection of analyses differ from those that were centered in the Enlightenment philosophy. Obviously this essay can only map in very broad outlines a philosophic terrain that deserves more detailed attention (some of which of course it has already received in the literatures indicated).

2. GED Criticisms of Enlightenment Assumptions ₃

Our focus below will be on three issues: how Enlightenment philosophies appear complicitous with the androcentrism, economism, and devaluing of nature in third world development policies and practices. ₄

Is Development Gendered?

Four issues link the GED and feminist analyses: women's work, gender as an analytic category, the androcentrism of science and technology thinking, and the standpoints of women of color. First, a main theme in early feminist criticisms of development was that women were being left out of development as literacy and job-training programs were designed for men only, and men were given favored access to income generating work. Often the only attention women received from development planners occurred under the heading of controlling women's reproduction. Moreover as men were drawn into urban manufacturing, mining, or plantation agriculture, women were left a higher proportion of rural populations, with increased responsibility for the care of the young, old, and disabled, and with fewer social and environmental resources to sustain life, environments, and community. Development policies bypassed women, the argument went.

Or were women actually left outside such modernization planning? A second round of analyses showed that these very processes of "leaving women out" in fact provided necessary new resources for modernizing national economies. Achieving economic growth required increasing women's unpaid domestic labor, enticing or forcing women into the lowest-paid manufacturing and agricultural labor, and appropriating their inherited land rights. Their land-rights tended to shift to men as only men were taught to farm in modern, scientific ways. At other times these rights were directly appropriated so the land could be used for export production by denying women access to agricultural, forestry or animal-herding community-owned commons. Peasants, women and men, also suffered from some of these forms of appropriation. (Mies 1986, Shiva 1989)

Thus the dedevelopment of women and peasants was a necessary condition for "development" in the south. "Progress for humanity" meant regress for women (and peasants), as northern feminist historians had put a similar point. ₅ Does the scientific and technological rationality that development was transferring from north to south include directions or, at least, permission for such banditry (as it could reasonably be called)? At any rate, the language of development, modernization and science was being used to obscure the actual mechanism responsible for much development success. Structural adjustment policies intended to resolve the debt crisis of the 80's followed the same pattern, further deteriorating the conditions of women in the developing countries. Here the International Monetary Fund and World Bank ordered the indebted southern governments to cut their social services in order to repay development loans to the northern "investing classes." Thereby women's unpaid labor was to be substituted for their formerly paid labor in state-provided educational, health, child care and other social services so to maintain the wealth of the most advantaged classes in the north. (Sparr 1994)

Some of the feminists concerned with these labor issues also began to identify problems with the economism, the production model, of both neo-classical and neo-marxian economists' attempts to address women's issues, and with the deteriorated environments that development policies created for women's subsistence and wage labor. These concerns lead to coalitions with relevant other groups#151;topics to be pursued further below.

A second important resource for the GED analyses was the more complex and comprehensive understanding of gender that they used. It was gender relations, not just women (as in the early "women in development" accounts), that were the object of GED concern. Gender was conceptualized not primarily (most significantly) as a property of individuals, but as an analytic category like race and class through which one could understand the structure of societies and their symbolic systems. In order to understand women's situations and the meanings of the womanly or feminine in development policies and practices, one had to look also at men's situations and the meanings of the manly or masculine. Gender, like class and race, is fundamentally a relationship. Thus GED accounts, like feminist ones, argued that the problem with Enlightenment philosophies is not only that women have been excluded from articulating them and overtly maligned in them, but that Enlightenment standards of the human, the good, progress, social welfare, economic growth, as well as of objectivity, rationality, good method, and what counts as important scientific problems all are defined in terms of masculine interests and meanings. They are part of historically varying but nevertheless persistent androcentric discourses. Among its other benefits, understanding gender as structural and symbolic enabled the integration of GED analyses with other groups' criticisms of structural and representational aspects of Enlightenment assumptions. ₆

This brings us to a third issue. Central themes in northern feminist science and technology accounts independently emerged or were transformed in the GED analyses. The GED discussion was created mainly in regional and international agencies rather than in the university and laboratory contexts within which northern feminist science and technology discussions were shaped. ₇ The androcentric structures and meanings of modern scientific and technological worlds shaped also international, national and local development agencies and their thinking. The obscuring and often misogynous dualisms identifed by northern feminists, postcolonial studies, and the environmental movement operated through development rhetoric to shape policies that were systematically discriminatory against the economically and politically most vulnerable populations. (Barker 1998) And the questions, the problems, that development addressed were never ones defined by women or from the standpoint of their lives. Development was gendered, as even one document from The United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development put the point by the mid-1990's. (Kettel 1995) Feminist concerns with the androcentric standards for objectivity, rationality, evidence, good method, and what counts as science were centered in GED analyses also.

