Introduction: Objectivity and Cultural Diversity
Since the origins of modern social theory in the Enlightenment, there has been a tension between, on the one hand, the received model of objective (scientific) knowledge and, on the other, the recognition of the historical and cultural variability of patterns of belief.
The paradigm of mechanical science, associated with Galileo and Newton, dealing with objectively measurable phenomena, and disclosing a world governed by mathematically specifiable laws, was widely adopted as the model for ‘scientific’ morality, law and government. Although the advocates of rival epistemologies - empiricists, rationalists and Kantians - differed from each other on many issues they still shared important thematic commitments, most especially their belief in the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge and method. This belief can be summed up in the form of the following four statements:(a) The concepts of science should be universally applicable, across time and space.
(b) The work of science should be objective, in the sense that it should aim at knowledge of the world as it is, and not as the investigators might like it to be.
(c) The personal characteristics of the investigator should therefore be irrelevant to the evaluation of the knowledge-claims they make, and the institutions of science should be designed to ensure this (for example, anonymous refereeing of journal articles and research applications).
(d) The standards, or criteria, in terms of which rival knowledge-claims are evaluated should be universalistic, and so neutral with respect to the rival positions being evaluated. Reason, observation and experimental testing are the standards most generally appealed to.
However, thinkers as diverse as Ferguson, Herder, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Vico and Voltaire were also well aware of the deep differences between the understandings and values which prevailed in different cultures.
They not infrequently used the standpoint of a cultural outsider as a device for exposing the irrationalities and injustices of their own societies (see, for example, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters). By the early nineteenth century it was also recognized that, within the same society, differences of social position and social experiences shaped different ways of thinking. Feuerbach, Marx and Engels developed this insight further into a systematic sociology of knowledge.For those who took cultural diversity seriously, it posed a challenge to the project of objective and universal knowledge of the social world. But, since other cultures also had different ways of understanding nature, the recognition of cultural diversity could also call into question the special status of Western natural scientific knowledge. How could one escape the conclusion that scientific standards of objectivity and universality were themselves the product and property of a particular, historically and geographically localized civilization (modern Western society)? What justification could there be for imposing these forms of thought on radically different cultures? This is, of course, the recurring theme of our book!
The use of the word ‘imposing’ in the penultimate sentence of the last paragraph is one indication why this has become such an important question. What at first sight seems like a matter of which set of beliefs we adopt - those of Western science, or those of some other culture - turns out to imply far more than this. Modern science is not just a set of authoritative beliefs and methodological principles, but is part of a complex apparatus of power, one which spans ‘cultures’, and incorporates Third World farmers, indigenous peoples, tropical rainforests, the upper atmosphere, pregnant women, the sick, industrial workers, consumers of processed food and hi-tech gadgets, ethnic minorities and sexual deviants - that is, all of us humans, and large parts of the non-human world, too.
This immensely complex and heterogeneous web of power both produces and coexists in tension with a correspondingly complex and diverse array of ‘subaltern’ positions. These positions, in turn, sustain relationships and activities on the part of the people who occupy them which may provide alternatives to the dominant forms of knowledge and understanding. The struggles of such subaltern groups on behalf of their own autonomy, emancipation or even mere survival necessarily involve struggles to redefine themselves and their relations to the world around them against the dominant worldview, including its ‘scientific’ legitimations.The benign and comforting ethic of welcoming cultural diversity, commonly claimed by relativistic approaches to knowledge and rationality, is inadequate when it is applied to such complexes of knowledge and power. For subaltern groups, resistance to domination has to include challenging the forms of knowledge which are invariably complicit in such regimes. These forms of knowledge, so far as the modern West is concerned, have generally harnessed the authority of science. So, for example, the eminent German biologist Ernst Haeckel was able to say in 1865:
That immense superiority which the white race has won over the other races in the struggle for existence is due to Natural Selection, the key to all advance in culture, to all so-called history, as it is the key to the origin of species in the kingdoms of the living. That superiority will, without doubt become more and more marked in the future, so that still fewer races of man will be able, as time advances, to contend with the white in the struggle for existence.
(Haeckel 1883: 85)
Haeckel's use of Darwinian ideas to justify the genocidal implications of Western imperialisms was in no sense exceptional. Indeed, the text was composed at a time when Haeckel's views were relatively liberal and progressive, and similar views were being expressed in Britain and the other Western powers.
Such evidence clearly calls into question the objectivity and value-neutrality of scientific expertise, long before the emergence of modern military-commercial technoscience. From the standpoint of those on the receiving end of this knowledge, a tolerant, relativist acceptance of it as just one of an indefinite plurality of incommensurable discourses seems insufficient.So, what would constitute an appropriate challenge? If we agree that the relativist response will not do, then there are three broad alternatives to it. One is to accept, in some version, the account of ‘good science' bequeathed by the Enlightenment, and to use it against the specific knowledge-claims which are considered objectionable. So, for example, it could be argued against Haeckel that his extended use of the concept of natural selection to include genocide is not licensed by scientific canons of enquiry, or that his assumption of ‘progress' as an outcome of selection involves an illegitimate importation of values into his ‘science'. So, this sort of criticism accepts a certain normative concept of science, but uses it to criticize ‘bad science', or ‘misuses' of science.
The second sort of challenge would be to accept that all knowledge-claims, including scientific ones, are grounded in the interests or values of some social group. Since we have no ‘Archimedean' point, neutral between such rival claims from which to assess their relative closeness to the truth, we can turn only to the values and projects which inspire them. Beliefs should be supported or rejected on the basis of their conduciveness to a just and good society. But this only poses further questions about the status and meaning of these appeals to values. Are they universally valid? What is to count as ‘justice'?
The third sort of challenge to the authority and power relations of Western science gives a central place to the metaphor of ‘perspective, or ‘point of view’. Patterns of belief are associated with social positions in a way analogous to the relationship between a view of a landscape and the physical location from which it is surveyed.
However, there are different ways of taking this metaphor, and they result in rather different positions in epistemology. In the case of views of a landscape, the different perspectives obtained from different standpoints can easily be understood as partial but mutually compatible with some synthetic concept of the real shape of the landforms. This concept can then be used to predict how the view will look from different viewpoints. Alternatively, and more commonly, the notions of ‘perspective' and ‘standpoint' are used to indicate different and potentially conflicting views from different positions in society, in the absence of any direct, perspective-free, access to the real landscape. This, too, can be taken to support a relativism of incommensurable views or perspectives. But it can also support claims that some standpoints give better views than others. This is the use of the ‘standpoint' metaphor with which we will be most concerned in this chapter.The dilemmas involved in these various attempts to find a reliable basis for challenges to the dominant apparatus of knowledge and power have been explored in very sophisticated ways in a range of modern social movements - the gay and lesbian movement, the labour movement, the women's movement, the struggles against disablement, anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, and in rather different ways in ecological and animal rights and welfare movements. An influential approach to the study of social movements (see Eyerman and Jamison 1991) gives a central place to their cognitive practice, not only in defining movements and the identities of their participants but also in transforming the wider culture: ‘For us, social movements are bearers of new ideas, and have often been the sources of scientific theories and of whole scientific fields, as well as new political and social identities' (Eyerman and Jamison 1991: 3).
Our focus in the rest of this chapter will be on how the issues of relativism and the status of rival knowledge-claims have been posed and understood in the contemporary feminist movement, but it should be kept in mind that there are both substantive connections and parallels which span these different sorts of social and political struggle.