Abstract

Chapter 1 discusses John Dewey's pragmatism and his reasons for rejecting a picture of the world which disallows human interest, striving, and concerns. Chapter 2 discusses the work of Richard Rorty's anti-foundationalism and attempts to reconstruct philosophy as hermeneutics. Chapter 3 discusses the work of Helen Longino, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, and Sandra Harding all of whom represent feminist attempts to reconstruct a concept of objectivity which is answerable to feminist concerns and which is built around an epistemolgical framework which does not depend on the conception of a thing-in-itself and which emphasizes the social nature of epistemology. Longino makes clear how objects of inquiry are characterized differently in the context of different research projects. Nelson addresses the connection between moral reasoning and scientific reasoning. Harding's version of feminist standpoint theory constructs a version of 'strong objectivity'. In Chapter 4 I turn to a discussion of interpretations of Nietzsche. I argue that we need not see Nietzsche as denying truth, and I suggest the promising metaphor of omniperspectvism, found in The Genealogy of Morals, as a framework for a new concept of objectivity. Chapter 5 draws on the work of Lorraine Code to discuss how omniperspectivism and a discourse of epistemological virtue can be combined to define a better conception of objectivity than the traditional concept which emphasizes value-neutrality and disinterestedness. The major tenets of this chapter are that moral reasoning and scientific reasoning inform each other, and that these discourses interact together in the process of coming to know the world and each other; that feminist insights into the functioning of sexism and racism in scientific research, reasoning, and theory construction must be taken seriously, and that a new objectivity must allow us to evaluate and critically analyze presuppositions; that we will inevitably have problems of exclusion and disagreement, but that this need not undermine objectivity but may, in some instances, actually enhance it