Finally, GED discussions paralleled analyses in the writings of African American and other feminists of color in the metropolitan centers, which made possible additional coalitions. These discourses in both the North and the GED accounts helped to redefine subjects of knowledge as having multiple and often conflicting identities due to their race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and other histories. They revealed the multiplicity of conflicting knowledge systems that different cultural histories will produce. They insisted on the importance of empowerment of marginalized racial and ethnic groups as a condition of democratic dialogue and coalition; difference as well as affinity must be recognized and respected. In both the south and the north these writings have produced a powerful critique of positivism, and have developed illuminating forms of feminist standpoint epistemology. (In the north, e.g., Anzaldua 1987, Collins 1991) ₈

These feminist origins of Enlightenment reevaluations were strengthened and expanded in the GED accounts through their links to criticisms of development economism and ignorance about nature's limits. ₉

Is Enlightenment Philosophy Economistic?

Does the Enlightenment scientific ethos depend on a bourgeois economic model of human progress? Of course in many respects Enlightenment philosophies of science can usefully be read as radically democratic with respect to class, race and other social markers, since it is the effective use of scientific methods (or some other property of scientific processes) that is to insure the reliabilty of knowledge claims rather than the social status of the knower, inherited or not. The modern Liberal state is supposed to be neutral toward the often diverse conceptions of "the good" of its sub-groups and their members, whether such conceptions be biological, religious, ethnic, racial, class or gender based. Any differences in treatment must be rationally justified. And modern states' information-producing institutions must similarly be value-neutral to enable the state to achieve policies un-biased towards conceptions of "the good." Through rigorous research methods the goal of value-neutrality has been "operationalized" for the sciences.

Of course hardly anyone thinks it defensible any more to assume the natural sciences are in fact neutral to the values and interests of their cultures. Even post-Kuhnian studies#151;the least overtly politically radical of the science studies movements that have emerged since World War II#151;have been busy showing the integrity of modern sciences with their historic eras, to paraphrase Thomas Kuhn. (Kuhn 1970, 1) I cannot discuss here the value/interest/ discourse/method-ladenness of modern science in general. (See Harding 1992, 1996a, Proctor 1991) The issue instead is whether economistic values and interests permeate it.

Development had initially been conceptualized as economic growth. Thus human progress was thought of in terms of increased production and consumption. One problem with this was that women's work in the household was never perceived as real work, or, therefore, as activity in which one could find elements of a history of human progress. This was as prevalent in the Marxian as in the Liberal analyses. Thus the need for childcare and household labor was perceived by development thinkers as a drain on maximum economic growth by peasant and working classes in the south, and as an opportunity to recruit middle- and upper-class women north and south into the consumption-work that was required to keep production profitable. Poor women were to be drawn into "productive" agricultural or manufacturing labor and get childcare and domestic work done as best they could, while women in the economically-advantaged classes were to devote increased time and energy to such labors, regardless of the various kinds of purportedly labor-saving devices to which they gained access, so to consume at higher and higher levels. Thus to feminists, conceptualizing development and human progress only in economistic production terms left women and the life of the household intensely vulnerable to exploitation.

Second, modernization theory routinely conceptualized population growth in developing countries as a major obstacle to raising standards of living. Population growth causes poverty, this theory insisted. From this perspective women's bodies were a main obstacle to social progress, and coercive population control policies appeared justifiable. Finally, in the 1990's, even the U.N.'s Population Conference officially recognized what feminists and progressive economists had been arguing for years. It is poverty that causes population growth, not the reverse, for only more children can provide poor households with the economic and social supports provided by the state and economy to middle-class households. Conventional Western scientific wisdom had the causal direction backwards.

A third problem with the economic growth conception of development was that nature itself limits economic growth, as feminists, environmentalists and critics of neo-classical and marxian economics argued. There are not enough resources in the world to support today's global population at even the standards of consumption of moderately well-off Third World middle-classes. And achieving that standard of living for today's most politically and economically vulnerable populations would require a lowering of consumption levels among the most advantaged half of the world's population that is virtually unimaginable. What political process could bring this about?

Finally, conceptualizing development in terms of greater economic productivity and consumption ignores and devalues all other "goods" that women and their cultures prioritize, such as ethical, political, aesthetic, and spiritual values.

