Silence and the Limitations of Contextual Objectivity

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Notes

Longino (1990) argues the community must provide the four criteria for critical discourse: (1) avenues for the expression and diffusion of criticism; (2) uptake of, and response to, criticism; (3) public standards by reference to which theories, etc. are assessed; and (4) equality of intellectual authority.

When we cannot set these aside we end up with a ‘bifurcated consciousness’, which Dorothy Smith (1987) argues is particularly valuable in women.

Illocutionary silence occurs when the presence of marginalized people, such as women, in science is used as reason to consider that such people are adequately represented by science in the sense that science serves their interests. However, this is a more flexible form of silence than that which typifies institutions.

Thomas Kuhn (1979) lists scientific values in this way.

Being assessed without a particular value does not entail that what is expressed actually lacks such significance.

Hill does not herself use the words ‘sexual harassment’, but what she describes is – literally – a textbook case.

Lynn Hankinson Nelson (1990) offers a social theory of evidence, but its normative application is unclear.