Ben Almassi (Governors State University)
While he is among the most prominent, Bruno Latour is not the only contemporary scholar to reflect on his earlier contributions to science studies with some retrospective regret and prospective resolve regarding his complicity in science denialism, climate skepticism, and other manufactroversies. Given the ascendency of merchants of doubt, should those with Latour put criticism aside and join the scientists they study in circling the wagons, or is there a productive role still for science-studies scholarship to question and challenge scientists and scientific institutions? Here I argue for the latter, looking to post-positivist feminist philosophy — and in particular, the sort of standpoint empiricism described by Kristen Intemann and exemplified by Sandra Harding and Alison Wylie, among others — as a blueprint. “Given political and conceptual commitments that make corrosive hyper-relativism as uncongenial as unreflective objectivism,” Wylie explains, “feminists have been exploring positions between, or ‘beyond,’ these polarized alternatives.” So characterized, a feminist philosopher of science who grounds her analysis in a detailed understanding of scientific practice is not thereby science’s simple champion nor its antagonist. So how might this kind of relationship be meaningfully described: is she a kind of loyal opposition to science, or perhaps its gadfly? While both of these notions offer useful approaches to science studies, in my estimation neither quite captures the interdependency and interestedness of feminist philosophers of science and their objects of inquiry. I suggest that we may be better served by a notion of trustworthy science criticism, built on analyses of trust and trustworthiness developed by Annette Baier and Karen Jones, among others, and attendant to the dynamics of interdependency in trust relationships.