Such considerations lead to the suspicion that "rational man," who seeks information always in order to maximize his own benefits, insures the destruction of the very conditions necessary for his survival when those benefits are conceptualized solely as economic. (This is a point about the values and standards of development and other modern institutions concerned with "human progress", not those of individual scientists or institutional actors, of course.) Neither nature nor social life can be sustained when such a rationality is the dominant institutional rationality of states and trans-national corporations (TNCs), and is held accountable to no other social values. The question arises as to what extent this self-destructive rationality is an inherent feature of Enlightenment rationality. Modern sciences emerged as part of European post-medieval economic, political and social formations. One issue is that the modern scientific ideal of value-neutrality and the autonomy of knowledge-seeking from social accountability makes modern sciences and technologies a "fast gun for hire." Ethics committees in scientific work-sites are better than nothing, but they have no power over TNCs, which at present appear accountable to no civic groups at all. Must democratic ethical and political principles be internalized in the sciences to avoid the sciences' "fast gun" status? Another issue is whether the increased access to nature's resources that is one of modern science's central goals encodes or legitimates "using up" and destroying environments in order to benefit the groups that modern sciences serve. Nature limits economic growth and any form of "human progress" that requires such growth. But where is this recognized in Enlightenment philosophies of science? This brings us to the final point here.

An Enlightenment Philosophy of Environmental Destruction?

It would take unimaginable sacrifices by middle- and upper-classes in the north and south to bring underdeveloped populations up even to standards of living of lower-middle classes in these societies. What governance practices could bring that about? Furthermore, the growth-models of development consistently sacrifice sustainable environments to short term consumption goals. Natural resources are disappearing not only due to their consumption, but also to their destruction through militaries, dessertification, and toxic pollution of air, water, and other nutrients that human and non-human life require.

Women suffer in distinctive ways from the limits that nature places on economic growth, and their disadvantage is passed on to children and others dependent on their energies and resources. They are frequently last in line for economic resources in their households, and disproportionately among the last within their societies. To them is assigned responsibility for doing or managing daily sustenance and the health and welfare of dependents, household, kin, the elderly and sick, and neighborhoods. Moreover, manufacturing and rural wage-labor work expose them as well as men workers to toxic dangers in addition to the toxic threats endemic in poor people's household labor. Life and health threatening conditions in mining, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture insure nasty, short and brutish lives for the men as well as the women who constitute the politically and economically most vulnerable classes. Wherever labor and interactions with nature are sex-segregated, environments are usefully conceptualized as gendered. The point here is not that environmental preoccupations with men's issues should be replaced by a preoccupation with women's, but that addressing men's problems does not automatically address women's issues in this case or any other.

Critics argue that the Enlightenment entrenches a faulty philosophy of nature. Nature is not a cornucopia that is available to satisfy limitless desires as in the infant's dream. Moreover, sciences and philosophies of nature and of science, like all other human creations, are importantly "in nature", not autonomous from them. Sciences, their philosophies, and the relations with their environments of societies who use them should all three be explained together. Yet modern philosophies' attempted isolation and immunization of natural sciences from social explanation, and their devaluation of local knowledge, have worked against such comprehensive understandings. Even the language in scientific philosophies about "nature," whose principles exist outside of all human cultures, and whose unique order can be identified and explained only by a universally valid science, though it has many appealing features, nevertheless obscures what happens in human "environments." Yet such environments are the only parts of nature with which humans interact whether this nature is located en route to Mars, out past Jupiter, in the factory, or in the kitchen. We need philosophies of environments and human interactions with them to replace Enlightenment philosophies of nature and science.

In drawing together resources from feminism, political economy, and environmental studies, GED theory shows the importance of intellectual and political coalitions between analyses that often have been at odds with each other. Moreover, Enlightenment philosophies are our world view#151;modernity's world view#151;and their assumptions permeate institutions and practices far removed from the studies, libraries, classrooms and conferences where we are used to doing philosophy. Transforming Enlightenment philosophies of science requires insights from all of the centers and peripheries where such beliefs have come to structure social relations and their meanings.

For those of us working in the north to transform Enlightenment philosophies in directions more useful for guiding the production of the knowledge we need for democratic politics, the resources of two additional science studies movements will also be important. The insights of both the postcolonial and the post-Kuhnian science and technology studies support and extend the GED synthesis of Enlightenment critiques in directions valuable to northern post-Enlightenment projects. ₁₀

3. Another History of Modern Science's Success Story: Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies

Postcolonial science and technology studies criticize Enlightenment philosophies and their effects in development policies from the perspective of anti-Eurocentric histories of modern sciences and also the related studies of non-Western cultures' own science and technology traditions. Development policies should be understood as a continuation of the European expansion that began in 1492, according to these accounts. Moreover, European expansion has played a far greater role than has been acknowledged in the growth of modern science in Europe and its achievement of a unique epistemological status as capable of providing the only true account of nature's order. That is, the plausibility of the epistemology of modern sciences has depended upon the success of European expansion, not just of the self-regulating powers of rationality, according to these accounts. Modern sciences need the power of national or international state institutions to legitimate and conduct scientific work. Expansionist state power makes possible foraging in other cultures' knowledge traditions, testing hypotheses in non-European environments around the globe, and the destruction of those other traditions, intentionally or not, that could have created competition for modern scientific claims and practices. This school of thought can claim roots going back to the 1940's, but began to flourish with conferences and publications in English only in the 1980's. ₁₁ Two of its focuses are especially relevant here: comparative ethnosciences and science-and-empires.

