Często w kontekście klimatu i zapobiegania kryzysowi, zastanawiamy się nad tym co konieczne, a co możliwe. Kto jednak decyduje o tym, co możliwe?
Bywa też, że padają wobec nas zarzuty, że to, czego oczekujemy czy postulujemy jest niewykonalne. Że ignorujemy naukę, wszak liczby kłamać nie mogą. O tym jednak, jak szybko to co wykonalne lub niewykonalne może się zmienić, przekonaliśmy się przecież dopiero co podczas globalnego zamknięcia pandemicznego. Jak to więc jest z tą rzeczywistością - jest obiektywna, czy też może jest odzwierciedleniem konkretnego punktu widzenia, konkretnej grupy osób, w konkretnym systemie socjoekonomicznym?
Żeby pomóc sobie odpowiedzieć na to pytanie, zachęcam do lektury Science, Facts and Feminism (1988) autorstwa Ruth Hubbard, pierwszej profesorki biologii na Uniwersytecie Harvarda.
Zapraszam też do dzielenia się swoimi tekstami i przemyśleniami, a poniżej zamieszczam wybrane fragmenty tekstu:
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, and the rest of us do not agree to accept or share the facts they offer us, we consider them schizophrenic, crazy. If we do agree, either because 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—then the new facts become part of our shared reality and their making, part of the fact-making enterprise.
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What are the social or group characteristics of those of us who are allowed to make scientific facts? Above all, we must have a particular kind of education that includes graduate, and post-graduate
training. That means that in addition to whatever subject matter we learn, we have been socialized to think in particular ways and have familiarized ourselves with that narrow slice of human history and culture that deals primarily with the experiences of western European and North American upper class men during the past century or two. It also means that we must not deviate too far from accepted rules of individual and social behavior and must talk and think in ways that let us earn the academic degrees required of a scientist.
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Thus, science is made, by and large, by a self-perpetuating, self-reflexive
group: by the chosen for the chosen. The assumption is that if the science is “good,” in a professional sense, it will also be good for society. But no one and no group are responsible for looking at whether it is. Public accountability is not built into the system.
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Subjectivity and Objectivity. I want to come back to Paulo Freire, who says:
“Reality is never just simply the objective datum, the concrete fact, but is also people’s [and I would say, certain people’s] perception of it.” And he speaks of “the indispensable unity between subjectivity and objectivity in the act of knowing” (Freire 1985, 51).
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By deleting the scientist-agent as well as her or his participation as observer, people are left with the concept of science as a thing in itself, that truly reflects nature and that can be treated as though it were as real as, and indeed equivalent to, nature.
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There is no “free spirit of natural history,” only a set of descriptions put forward by the mostly
white, educated, Euro-American men who have been practicing a particular kind of science during the past two hundred years.
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Feminists must insist that subjectivity and context cannot be stripped away, that they must be acknowledged if we want to use science as a way to understand nature and society and to use the knowledge we gain constructively.
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By turning the activities of certain people who have the power to hire or not hire other people into pepersonalized descriptions of economic fact, by turning activities of scientists into “factual" tatements about nature or society, scientific language helps to mystify and intimidate the “lay public,” those anonymous others, as well as scientists, and makes them feel powerless.
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Awareness of our subjectivity and context must be part of doing science because there is no way we can eliminate them. We come to the objects we study with our particular personal and social backgrounds and with inevitable interests. Once we acknowledge those, we can try to understand the world, so to speak, from inside instead of pretending to be objective outsiders looking in.
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The pretense that science is objective, apolitical and value-neutral is profoundly political because it obscures the political role that science and technology play in underwriting the existing distribution of power in society. Science and technology always operate in somebody’s interest and serve someone or some group of people. To the extent that scientists are “neutral” that merely means that they support the existing distribution of interests and power
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We must broaden the base of experience and knowledge on which scientists draw by making it
possible for a wider range of people to do science, and to do it in different ways. We must also provide kinds of understanding that are useful and useable by a broad range of people. For this, science would have to be different from the way it is now. The important questions would have to be generated by a different social process. A wider range of people would have to have access to making scientific facts and to understanding and using them. Also, the process of validation would have to be under more public scrutiny, so that research topics and facts that benefit only a small elite while oppressing large segments of the population would not be acceptable.