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Synthese (2023) 201:220
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04198-z
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Values as heuristics: a contextual empiricist account
of assessing values scientifically
Christopher ChoGlueck1·Elisabeth A. Lloyd2
Received: 20 July 2022 / Accepted: 19 May 2023 / Published online: 13 June 2023
© The Author(s) 2023
Abstract
Feminist philosophers have discussed the prospects for assessing values empirically,
particularly given the ongoing threat of sexism and other oppressive values influenc-
ing science and society. Some advocates of such tests now champion a “values as
evidence” approach, and they criticize Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism for not
holding values to the same level of empirical scrutiny as other claims. In this paper, we
defend contextual empiricism by arguing that many of these criticisms are based on
mischaracterizations of Longino’s position, overstatements of certain claims, and false
dichotomies. Her contextual empiricism not only allows for the empirical support and
disconfirmation of values, but Longino explicitly discusses when values can be empir-
ically adjudicated and emphasizes the crucial role of the community for standards of
evidence. We support contextual empiricism and elaborate a less direct account of
“values as heuristics” by reviewing Longino’s theory of evidence and then using a
case study from Elisabeth Lloyd on the biology of female orgasm, demonstrating the
disconfirmation of androcentric values in evolutionary science. Within Longino’s and
Lloyd’s contextual empiricism, values do not get treated as empirical evidence to be
directly assessed by individuals, but rather values are heuristic tools to build models
whose use can be validated or invalidated by communities based on their empirical
fruitfulness in the logic and pragmatics of research questions in specific historical and
cultural contexts.
Keywords Values as evidence ·Contextual empiricism ·Androcentrism in biology ·
Underdetermination ·Community standards of evidence ·Feminist philosophy of
science
BChristopher ChoGlueck
christopher.choglueck@nmt.edu
1Department of Communication, Liberal Arts, and Social Sciences, New Mexico Tech, Socorro,
NM, USA
2Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Indiana University, Bloomington,
IN, USA
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1 Introduction
Traditionally, empiricists have held values in suspicion (or outright contempt), fol-
lowing Hume’s classic argument that normative conclusions cannot be derived from
purely empirical observations (Marchetti & Marchetti, 2016). Yet, with more attention
to the contextual nature of science, philosophers have shown that values have guided
theory choice and, conversely, that widely held scientific values like accuracy, consis-
tency, scope, and fruitfulness are informed by scientists’ experiences of success and
failure (Kuhn, 1977).
Moreover, because of their normative commitments, empiricists of a more feminist
stripe like Helen Longino (1990) and Elisabeth Lloyd (1995) have led the vanguard
in collapsing this fact-value dichotomy by challenging idealized concepts of “value-
free” or “value-neutral” science and articulating value-rich conceptions of scientific
objectivity (Crasnow, 2013; Intemann, 2010; Richardson, 2010). With their alternative
value frameworks, feminist scientists like biologist Ruth Hubbard (1979), neuro-
physiologist Ruth Bleier (1984), and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1986)have
successfully challenged dominant oppressive values in science like sexism, racism,
and heteronormativity (Schiebinger, 2001). Following these insights into how values
guide and infuse empirical inquiry—for bad or for good—feminist philosophers have
more recently turned to the reverse direction: how is it that scientific facts inform our
values, especially ethical and political values (Anderson, 2004; Clough, 1998; Yap,
2016)?
In reconsidering the empirical status of values, some feminists such as Sharyn
Clough and Maya Goldenberg now advocate for treating “values as evidence” by hold-
ing value judgments “to be subject to the same level of rigorous empirical inquiry” as
descriptive claims (Goldenberg, 2015, p. 25; Clough, 2013a). Goldenberg describes
the current status of the field as such: “whereas scholarly attention has been focused
on facts as value-laden and the impossibility of value-free science due to the nor-
mativity of experience, far less attention has been given to the facticity of values”
(2021, p. 57, emphasis added). Surprisingly, the primary target of Clough and Gold-
enberg is feminist philosopher of science Helen Longino, on account of her analysis
of underdetermination and objectivity and her claim that values “may not be subject
to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation” (Longino, 1990, p. 75, quoted by Gold-
enberg, 2015, p. 12; see also Clough, 1998; Solomon, 2012). Is it true that Longino’s
contextual empiricism makes an exception for values (compared with descriptive
claims)? Moreover, are values like feminism and androcentrism simply “objectively
true” or “false” beliefs, meaning “value judgments, like any other [decision], just are
empirical hypotheses, broadly speaking—hypotheses that can be subjected to rational
processes of adjudication” (Clough & Loges, 2008, p. 88; contrast with Yap, 2016)?