A new kind of comparative ethnoscience studies emerged in anthropology and history from the older eurocentric colonial frameworks. The latter had represented other cultures' knowledge traditions as the products of "savage minds," superstitions, magic, mere speculation, inextricably mired in religious and other cultural beliefs, or as mere technological know-how. Other cultures had local knowledge systems, but only modern sciences produced claims that were universally valid, according to the eurocentric view. The anti-eurocentric comparative ethnoscience movement began to reevaluate the sophistication of other cultures' scientific and technological achievements, and the contributions these had made to the development of modern sciences in Europe that have gone unmentioned in the conventional histories of science. It also began to use the tools of ethnography and social history to reexamine modern western sciences as also local knowledge systems, integrated into their particular cultures. For example, historian Joseph Needham shows the distinctively Christian meanings of the notion of "laws of nature" as it directed scientific method until the Twentieth Century (Needham 1969). To take another case, European expansionist thinking, its representations of the Edenic Americas, of the declining cultures of Asia, of the destiny of Christian Europe, and so forth, pointed toward the need for knowledge about particular parts of nature's order that greatly advanced the development in Europe of oceanography, climatology, geology, cartography, diverse engineering projects, tropical medicine, pharmacology, agricultural sciences, evolutionary biology, and many other modern sciences. (See, e.g., Brockway 1979, Goonatilake 1984, Kochhar 1992-93, McClellan 1992.) Culturally local discourses have positive effects on the growth of science, not just the negative effects upon which conventional philosophies focus.

In a second and related project, the "science-and-empires" approach, the postcolonial histories of science and technology emerged as part of the new anti-Eurocentric global histories. Here they look at how European and non-European cultures have been interacting for perhaps as long as a millenium, and certainly actively so in the five centuries since 1492. In such encounters cultures exchanged beads, manufactured goods, cattle, women, and scientific and technological ideas. Thus the Voyages of Discovery and the subsequent colonial era, on the one hand, and the development of modern sciences in Europe, on the other hand, were conditions for each other's success. (See, e.g., Brockway 1979, Goonatilake 1984, McClellan 1992, Petitjean et al 1992, Sardar 1988.) They continue to nourish each other through development policies, described in this literature as the continuation of colonialism by other means. That is, development policies and their scientific and technological questions primarily continue to advance European expansion, not the flourishing of the societies that are the overt targets of development policies.

What is meant in the postcolonial literature by calling both modern sciences and the knowledge traditions of other cultures "local knowledge systems?" This notion has moved to center stage in all of the other science movements discussed here. ₁₂ One way to conceptualize the point is this. Cultures have distinctive locations in heterogeneous nature, and distinctive interests in those surroundings. People living in deserts or on the borders of the Atlantic will tend to produce different patterns of knowledge (and ignorance). The fact that their hypotheses (usefully) always extend considerably beyond the available evidence is one reason why these patterns of knowledge cannot be fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Even in the same environment#151;on the borders of the Atlantic, say#151;different cultures will have distinctive interests in it and produce different patterns of knowledge and ignorance depending on whether they are interested to fish it, use it as a coastal trading route, desalinize it, use it as a garbage dump, mine minerals under its floor, use it as a military highway, etc.

Two more features provide local resources for cultures' knowledge projects. Different cultures have access to different discursive resources#151;Christian models of nature's order, organicist, mechanistic, or Biblical models of nature, or environmental ones of lifeboat earth or spaceship earth. Each such discourse directs scientific attention to different aspects of nature's regularities and orders them in different causal configurations. Finally, there is no one scientific method or, more generally, way of organizing the production of knowledge that can claim credit for the various kinds of knowledge of nature's order that different cultures have produced#151;or even that has been produced by the history of modern science. Fruitful inquiry methods are also as varied as are human styles of thought and social organization.

