Helen Longino

Helen Longino is an American philosopher of science who has taught at the University of Minnesota and at Stanford University. Her contextual empiricism holds that background assumptions always shape how evidence bears on hypotheses, so objectivity cannot rest on individual scientists being free of commitments. Instead it is a social achievement of communities with the right features: public venues for criticism, shared standards, responsiveness to criticism and equality of intellectual authority. Her work is central to feminist and social epistemology of science.

Key ideas

• Evidence supports hypotheses only relative to background assumptions.
• Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists.
• A community is objective to the degree that it has public venues for criticism, shared standards, uptake of criticism and tempered equality of intellectual authority.
• Diversity of perspectives within science is an epistemic resource.

Major works

• Science as Social Knowledge (1990)
• The Fate of Knowledge (2002)
• Studying Human Behavior (2013)

In the conversation

• Discussion How should a journalist judge a study in a field she knows nothing about? Sana Rizvi · 5 replies
• Debate Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists Lars Eriksen · 6 replies
• Question If objectivity belongs to communities, what happens when the community all looks the same? Femke Bosman · 5 replies