Empiricism vs the World

“The only valid knowledge that contributes to the human understanding of the world is that of empirically-based, Western science.”
This brief refelction will seek to critically evaluate the claim that empirically –based Western science is the only valid methodology of knowledge production that contributes to the understanding of the world by considering the efficacy of empirically based knowledge production and then to counter pose this methodology against the feminist philosophy of science perspective.

Empiricism
Empiricism, stresses the fundamental role of experience (Alston, 1998), and starts from the understanding that all knowledge is ultimately based on experience. While empiricism stems from the Logical Positivists school of thought, they however reject the corresponding version of the Superiority of Reason thesis (Markie, 2015).

Alston explains that empiricism always assumes a hierarchical form, in which the lowest level are derived directly from experience, and higher levels are developed and based on the lower levels (Alston, 1998).

Empiricism is firmly rooted in the Western history and development of science and has been the bedrock of western science. Okere asserts that “Western science “... has become more a science for the materially useful and less the science in quest of the true, a know-how rather than a knowledge” and that Western science has consequently “progressively deemed a huge portion of knowledge outside of its field of relevance… to the detriment of the complexity of the human experience” (Callum D. Scott & Pascah Mungwini, 2013)

But Empiricism has also been the focus of European critiques, most notably those of Kuhn and Feyerabend.
Kuhn`s contribution to locating bodies of knowledge, within the context of a paradigm, has been particularly useful in recognizing that all investigations are culturally centred and are informed by a particular worldview.

Eckberg and Hill describes Kuhn`s representation of a paradigm thus; “[a] paradigm locks its practitioners together within a fairly rigid, highly elaborated framework of beliefs. This is not a serendipitous overlapping of elements from various perspectives. It is made of the consensual beliefs of a self-contained community. No analysis which neglects the communal nature of a paradigm can capture the essence of the concept” (Eckberg, D. L., & Hill, L., 1980, pp. 117-136)

While Kuhn points out the closed assumptions of empirical science, Feyerabend argues “that most successful scientific inquiry have not proceeded in accordance with a rational method” (Callum D. Scott & Pascah Mungwini, 2013, p. 142), and that the accepted methodology of engaging in scientific enquiry had no definite frame of reference and could be adjusted according to whichever framework suited the current enquiry. All science Feyerabend argues,” is laden with supposition and subjective theory at every level. Feyerabend’s criticism of unquestioned scientific method is founded in theories’ inability to be derived from facts because of the layer-upon-layer of theory behind theory-choice, observation” (Callum D.Scott & Pascah Mungwini, 2013, p. 143)

It is thus clear from the range of critiques against empiricism that its fundamental claim to universality is at best contested and at worst completely refuted as a universal claim to knowledge.

Feminism
The work of Kuhn and Feyerabend in helping the sciences locate the production of knowledge has contributed greatly to the development of knowledge production that rejects universalist assumptions of true knowledge and which has encouraged and provided spaces for the those who are on the margins of society and science to claim their own knowledge and to insert that knowledge into the epistemological debates of the philosophy of science.

One such marginalised location of knowledge production has been the emergence of a feminist philosophy of science. The impact of feminism on epistemology has been to move the question ‘Whose knowledge are we talking about?’ to a central place in epistemological inquiry (Code, 1998).
Code argues that in “these reconfigured epistemologies, feminists have argued that the cognitive status and circumstances of the knower(s) are central among conditions for the possibility of knowledge. They have demonstrated the salience, in evaluating any epistemic event, of the social arrangements of power and privilege by which it is legitimated or discredited” (Code, 1998)

In other words, Feminists have refocused questions not only of women, but of society, towards a less masculine, Western European androcentric paradigm, towards a global humanistic gynocentric paradigm that has opened up new and exciting possibilities in reinterpreting knowledge and understanding of power and privilege.

Code, in articulating the value of a feminist philosophy of science, and affirming the basic grounding of Kuhn and Feyerabend, insists that “the era of theoretical and methodological monotheism has passed” and that we “cannot assume that ‘reason is alike in all men’; nor can they represent knowers as mere place-holders in an infinitely replicable process, whose minds convert information, mechanically and indifferently, into knowledge”

The task of resituating knowledge and accordingly of developing new scientific methodologies is acknowledged by Code when she argues that “feminists have resituated knowledge-constructing practices within human lives. They have reclaimed testimony as a source of knowledge as valuable (and as fallible) as perception and memory; and have challenged the divide that is often thought to separate ‘knowing how’, ‘folk wisdom’, and narrative knowledge from ‘knowledge properly so called’. Feminists have demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogic, negotiated epistemic deliberation and the integrity of local knowledge.” (Code, 1998)

Conclusion

While the centrality of the empiricist worldview has dominated science and has sort to claim its universal pedigree, unencumbered by other knowledge systems or methodologies, the scientific project has nonetheless, through a process of trial and error, thesis, antithesis and synthesis, managed to give birth, although not intentionally, to a wide range of competing philosophical and scientific paradigms that has enriched the philosophical worlds and has forced philosophers and laypersons to reconsider the one dimensional universalist view of the world, in favour of a pluralistic understanding of knowledge production and its contribution to the human project of seeking knowledge and truth. The development of a Feminist philosophy of science has helped to enrich the project and has contributed in substantial ways to redefining our epistemological understanding and hence our praxis. 

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