Of course not all local knowledge systems are equally powerful for all projects. Modern biomedicine is valuable for many purposes. But acupuncture, chiropractry, and vitamin and exercise therapies unappreciated by biomedicine may be more valuable for some health purposes which modern biomedicine has neglected or misunderstood. Modern philosophy of science's claims to unique and universal validity obstruct our ability to think our way through such issues. The universality claims are scientifically and politically dysfunctional. ₁₃

Thus these postcolonial studies replace the Enlightenment histories and epistemologies of modern sciences with more objective ones, stimulated initially by questions from the standpoint of those who have benefitted least from the development of modern sciences in Europe. They argue that the sciences that were best for the west are not necessarily best for the rest of the world, and that the "western" sciences we have today are also not good for the west. They produce systematic ignorance that is dangerous to the species, the continued destruction of nature and of other valuable knowledge traditions, and anti-democratic social relations. Moreover, this literature is full of specific reevaluations of Enlightenment philosopies of science. They have focussed especially on their unearned presumptions to model uniquely ideals of objectivity, rationality, and good method, and on their troubling ontologies of isolated bits of value-neutral matter in motion. They have criticized their idealizations of scientific experts who are often ignorant of local conditions and of alternative knowledge systems, and their refusal of internal moral and political constraints on the accountability of scientific rationality. As indicated, the epistemology of modern science is perceived in effect as predatory, legitimating foraging in, while also destroying, all other knowledge systems. The unique status of modern sciences are due primarily to the successes of European expansion and to their legitimating predatory philosophies according to these accounts.

Issues about women and gender have been largely absent from the grand narratives of these postcolonial accounts, except as GED writers have occasionally participated in them#151;e.g., Vandana Shiva. Yet their questions about Enlightenment philosophies converge with those in the GED discussions.

4. After "Autonomous Science": Post-Kuhnian History, Philosophy and Social Studies Of Science.

It is useful to save for last a review of the challenges to Enlightenment thought produced by post-Kuhnian northern philosophies and social studies of science and technology. Many would regard this school as the most conservative of the movements of interest here, and yet their analyses have often been much the same as the most radical tendencies in the others, even though these northern accounts emerge from the older historical and geographical map. One could start here by pointing out that all of the other literatures set out to show the integrity of modern sciences and technologies with different aspects of their historic eras#151;with gender structures and meanings, with local and global economic projects, with historically distinctive environmental attitudes and conditions, with European expansionist and colonial projects, and with attitudes toward and conditions of women's lives within development policies. On this point alone the post-Kuhnian science and technology studies join these other movements in challenging the conventional idea that the philosophically relevant histories and philosophies of modern sciences are only intellectual ones.

Let us consider briefly two focuses of this kind of northern Enlightenment critique which offer opportunities to expand and strengthen coalitions between the post-Kuhnian, postcolonial and feminist projects. First, was there a European Scientific Revolution that as part of the "European Miracle" appeared out of the Dark Ages? All five terms of such a claim #151;European, scientific, revolution, miracle, and dark ages#151;now appear problematic. Historical studies of medieval Europe and its sophisticated scientific and technological activities show that referring to the period as the "Dark Ages" tells us more about the speaker than about medieval Europe. Thus there was no European revolution or its scientific revolution, but only a slow process going back to the 11th Century, at least, during which the components of what were eventually dubbed modern science came together as part of equally gradual political, economic and social changes. Moreover, given the immense presence in medieval and early modern Europe of Islamic culture, the borrowings in early modern science of Egyptian mystical thought and other non-European elements, and the political fragmentation until at least the late Renaissance of what we now call Europe, it is misleading to speak of modern science as European. Nor does early modern science look much like what is counted as science today, with its empirical claims shaped by alchemical, sun worship, astrological, and other mystical beliefs and investigatory practices#151;not to mention overtly Christian metaphysics and epistemology, as Needham and others point out. (Blaut 1993, Yates 1969.)

This kind of reconceptualizing of the origins of modern science links post-Kuhnian accounts with postcolonial studies, and with the interests in local knowledge systems found throughout the GED literatures. Northern science studies have shown through such analyses#151;even of late Twentieth Century physics#151; that no element of science is immune from cultural shaping, and every element of science has epistemological consequences. (Forman 1987, Pickering 1992)

For a second focus, consider recent arguments against the unity of science thesis#151;the form in which Enlightenment assumptions about the universality of modern scientific claims coalesced in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, and remain powerful today. (See Galison and Stump 1996, Harding 1998 Chapter 10.) The unity of science thesis held that there is one world, one truth about it, and one and only one science capable of capturing that truth. Obscured in the scientists' and philosophers' formulations of the argument was a fourth assumption: that there is one "class" or group of humans capable of doing that science and thus recognizing that truth#151;scientific experts. ₁₄ Leaving aside issues about the usefulness of the "one world" hypothesis (but see Dupre 1993), the other three assumptions have been firmly undermined by post-Kuhnian science studies. This is not to say that these positions are uncontroversial, but rather that there is widespread agreement among many historians, sociologists, ethnographers and philosophers of science that the unity assumptions have outlived their usefulness, at least in their stronger initial formulations and in the ways they are articulated today. The "one truth" hypothesis requires various forms of reductionism that are unrealistic; even as an ideal this claim is knowledge-blocking. The "one science" hypothesis is meaningless even within modern sciences in light of the valuable proliferation there of specialized research fields, their distinctive methods and distinctive representational resources. Modern sciences are themselves many local knowledge systems linked in pragmatic but not necessarily perfectly coherent ways, from this perspective.

