2024/03/16 by Teemu Lari · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies #Philosophy and History of Science
paper · doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.02.005
openalex publication_date 2024/03/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
I identify and resolve an internal tension in Critical Contextual Empiricism (CCE) - the normative account of science developed by Helen Longino. CCE includes two seemingly conflicting principles: on one hand, the cognitive goals of epistemic communities should be open to critical discussion (the openness of goals to criticism principle, OGC); on the other hand, criticism must be aligned with the cognitive goals of that community to count as "relevant" and thus require a response (the goal-relativity of response-requiring criticism principle, GRC). The co-existence of OGC and GRC enables one to draw both approving and condemning judgments about a situation in which an epistemic community ignores criticism against its goals. This tension results from conflating two contexts of argumentation that require different regulative standards. In the first-level scientific discussion, GRC is a reasonable principle but OGC is not; in the meta-level discussion about science, the reverse holds. In meta-level discussion, the relevance of criticism can be established by appealing to goals of science that are more general than the goals of a specific epistemic community. To illustrate my revision of CCE, I discuss why feminist economists' criticism of the narrowness of the goals pursued in mainstream economics is relevant criticism.