What can Longino’s approach even offer us in support of feminism and social justice
more generally?
There are huge stakes to these debates over the empirical status of values, given the
power of science in society, the widespread influence of sexism and other oppressive
values on science, and the adverse impacts of such science on society. On one end of the
continuum is empirical optimism: if science can decisively adjudicate values as some
more radical holists contend (Clough, 1998; Goldenberg, 2015), then scientists ought
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to inform ethical decision-making and social policy-making in an even more direct
and robust manner. While this could have significant social benefits, the deployment of
such broad-strokes empiricism based on technical expertise could border on scientism
and technocracy, both of which have tensions with democratic processes (Jasanoff,
1990). On the other end of the continuum is empirical pessimism: if science cannot
assess values at all (the equally radical alternative view attributed to Longino), then
we are back to the traditional fact-value dichotomy, in which values are either, at best,
remote from the empirical world or, at worst, empirically immune to any scientific
testing. Then, one might reasonably worry that facts about, e.g., women’s lives and
capacities, are compatible with both feminist and sexist values, rendering the facts
insufficient for value revision (Alcoff, 2006).
In this paper, we articulate a middle-ground position between empirical optimism
and pessimism, defending Longino’s contextual empiricism on the abilities of science
to assess values.1In contrast with the approach of “values as evidence,” we emphasize
the limitations of empirical “tests” of values (see also Solomon, 2012; Yap, 2016). We
also elaborate how to assess values indirectly in terms of their empirical fruitfulness,
where values operate as heuristics that provide frameworks for posing empirical ques-
tions, constructing models, and motivating the collection of certain kinds of evidence
(see Longino, 2008). To do so, our analysis operates across levels of abstractness and
concreteness. At the more conceptual level, we describe Longino’s original program
of contextual empiricism, particularly her views on background assumptions and evi-
dential status. We contend that contextual empiricism not only allows for the empirical
support/refutation of values but also that Longino explicitly discusses when values can
be empirically adjudicated and when not.
Then, to link this theory with practice, we use a case study on gender bias in research
on female orgasm from Elisabeth Lloyd (the second author on this present paper).
Whereas Longino conceptualized how science must be done to combat hegemonic
values, Lloyd’s successful intervention in biology demonstrates how such processes
actually work. Through this concrete case, we explore the prospects for a more tem-
pered account of the normative power of science regarding the empirical status of
values. We demonstrate how the empirical status of sexist values can be challenged by
exposing their empirical deficiencies—and how the more empirically fruitful values
from feminists provoked further empirical research to evaluate value-laden background
assumptions, explore alternative theories, and provide the evidence needed for sexual
liberation.
We begin in Sect. 2with a close reading of Longino on the category of empirical
evidence. Section 3then evaluates criticisms of her treatment of values, showing how
her critics at times mischaracterize her position, overstate certain claims, and rely on
the rational-social dichotomy that Longino aimed to collapse (Longino, 2002). After
elaborating the heuristic power of values, Sect. 4details how oppressive values like
androcentrism and heteronormativity can be empirically disconfirmed through what
Longino calls “transformative criticism.” This case study on the impacts of feminist
1While there are interesting questions about what sorts of values and what roles for those values are
legitimate in science, these debates are beyond the scope of this paper (see Anderson, 2004; Douglas, 2009;
Intemann, 2005,2015; Holman & Wilholt, 2022).
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heuristics throughout biology supports and extends Longino’s framework on the com-
plex, limited, but genuine invalidation of the use of certain values in specific contexts,
emphasizing the importance of evaluating shared community standards empirically.