The challenge then becomes not how to reduce this multiplicity to one through some kind of fancy discursive footwork, but rather to understand how it is that such local knowledges do in fact travel from one culture to another, and how elements from different contexts of production are linked and reconstructed in ways that work to continue to produce new knowledge. How can practitioners from fields with conflicting definitions of key terms nevertheless come to work together effectively? ₁₅ What is gained and what lost when knowledge is detached from one cultural system and inserted into another at a distant time or place, as, for example, has occurred recently in the case of acupuncture's move into modern biomedicine? How is information that must be passed on over generations standardized in the case of cultures of only oral literacy? (Watson-Verran and Turnbull, 1995)

And the universality ideal appears scientifically and epistemologically dysfunctional since it 1) legitimates appeal to monolithic science to support otherwise inadequately supported individual scientific claims; 2) legitimates resistance to valuable criticisms which are inconsistent with prevailing views; 3) inappropriately devalues cognitive diversity; 4) blocks the visibility of the inevitable production of systematic ignorance by any one science; 5) promotes systematic ignorance in the social sciences and other fields that model themselves on philosophies of the natural sciences. Moreover, the universality ideal is politically costly in three ways. It devalues and destroys knowledge traditions that are crucial to the survival of other cultures per se, and as "other". It elevates a model of the admirably human that is defined in terms of its opposition to and distance from the womanly, non-European, and economically vulnerable. And it elevates cognitive authoritarianism and problematic "religious" ideals to the status of the highest human ideals in its monovocality, xenophobia, its hierarchical social structures with their elite group of experts who have the status of "chosen people", and its formal and informal ways of protecting the complete processes of sorting belief from scrutiny by the public. ₁₆

Finally, this school of science studies, too, shows that the standards of modern science have historically changed over time and are always rhetorically constituted and deployed. What counts as good method, as a proof in mathematics, as objectivity and rationality, not to mention as "real" or material, varies from era to era and often from field to field within the sciences. Epistemological and ontological standards of the sciences, too, have an integrity with their historical era. (Proctor 1991, Schuster and Yeo 1986, Shapin 94, Shapin and Schaffer 1985.)

Thus Post-Kuhnian histories and philosophies of modern science are thematically linked to the others in their critiques of Enlightement philosophies of science, and provide valuable possibilities for the coalition work necessary to stabilize post-Enlightenment philosophies of science. What will such philosophies look like?

5. Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Sciences: New Questions

We are now in a position to summarize some of the new philosophic themes emerging from GED analyses that appear also in postcolonial and post-Kuhnian studies.

a. After the Universality Ideal: Local Knowledge Systems

The Enlightenment philosophies were preoccupied with eliminating the local in scientific processes so to obtain trans-cultural, universally-valid knowledge claims. There is no doubt that elements of many bodies of systematic scientific knowledge (and of systematic scientific ignorance) find homes in later or other knowledge-configurations, though the models of the universe within which they are lodged, and how the phenomena observed are claimed to be related to each other can vastly differ in successive systems. The new philosophies ask how and what kind of local knowledge "travels," and#151;since cultures are toolboxes as well as prisonhouses for the growth of knowledge#151;what is lost and what gained when it does. They are interested in globalizing processes, but not in the achievement of universality.

b. Smart Knowers and Imperfect Knowledge Systems

Such conditions of actual and ideal knowledge production require a model (or, rather, many such) of knowers and knowledge systems that is different from the familiar one of dumb knowers who must struggle to learn the one, correct knowledge system. These philosophies explore other possible models. One drawn from the realities of both everyday life and contemporary scientific practice is of smart knowers and imperfect knowledge systems. Here, knowers#151;scientists or citizens#151;always have only imperfect knowledge systems with which they must make daily decisions as well as life-or-death ones, though they always have more than one such system available. Consider, for example, the daily health maintenance practices of middle-classes in the metropoles. Here individuals commonly use several conflicting knowledge systems. We use vitamin, acupuncture, chiropractic, dietary, exercise, and meditation therapies, not to mention Grandma's home remedies#151; ones that modern biomedicine until the last few years claimed were of little or no value. But we also use modern biomedicine. Another version of this situation occurs for people in non-western cultures who have access both to modern bio-medicine and other sciences and also to indigenous health and other knowledge systems. (Cf.,e.g., Bass 1990) All of us have to be very clever about which knowledge system we use and when#151;this can be a life or death matter. The point here is that cognitive diversity is an important scientific value. ₁₇

