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If objectivity belongs to communities, what happens when the community all looks the same?

Femke Bosman Fellow
· 5 replies · 203 views
Scientific methodAmericanAnalyticFeminist philosophyHelen LonginoW. E. B. Du Bois#diversity#longino#objectivity#social-epistemology
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Helen Longino argues that objectivity is not a property of individual scientists, who all have commitments and blind spots, but of communities. And not any community. Only one with public venues for criticism, shared standards, genuine uptake of criticism, and what she calls a tempered equality of intellectual authority.

The history of medicine gives obvious cases. For decades many clinical trials enrolled mostly men, on the assumption that results would transfer. In the United States it took legislation in 1993 to require the inclusion of women in federally funded research. No individual researcher needed to be biased for the field to be skewed.

Here is my question, and I want genuinely different answers. Does a more diverse scientific community produce more objective science, as Longino's account suggests? Or does that run political goods into epistemic ones? And if it does help, is it diversity of people, or diversity of criticism, that matters, and are those the same thing?

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5 answers

  1. Tsion Bekele

    Fellow

    A recent example from my world: pulse oximeters, the clip on the finger, turned out to overestimate oxygen levels more often in patients with darker skin. Clinicians in many countries relied on them for years. The bias wasn't hidden in anyone's heart; it was in who the devices were tested on and who was in the room asking whether that mattered. That's Longino's point exactly.

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  2. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    I'd answer the last question: it's diversity of criticism that matters. Identity is at best a proxy for it. A lab of people from five countries who all trained under the same professor may be less diverse in the way that counts than a lab of locals who disagree violently. If we confuse the proxy with the thing, we'll congratulate ourselves on photographs.

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  3. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Arvind's right about proxies, but Longino's fourth criterion matters too. I've worked in institutions where people of every background were present and only the senior professor's criticisms counted. Diversity without tempered equality of authority changes nothing. The hierarchy filters the criticism before it can have any effect.

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  4. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    A historical case I teach: Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was a careful empirical study of a Black community at a time when most writing on the subject was speculation shaped by prejudice. He used the same tools as everyone else, survey and statistics. What changed was who was asking, and so which questions got asked. That's the strongest version of the case for diverse communities: not different answers to the same questions, but different questions.

  5. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    Keisha's point is where I'd come down. Longino's account is normative and structural: what matters is the critical organisation. But who is in the community changes which questions get asked and which assumptions are visible enough to criticise, and that's an epistemic effect, not a political one. Arvind, I agree a photograph isn't a method. A room where only one kind of question gets asked isn't one either.

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