2 Longino on empirical evidence
Over three decades ago, Longino famously criticized the traditional “value-free”
ideal of a dispassionate scientist detached from their personal values and biases, and
she offered an alternative view of objectivity in science without value-freedom. Her
methodological, interactive conception of objectivity is consistent with some influence
of contextual values on science, based on the insight that effective and significant sci-
entific criticism and reasoning about evidence can depend on value judgements, e.g.,
values implicit in dominant assumptions in that field (for other senses of objectivity,
see Daston & Galison, 2007; Douglas, 2009; Porter, 1996; Crasnow, 2013; Lloyd,
1995; Lloyd & Schweizer, 2014). Values function properly in science as the grounds
for “transformative criticism,” so methodological objectivity depends on the diver-
sity of values represented and the social structuring of science: recognized venues
for criticism, shared public standards, community response (uptake of criticism), and
tempered equality of intellectual authority (1990, p. 78f; 2002, pp. 128–135).
Now, what makes Longino’s contextual-empiricist approach empiricist in the first
place? Here, we explain her (1979) account of empirical evidence, upon which her
later (1990) claims about objectivity and social relations stand.2The thing we call
“evidence,” according to Longino, is actually a relation between a fact (a state of
affairs or “data”) and a hypothesis, and that relationship is extrinsic to both the fact
and the hypothesis:
What determines whether or not someone will take some fact or alleged fact,
x, as evidence for some hypothesis, h, is not any natural (e.g., causal) relation
between the state of affairs, x, and that described by h, but are other beliefs that
person has concerning the evidential connection between xand h. (Longino,
1979, p. 37)
Those “other beliefs” connect the two: the relevance of a fact as evidence for a hypoth-
esis necessarily involves additional “background beliefs or assumptions” (1979,p.40).
For instance: Why might you take red spots on your daughter’s stomach to be evi-
dence of measles? The relevance of this fact for that hypothesis might be based on the
additional background belief that red spots are a symptom of measles. Such a connec-
tion, however, is both theoretically and empirically underdetermined: neither does the
hypothesis itself entail the evidential relation between spots and measles, nor does the
fact of the spots (see Longino, 1979,1990, pp. 38–61).
Now, one might think that if there is under determination of theory by evidence, then
evidence is ultimately internal to each theory, and alternative theories cannot be com-
pared on the grounds of evidence. Such raises the specter of epistemic relativism and
global skepticism, which we will see is a recurrent attack from Longino’s critics (see
2While Longino’s views on evidence have developed over time, they are a continuation from her landmark
(1979) paper “Evidence & Hypothesis” in Philosophy of Science, which she acknowledged as the basis for
Chapters 2 and 3 of Science as Social Knowledge (1990,p.xi).
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Sect. 3.1). However, Longino compellingly presented her analysis of under determina-
tion as a solution to Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend’s problem of insurmountable
incommensurability, where the theory-ladenness of observation could leave scientists
in different paradigms inescapably speaking past one another. In contrast, Longino
preserves the possibility of intersubjectivity for empiricism in the face of theory-
ladenness: on her view, evidential status is dependent on relevance, which is, in turn,
dependent on background assumptions. Rather than an irreconcilable difference, dis-
agreement between people over which hypothesis the facts support might legitimately
require recourse to a discussion that foregrounds, unpacks, and improves those oper-
ative but previously implicit assumptions. Because evidential status is contingent on
background assumptions, and because hammering out disagreements over “the evi-
dence” often requires social interactions, there cannot be a strict distinction between
empirical evidence and social interactions. Whereas Kuhnian-Feyerabendian incom-
mensurability might render evidence irreducibly dependent on the paradigm and thus
internal to the theory, Longino’s recognition and articulation of the role of background
assumptions allows for different evidential assessments to be discussed and overcome
through interaction across people with somewhat different background assumptions.
For Longino, background assumptions include contextual values as well as scientific
laws, models, logic, and theories, so decisions about evidence based on background
assumptions are at times value judgments. Nonetheless, Longino’s solution pushes
the question of the epistemic justification of theory choice one step back: why hold
certain background assumptions over others? She writes:
Even though the prospect of an infinite regress prevents one from supposing
that the adoption of all beliefs could be evidentially based, there is no apriori
reason to suppose that there are no criteria at all. One can ask whether, and if
so, which, criteria should determine their acceptance. (Longino, 1979, p. 55,
emphasis added)
We can take the development of Longino’s work since 1979, especially Science as
Social Knowledge, as an elaboration of how to adjudicate background assumptions,
empirically or otherwise, with special attention to value-laden background assump-
tions.
