Neither Man nor Beast by Carol J Adams

Author:Carol J Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

What Is Knowledge and How Do We Gain It?

Feminist philosophers have identified ways in which the methodology of science both arises from and valorizes human male experience. Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, and Carolyn Merchant have argued that science is not value-free, that the scientific concept of objectivity is itself a value—a value that remains unexamined by science’s claim to be value-free.33 Feminist philosophers also have described science as generally characterizing individuals as autonomous, independent, and solitary, and the scientist as one who is and should be a disinterested human observer.

Scientists offer three reasons why the knowledge gained from experimenting on animals is justified: that knowledge is valuable; it is unreproducible without animals; and the complexity of the issues makes it difficult for laypeople to comprehend. These reasons suggest that the issue of animal experimentation is primarily a question of epistemology and secondarily one of hermeneutics. It is a question of epistemology because issues associated with the acquisition of knowledge are primary in the debate: What is it? How do we get it? It is a question of hermeneutics because issues associated with meaning are also pertinent: How is knowledge interpreted or applied? Through feminism the issues of epistemology and by extension hermeneutics are unresolved and destabilized rather than made static and apolitical in nature.

If the feminist critiques of science are correct, animal experimentation seems less a scientific question than a power issue filtered through the current, malestream power discourse. Gendered notions of knowledge acquisition mean that disenfranchised bodies are used to gain knowledge.

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