Sandra Harding (born 1935) is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology and philosophy of science. She has contributed to standpoint theory and to the multicultural study of science. She is the author or editor of some 14 books on these topics, and was one of the founders of the fields of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. Her ways of developing standpoint theory and stronger standards for ivity (“strong ivity”) have been influential in the social sciences as well as in philosophy.
She currently is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She is the former Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (1996-2000), and co-editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2000-05). She previously taught at the University of Delaware for many years, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Costa Rica, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. She has consulted to a number of international agencies on feminist and postcolonial science issues, including the Pan-American Health Organization, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. She was invited to co-author a chapter on “Science and Technology: The Gender Dimension” for the UNESCO World Science Report 1996. She is a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer for 07-08. She earned her PhD from New York University (NYU) in 1973.
She has been part of an on-going debate regarding claims of scientific ivity. Critiques of her work have been made by scientists Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstition. She gained some notoriety for referring to Newton"s Laws as a "rape manual" (Harding: 1986, pg. 113). The full quote is:
| “ | One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g. Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote. But when it comes to regarding nature as a machine, they have quite a different analysis: here, we are told, the metaphor provides the interpretations of Newton"s mathematical laws: it directs inquirers to fruitful ways to apply his theory and suggests the appropriate methods of inquiry and the kind of metaphyiscs the new theory supports. But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. Presumably these metaphors, too, had fruitful pragmatic, methodological, and metaphysical consequences for science. In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton"s laws as "Newton"s rape manual" as it is to call them "Newton"s mechanics"? | ” |
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