3 Feminist empiricism about values
Among feminist empiricists,3one increasingly divisive topic is how to be an empiri-
cist about values themselves (Clough, 2020; Solomon, 2012; Yap, 2016). Based on
her (1979) analysis of evidential reasoning, Longino (1990) established contextual
3The term “feminist empiricism” comes from Sandra Harding (1986, p. 24) to designate the feminist epis-
temology that contends “that sexism and androcentrism are social biases correctable by stricter adherence to
the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry.” Harding distinguished this empiricist brand of fem-
inist epistemology that aimed to preserve traditional objectivity from what she called “feminist standpoint
theory” and “feminist postmodernism” (1986, pp. 26–27). Though widely influential, Harding’s classifica-
tion of feminist empiricism as an alternative to standpoint theory has been criticized by feminist standpoint
advocates (Intemann, 2010; Wylie, 2012), along with her misrepresentation of Longino’s position as simply
replacing androcentrism in science with value-free, gender-neutral descriptions (Lloyd, 1988a).
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empiricism as a new form of feminist empiricism: “It is empiricist in treating experi-
ence as the basis of knowledge claims in the sciences. It is contextual in its insistence
on the relevance of context—both the context of assumptions that supports reasoning
and the social and cultural context that supports scientific inquiry—to the construc-
tion of knowledge” (Longino, 1990, p. 219, emphasis added). Yet, several feminist
philosophers of science, particularly Sharyn Clough (1998) and Maya Goldenberg
(2015), have criticized the way Longino relates empirical evidence to values. This
section unpacks both of their critiques, which to varying degrees are based on misrep-
resentations and misunderstandings of Longino’s accounts of empirical evidence and
intersubjective objectivity.
We contend that at the heart of the disagreements in this debate are the differ-
ent epistemological traditions in feminist philosophy of science, which give rise
to several competing conceptions of “feminist empiricism” and significant diver-
gence among them over what counts as “empiricism,” especially from more radical
advocates of holism and “naturalized epistemology” (see Intemann, 2010; Richard-
son, 2010; Solomon, 2012; Crasnow, 2013; Yap, 2016;Brown,2020). Longino’s
contextual empiricism is more akin to Bas van Fraassen’s (1980) constructive empiri-
cism; it differs from Clough’s (1998) semantic holism from Donald Davidson, who
rejects representation-based epistemologies for a more action-based, behavioristic
understanding of knowledge that has little space for background beliefs (LePore &
McLaughlin, 1985).4Clough’s position has been called “feminist radical empiricism”
for endorsing a “web of valief …the all-encompassing network of beliefs and values
that is described by feminist empiricists in the Quinean tradition” (Solomon, 2012,
p. 435, emphasis added).5
It is important to note that the legacy of pragmatism is also at stake, which Clough
defines as naturalized, socio-historical, and holistic in the neo-pragmatist tradition of
Davidson and Richard Rorty (Clough, 2013b). This contrasts with more classic Ameri-
can pragmatists like John Dewey that are more consistent with Longino’s program (see
Sect. 3.3; Anderson, 2006;Brown,2020). Also debated is the social nature of empiri-
cism: For Clough, the empirical bases of epistemology are language and learning,
which are inherently social processes; for Longino, one of the reasons that “science is
social knowledge” is because background beliefs are learned socially but also because
the objectivity of science depends on communal processes of intersubjective criti-
cism, uptake, and response. For Goldenberg (2014,2015), however, community-based
modes of mitigating the harmful effects of values are less practical than more individ-
ual, evidence-based assessments—which directly contrasts with Longino’s rejection
of the dualistic binary of rational empirical assessment by individuals vs. social nego-
tiation by collectives (Longino, 2002). Given the complex nature of empirical evidence
4Quinean feminist empiricisms also differ those descended from Rudolf Carnap that preserve an a priori
(Yap, 2016).
5Sharon Crasnow (2013) places Longino’s contextual empiricism solely within feminist empiricism and
against feminist standpoint theory. However, Longino aligns herself with practice-based standpoint the-
ory (1990, p. 188), and the contemporary versions of these approaches are compatible under several
interpretations (Intemann, 2010; Wylie, 2012). A more significant distinction is with feminist postmod-
ernists/posthumanists (e.g., Haraway, 1991, p. 186; Barad, 2007, p. 244), who contrast their approaches
with older, more empiricist modes of feminist critique of science (see Richardson, 2010). See footnote 3.
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and the dynamic interplay between individuals and communities, it is unsurprising that
such disagreements have emerged, even among feminists who share many social and
political goals.