c. Resisting Relativism and Idealism

In almost all of the writings in these diverse literatures, the rejection of Enlightenment absolutism and excessive materialism is specifically not permitted to provide reasons to adopt cognitive relativism or idealism. Different cultures in fact do have different scientific and epistemological standards, and this is merely a factual historical or sociological claim#151;it is historically or sociologically relative. But not all knowledge systems are equally powerful at grasping the diverse aspects of nature's heterogeneous order. Many people lead nasty, short and brutish lives by following the recommendations of local knowledge systems#151;including those of our own "local knowledge system," modern science. Consider the latter's toleration until recently of smoking and of inadequate vitamins, not to mention of industrially-caused environmental toxicity. Some sciences are better if you want to get to the moon; others if you want to maintain sustainable environments. So instead of pursuing issues about the virtues of absolutism or of realism, these accounts are interested in how to articulate such practical standards of belief-sorting. And rejecting the idea that our glassy mirror minds can perfectly mirror a reality that is "out there" in the non-social universe similarly (almost) never forces these accounts to an idealism, in which only human ideas and the social are real. ₁₈ Rather, the dichotomy between material vs. ideal, like absolute vs. relative cognitive judgments, has itself become the object of historical scrutiny: what social and intellectual conditions made such problematic conceptual frameworks look reasonable?

d. Nature: Social and Emergent.

For the Enlightenment philosophies, nature was in principle readable by science, and the questions were about how to accomplish such perfect readings. In the literatures examined here, there is no possibility of one perfect scientific reading of nature's order. In part this is because of the sometimes fruitful, sometimes knowledge-obstructing, ways that the nature humans study is always worked up into an object of observation through cultural interests, discourses, and ways of organizing the production of knowledge: this nature that scientists observe is in such respects always already also social. (Not "nothing but" social; only always also social.) Here the questions shift to how what counts as nature and what counts as the social are co-constituted in societies that favor such a dichotomy, and, more generally, how human material and symbolic practices change nature's order. How should sciences and their philosophies, sciences' order and philosophies' order be conceptualized as also "in nature," requiring explanation alongside the accounts they provide of sciences' and of nature's order? What resources from philosophies of social sciences could be useful in such explanations?

Another cause of nature's unreadability is its emergent character. Nature is constantly producing new phenomena such as ozone holes and new categories of diseases which are unpredictable. How should this aspect of nature be characterized in the new philosophies?

e. Internalized Democratic Ethics and Politics in Sciences

With a multiplicity of culturally local sciences, presumably a multiplicity of culturally local ethics and political philosophes will be integrated into these sciences. Enlightenment notions of rationality locate ethics and politics outside the borders of rationality. Post-Enlightenment theories of rationality have been developed in recent years by feminist theorists, among others, in which moral decisions and emotions also have their rationality. The postcolonial and GED analyses clearly are exploring appropriate ways to internalize democratic ethical and political ideals within scientific rationality, since such a rationality bereft of such accountability is incapable of adequate self-regulation. What "democratic" will mean, how such a standard will function in particular contexts#151;these are difficult but important questions with which the GED and postcolonial accounts are concerned. One possible democratic ethos to internalize in science#151;one which emerges from several of the kinds of accounts here#151;would be that those who bear the consequences of scientific and technological decisions should have a proportionate share in making them. In different historical and cultural contexts, different kinds of institutions and practices would best facilitate such an ethos: small face-to-face communities and large bureaucratic ones need different kinds of democratic institutions and practices.

f. Whose Philosophies of Science?

And what of philosophies of science, such as these with common themes that are emerging from so many diverse post World War II science and technology studies? We have noted that they, too, can usefully be conceptualized as "part of nature" and subjected to analyses alongside the other social and natural elements of our surroundings. We can also see that they must remain permanently unfinished and continually regenerated through collective processes achieved through fruitful coalitions and respectful dialogues. ₁₉

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Endnotes

Note 1: "Enlightenment science" or "... scientific rationality" is not the way such fields are characterized by their adherents. But it is the way they are referred to in the GED debates, as well as in postcolonial and some northern feminist science studies. The target here is much broader than positivism or logical positivism, including much of marxian and post-marxian philosophies of science, and of other science movements. Other terminology taken from the literatures discussed will also appear odd to other readers#151;for example, "north" and "south" to refer to the west and "the rest;" "science" to refer to any culture's systematic knowledge about the natural surround; "postcolonal science studies," and "local knowledge systems." I shall try to make clear to what such terms refer as they appear. Back.

Note 2: Drucilla Barker (1998) has usefully summarized important aspects of this dream (her phrase). "Economism" is explained below. Back.

