Feminist Epistemology: where do facts come from?

The most amazing worldview shaking, ground-breaking course I ever took was a course on Feminist Epistemology called Feminist Challenges to Positivism.  Getting ready to go back to school I am re-reading many of these articles (but not too many because the course nearly made me drop my social science based MA program entirely!)

The course covered such interesting questions as "Where do facts come from?"  Here's an excerpt of an article by Ruth Hubbard published in Hypatia called Science, Facts and Feminism.

"I want to begin by exploring some of the reasons behind a particular kind of facts, the facts of natural science.  After all, facts aren't just out there.  Every fact has a factor, a maker.  There interesting question is: as people move through the world, how do we sort those aspects of it that we permit to become facts from those that we relegate to being fiction --untrue, imagined, imaginary or figments of the imagination --and from those that, worse yet, we do not even notice and that therefore do not become fact, fiction or figment?  In other words, what criteria and mechanism of selection do scientists use in the making of facts?

"One thing is clear: making facts is a social enterprise.  Individuals cannot just go off by themselves and dream up facts.  When people do that... we consider them crazy.  If we do agree, either becaus their facts sufficiently resemble ours or because they have the power to force us to accept their facts as real and true --to make us see the emperor's new clothes --the the new facts become part of our shared reality and their making, part of the fact-making enterprise.

"Making science is such an enterprise..."

Think "facts" are universal, timeless and gender/race/class blind?  "Nineteenth century biologists and physicians claimed that women's brains were smaller then men's and that women's ovaries and uteruses required much energy and rest in order to function properly.  They "proved" that therefore young girls must be kept away from schools and colleges once they begin to menstruate and warned that without this kind of care women's uteruses and ovaries will shrivel and the human race die out."

Comments

[L]

I always love reading about the old "theories" about women (many of which are not that old). From "do women actually have souls" and "can women actually think" to "can women be in the workplace without constantly crying"...

[Jonesy]

Quite intriguing! And an excellent place to begin. What are the facts? What is truth? I hope the class left you in a place of true enlightenment, able to discern the truth from deception.

Mankind has progressed such that the facts are the privilege of the erudite elite; you nor I know little more about natural sciences than what has been provided us as fact, we accept prevailing scientific theories on authority of their research and credibility. And, to a degree, we can examine how they performed their fact-finding to determine for ourselves if it makes sense or not. Still, what method do we use to make these judgments? Are we capable of determining truth from falsity? Where is the guiding measure? How can we draw the line in the sand to separate good from bad?

Everyone probably has some answer to this. After all, they have to determine what's good and bad for themselves, correct? Yet time often judges differently. Today's good is tomorrow's bad. How to make sense of all this?