Furthermore, much confusion is bred in the discussion by cross-talk about “values,”
“value judgements,” and “background assumptions.” Philosophers of science typically
use the category value to mean an abstract quality that some people take to be good,
desirable, or worthy of pursuit, such as simplicity among physicists or sustainability
among environmentalists (McMullin, 1982, p. 5; Elliott, 2017, p. 11). Values are thus
a normative form of belief that guide our value judgments, including the appraisal
of means and the prizing of ends (Dewey, 1939, p. 5). Clough (1998,2013a,2020)
focuses on the actual values themselves being evaluated (e.g., anti-Black racism), and
Goldenberg (2015) primarily analyzes value judgements (e.g., discounting industry-
funded studies), while Longino is interested in the assessment of the background
assumptions uberhaupt—including the values, methodologies, laws, models, theories,
social norms, and biases—all of which can influence science (see Sect. 2).
In this section, we hope to distinguish legitimate philosophical disagreements from
misunderstandings and mischaracterizations. Following our own evaluation of these
critiques, this section concludes more positively with an elaboration of how Longino’s
contextual empiricism explicitly understands values as heuristics, which steer the
practice of research programs in certain directions that can be empirically fruitful or
not for particular uses (Longino, 2008). This sets the stage for our case study in Sect. 4
on the empirical disconfirmation of androcentric values in evolutionary biology.
3.1 Clough’s critique: “hasty retreat from evidence” to relativism
We begin with the earliest analysis from Clough (1998), that Longino “retreated”
from empirical evidence (which Clough calls “content”) toward values and world-
views (“scheme”). Over the past two decades, Clough has advocated for treating
values (and value judgments) as having empirical content subject to the gauntlet of
human experience (Clough & Loges, 2008; Clough, 2003,2013a,2013b,2020). For
instance, she argues that “racist value judgments,” like beliefs about racial hierarchies
based on biological differences, “express beliefs that are objectively false” in terms
of their “cognitive or descriptive content” about the world (Clough & Loges, 2008,
p. 77; Clough, 2020). Clough’s framework relies on Davidson’s critique of “represen-
tationalism,” referring to the view that theories represent the world by using “language
schemes” as a filter through which empirical “content” flows (Clough, 1998, p. 91).
Accordingly, Clough takes contextual values to be “schemes” in Davidson’s sense of
passive constraints or filters that screen off content, unaffected by empirical evidence
(see also Clough, 2003).
Rather than “the search for better evidence (or content),” Clough criticizes Longino
for instead promoting “a search for better conceptual filters (or schemes)” (1998,p.94).
This is not to say that Clough takes a naïve positivist view of evidence as unmediated
and “simply ‘given’,” nor that she disagrees with Longino over the contested nature
of evidence; their disagreement is instead how to understand the interdependency
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of values and evidence (pp. 94–95).6Clough claims that, because Longino bases
scientific representations on the filtering of personal values and beliefs, she leaves a
“metaphysical gap between our theories and the world” that invites “global skepticism”
and subjective epistemic “relativism”: “All of our representations could be floating free
of the world, to varying degrees” (p. 101). Such undesirable consequences, Clough
argues, invite the need for a more robustly ontic form of feminist empiricism, focused
on understanding the causal relations between theories and the world (see Clough,
1998,2003,2013b).
While we welcome parts of Clough’s positive program, her critique of contex-
tual empiricism is based on three key mischaracterizations of Longino’s view. First,
the interpretation that Longino abandoned empirical evidence (or content) in favor
of values (or scheme) is inaccurate. What Clough perceives as a “retreat” from evi-
dence/content and advance to values/scheme is more charitably understood as an
elaboration of the very category of evidence. Rather than accepting a simple view of
evidence as “the given” or positing an insurmountable incommensurability, Longino’s
framework allows for a deeper, relational understanding of evidence and disagree-
ments over it based on background assumptions. By making background assumptions
transparent through the community’s criticism, we can better understand the source
of divergence over judgments about evidential relevance—and improve them.