Note 3: I draw here on writings by a number of participants in the GED debates (as indicated), but especially on the work of Rosi Braidotti, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Hausler and Saskia Wieringa in Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis. (Braidotti et al, 1994). Braidotti and her colleagues have pulled together the most comprehensive theoretical analysis in and of the GED discussions to date, one which focuses both on how institutional priorities have shaped these discussions, and on the philosophical issues, problems, and possibilities that these accounts raise. Back.

Note 4: Brief outlines of the history of the development of the GED analyses can be found in this issue in Barker 1998 and Ferguson 1998. See also Braidotti et al 1994, especially Chapter 5, and the introduction to Harcourt 1994. Central arguments in this history are developed in Agarwal 1993, Boserup 1970, Dankelman and Davidson 1998, Mies 1986, Sen and Grown 1988, Shiva 1989, and Sparr 1994. Back.

Note 5: Modernization ("development") in Europe took exactly this pattern with enclosure of commons, migration from rural to industrializing areas, the creation of a proletariat, new marriage and inheritance laws favoring men, etc. (See, e.g., Kelly-Gadol 1976) Back.

Note 6: Yet the term "gender" has its own problems. It has no home in many European languages, where "sexual difference" is used to do much of the work that "gender" does in English. (See Braidotti 1994, 36-43 for a useful discussion of the history of problems with the term, and Harding 1986, 52-56 for an early attempt to insist on the importance of symbolic and structural forms of gender.) Moreover, the ways this term has been developed are problematic elsewhere also, as, for example, one U.S. trained Nigerian sociologist has pointed out. (Oyewumi 1997). Back.

Note 7: Braidotti et al gives a good sense of how this development agency context shaped the GED discussions in Chapters 5 and 7. Back.

Note 8: Donna Haraway's work (1989, 1991, 1996) has been especially important to the GED synthesis precisely because of the way she has linked through poststructuralist and materialist discourses concerns with Enlightenment conceptions of nature, science, gender, race and imperialism. Back.

Note 9: A few other feminist accounts (in additon to Haraway's) have also drawn on the combined resources of political economy and environment studies for their science projects (e.g., Seager 1993, Plumwood 1993). These both overlap with and diverge from the GED concerns. Back.

Note 10: The work of these two schools of post-World War II science studies is of course familiar to some of the GED writers. Back.

Note 11: For an overview of this literature see Harding 1998, Chapters 2 and 3. See also Adas 1989, Blaut 1993, Brockway 1979, Crosby 1972, Goonatilake 1984, 1997, Headrick 1981, Hess 1995, Kochhar 1992-93, Kumar 1991, Lach 1977, McClellan 1992, Nandy 1990, Needham 1954ff, 1969, Petitjean et al 1992, Reingold and Rothenberg 1987, Rodney 1982, Sardar 1988, Watson-Verran and Turnbull 1995, Weatherford 1988. This movement is internally diverse with many debates going on within it; its representatives come from Northern as well as Southern cultures as the above list indicates. Many third world scientists, like their colleagues in the North, are untroubled devotees of Eurocentric accounts of modern sciences, and thus have no interest in these discussions. Entering modern science is for them, as for cultures of Europe and its diasporas, a way of gaining social status locally, of entering international society, and last but not least, of engaging in projects that do in many respects offer resources against oppressive traditional thinking and practices. Contrary to the impression given in some of the postcolonial literature, it is not modern science, the Enlightenment, or modernity per se which GED (or this author) see as problematic, but only certain aspects in distinctive contexts. Back.

Note 12: See Harding 1998, Watson-Verran and Turnbull 1995. Back.

Note 13: "Local" is perhaps not the ideal term to contrast with universal knowledge here, since some aspects of any cultures' science traditions are decidedly less local than others. Some of the beliefs of other cultures, too, travel far from their place of origin and persist through many subsequent knowledge systems. Nevertheless, the term does disrupt the tendency to presume that the more universal, the better. Back.

Note 14: Val Plumwood pointed this out to me in conversation. Back.

Note 15: See, e.g., Peter Galison's "Introduction" to his and David J. Stump's collection (1996) where he discusses how such agreement about how to conceptualize randomness was reached in the 1940's and 1950's between H-bomb designers, logicans, statisticians, and aeronautical engineers as they tackled the problem of how to construct computer-simulated realities. Back.

Note 16: See the essays by David Stump and Ian Hacking in Galison and Stump 1996, and Harding 1998 Chapter 10. Back.

Note 17: I explored some such models as they appeared in the postcolonial science literature in the concluding section of Harding 1994. Back.

Note 18: "Almost never" because a few Northern post-Kuhnians and feminists have defended such positions. Significantly, no one in the GED debates or postcolonial science studies does. Back.

Note 19: Comments by Ann Garry and Uma Narayan helped to improve this essay. Back.