Part of the misunderstanding follows from a mischaracterization of Longino’s
stance as an ontic view itself, typified by Clough’s description of a “metaphysical
gap between the subjective end product of belief and the objective external reality the
belief is about” (1998, p. 91). Because Clough interprets Longino as a representational-
ist—someone who distinguishes between internal schemes and external content—she
then criticizes contextual empiricism for claims that Longino never actually makes:
As Longino has described it, the “gap” is merely a “logical” one about evidence
and justification, not a metaphysical gap between mind and matter (1990, p. 58; see
Sect. 2). So when Longino talks about this underdetermination gap between data and
hypothesis (bridged by background beliefs), she is not talking about an ontic gap
between the knower and what is known but an epistemic gap between claims (obser-
vations and ideas) about the world. This gap between claims is bridged by background
beliefs, which are largely incompatible with a standard Davidsonian picture that takes
behaviors as the only causally or logically significant factors and ignores intentions,
mental representations, and other implicit/unstated beliefs (LePore & McLaughlin,
1985). While a Davidsonian might take aim at Longino’s metaphysical quietism, it is
uncharitable and incorrect to interpret Longino in such heavily metaphysical terms.
Second, Clough misrepresents Longino’s view by falsely claiming that, for
Longino, values are merely negative “constraints on reasoning” like Davidson’s pas-
sive filters (Clough, 1998, p. 96). On the contrary, values for Longino are among the
positive epistemic conditions for reasoning that justify background assumptions, in
turn enabling evidential classifications that structure social interactions about empir-
ical evidence. That is, values can serve as background assumptions and supply these
relevance relations that connect data and hypothesis, rendering some data relevant to
a given hypothesis and other data irrelevant. Emphasizing their active nature, Longino
6Wethank an anonymous reviewer for helping us highlight these agreements between Longino and Clough.
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has described values even more dynamically as heuristics for inquiry that positively
guide knowledge production and the development of theories and models (Longino,
2008; see Sect. 3.3).
Third, and most problematically, Clough (1998, pp. 100–101) mischaracterizes
Longino by describing her conceptions of theory choice and evidence as “subjective”
and “relativist” because they give up “on the potentially decisive role of evidence.”
Clough falsely claims that Longino bases theory choice solely on “subjective” values
or personal preferences and does not acknowledge “belief-independence of empirical
evidence” (1998, p. 106). Clough’s scheme/content framing projects this subjec-
tive/objective binary onto Longino’s framework, inviting her accusation that Longino
posits “a split between an inner conceptual world of values and interpretive frameworks
and an outer world of unanalyzed data” (p. 94). While Clough agrees with Longino
that evidence is often indecisive and that we need to be “examining the historical
and political conditions under which data become taken as evidence,” she worries that
Longino has rendered science into a debate over “interpretative frameworks” (Clough,
2020, pp. 25–26). Instead, Clough contends that the “decision about which values to
prioritize itself becomes an investigative project that properly continues at a meta-level
using roughly the same kinds of empirical criteria” (2020, pp. 25–26).7
In contrast with Clough’s framing of Longino approach as “subjective,” contextual
empiricism maintains that the status of “evidence” is not purely a question of personal
interpretation, but rather a relational property between a hypothesis/theory and the data
taken to be evidence for it; so evidential status depends partially on background beliefs
and partially on data and observations from the empirical world. Here, the distinction
in Longinian thought between evidence and data is significant: it is precisely during
the transformation of multipotent data/observations of the world into relevant evidence
via background beliefs that values can play their most influential roles. That mediation
of data and hypotheses by background assumptions is where scientific criticism ought
to be aimed, which Clough appears to misunderstand by taking Longino to have
a subjectivist view of evidence based on her own objectivist alternative. Empirical
evidence is relational and intersubjective (neither wholly external nor wholly internal),
and as we discuss next, Longino instead takes values, while privately held, to be socially
accessible and sometimes even testable.
3.2 Goldenberg’s critique: “values as evidence,” rather than negotiated
While Clough (1998) argues that Longino has “retreated from evidence” and invited
skepticism, Goldenberg (2014,2015) makes a different critique, more about scientific
objectivity: she argues that Longino’s norms for interactive objectivity are not the
only (or the better) way to adjudicate values within science. Along with Clough, she
advocates a “values as evidence” approach that accepts theoretic underdetermination
of evidence but also promotes more direct empirical evaluation of values than what she
sees in Longino. Yet, unlike Clough, Goldenberg focuses on what she calls Longino’s
“feminist criterion for inclusive community arbitration of the values that inextricably
7We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us show these overlaps between Longino and Clough and
their disagreements.
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enter into scientific reasoning” (2015, p. 4), contending that they undermine more
practicable and rational forms of empirical assessment:
That [underdetermination] gap is filled by the contextual values that mediate
evidential relations. Those values, notably, ‘may not be subject to empirical
confirmation or disconfirmation’ (Longino, 1990, p. 75). Background assump-
tions [according to Longino] are thereby not subject to the same empirically
driven modes of scrutiny that scientific reasoning affords to data. (Goldenberg,
2015, p. 12, emphasis added)
Note how Goldenberg moves from Longino’s hedged claim that values “may not be
subject” to empirical test to the much stronger claim that values “are thereby not
subject” to such tests.
Goldenberg focuses on entrenched problems in medicine involving the hegemony
of the pharmaceutical industry, conflicts of interest, and lack of transparency—all of
which Longino would argue reduce interactive objectivity. Yet, Goldenberg contends
that biomedicine is nonetheless structured well enough for individual clinicians and
researchers to deliver treatments with good standards of evidence. She considers a
hypothetical doctor, who is trying to decide whether to offer her patient a new therapy
with seemingly promising results (Goldenberg, 2015, p. 23). The doctor soon realizes
that the positive findings in the trial she initially consulted were, in fact, likely the result
of industry-funding bias, using low dosages of the standard therapy for the controls to
get a (lucrative) false positive. Confirmed by the additional knowledge that industry
funding predicts pro-industry conclusions, the doctor comes to the “reasonable deci-
sion within the confines of the information available to her” to not offer her patient
the therapy (Goldenberg, 2015, p. 23, emphasis added).
According to Goldenberg, this thought experiment illustrates how clinicians, in
the face of a seemingly less than objective research community, can gather empirical
evidence (an underpowered control and the industry’s “tricks of trade”) to support value
judgements (ignore this study’s positive results) based on value-laden assumptions
(distrust industry studies), which are themselves empirically evidenced. She concludes
that clinicians can use their judgment based on empirically confirmed values rather
than “the cumbersome recourse to epistemic communities” a la Longinian objectivity
(Goldenberg, 2015, p. 24). Unlike this more direct use of “values as evidence,” she
charges that Longino’s proposed social solutions fail because value-laden “background
assumptions are thereby not subject to the same empirically driven modes of scrutiny
that scientific reasoning affords to data” (2015, p. 12). Because of the effectiveness of
individually using empirically evidenced value judgments to combat systemic financial
conflicts of interest throughout the community, Goldenberg concludes that Longino’s
social approach is “impractical and unnecessary” (2014,2015, p. 5; contrast with
Goldenberg, 2021).8
8Interestingly, in Goldenberg’s (2021) monograph on vaccine hesitancy, she expresses much more agree-
ment with Longino’s overall approach than in these earlier papers from 2014 and 2015. Most notably, she
advocates for the importance of transformational criticism for objectivity (2021, p. 97) defined as “inter-
subjective agreement” (p. 196, n. 11) rooted in both everyday social dynamics (p. 122) and the diversity
within scientific communities (p. 152). We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this more recent
convergence.
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While it would be problematic if Longino shielded values from direct empirical
scrutiny, this is not an accurate representation of Longino’s position. Goldenberg’s
reading of Longino is challenged by a discussion near the end of Science as Social
Knowledge, in which Longino writes:
Some background assumptions may involve conceptual, metaphysical, and nor-
mative dimensions that elude assessment by strict empirical criteria. Others may
be subject to fairly straightforward empirical assessment. Arguments that use
factual hypotheses to undermine or support claims about values provide good
subjects for study. (Longino, 1990, p. 183, emphasis added)
She then considers the studies on boys’ and girls’ mathematic abilities. Longino argues
that the traditional, gender-neutral assumption that test preparation is uniform for boys
and girls is “deficient on straightforward empirical grounds” citing empirical studies
evidencing sexist practices, such as different treatment by teachers that promote dif-
ferent skills (p. 183). Thus, she contends that these other lines of empirical evidence
undermine the value-laden assumption rooted in the conservative value of gender neu-
trality in the classroom (i.e., that there is no differential gender-based discrimination in
math classrooms) that supports business-as-usual education. However, other operative
background assumptions (e.g., there is only one form of mathematical ability) have
not been “investigated systematically” (p. 183). Without empirical studies, we are left
with conventional intuitions about cognitive abilities and normative critiques of them,
such that “the interests of [already recognized individuals of mathematical ability] are
served by not challenging the assumptions” (p. 184).
Therefore, contra Goldenberg, Longino did not claim that empirical assessment
of values (or background assumptions) was impossible outright and in all cases, but
rather that testability depends on whether relevant studies are available and whether the
problem is currently approachable as an empirical one. Fleshing out the assumptions
in need of empirical support through conceptual criticism may enable testing and
confirmation in the future (see Sect. 4).
Digging a little deeper, we see how Goldenberg’s critique is based on four mischar-
acterizations of Longino’s norms for objectivity. First and foremost, she relies on a
false dichotomy between empirical assessment (testing and confirmation) and social
assessment (criticism and negotiation). Goldenberg claims that the only way a contex-
tual empiricist can adjudicate between different values is by non-empirical methods,
namely “under scrutiny by the democratic, inclusive, and responsive community of
knowers” (2015, p. 14). She contrasts Longino’s social approach with her (individ-
ualist) one, exemplified by the doctor sitting alone in her office, where such values
are arbitrated “using many of the same empirical modes of inquiry used to scrutinize
empirical claims” (p. 15).
Yet, the dichotomy between individual empirical assessment and social processes of
deliberation is precisely the dualism Longino undermined with her analysis of empir-
ical evidence (see Sect. 2). Social and evidential assessment are not alternatives but
instead inseparable during the process of science: social interaction improves one’s
understanding of the evidence for/against a hypothesis by drawing out the underlying
assumptions. Furthermore, the goodness of evidential reasoning relies on public com-
munity standards, such as what counts as a good explanation, good statistical practices,
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and good enough evidence to support a theory (Longino, 1990). While Goldenberg
(2014,2015) seems to disagree over the crucial importance of social processes (con-
trast with Goldenberg, 2021), Clough (2013b) might be in more agreement here with
Longino on the necessarily social nature of epistemology.
Goldenberg’s reliance on the empirical-social dichotomy for methods of assess-
ment is clear in her own thought experiment, which she takes to exemplify the
self-sufficiency of the former without dependence on the latter. Accordingly, she
downplays the importance of shared community standards for assessing evidence
(Longino, 1990, p. 77) and, thus, potentially overstates the decisiveness of evidence
for individual value judgments (like discounting results from industry-funded studies)
in politicized contexts. These community standards include peer-review processes like
double-masking and statistical standards accepted across the profession, including the
infamous 5% standard level of significance (Gigerenzer, 2004; Porter, 1996). Further
related to Goldenberg’s example are requirements to disclose funding sources and
register all trials—standards that have arisen because of community concerns about
conflicts of interest (see Holman & Elliott, 2018).
The second major issue is how Goldenberg (2015) mischaracterizes the operation of
Longinian norms as “arbitration by democratic vote” (p. 26) competing with the ratio-
nality of individual judgment and thus lacking “rational content” (p. 24). Longino’s
shift to the social level for accessing, applying, or challenging norms does not pre-
clude the possibility of the rationality of individuals’ judgments conforming to social
norms and processes, as Goldenberg implies, unless one accepts the two as strictly
dichotomous. Even if we grant (as Longino would) that only sometimes can values
be assessed empirically, this could not be done in the isolated, individualistic manner
suggested by Goldenberg. Many judgments would be derivative of community stan-
dards for good science, and others require social criticism to unpack their evidential
relations. Thus, while we might grant that individuals can devise “what appears to be a
reasonable decision” after the fact (Goldenberg, 2015, p. 23), its reasonableness would
nonetheless depend on community practices. By artificially segmenting the social and
individual aspects of objectivity, Goldenberg suggests that scientists and clinicians can
and should evaluate evidence in isolation from social processes. Such heavy emphasis
on individual judgment is badly misleading—especially in science where collabo-
ration, trust, and group deliberation are essential (Andersen & Wagenknecht, 2013;
Wilholt, 2013;Wray,2014).
Third, and relatedly, Goldenberg ignores the social process of science by looking
only at the products and outcomes available for expert judgment. She claims that.
There was no recourse to a social process of critical scrutiny required either in
order to justify the values invoked or the conclusion that the physician drew.
Instead, the relevant contextual values rested on empirical claims that were
legitimately arbitrated using the same modes of scientific reasoning to which
all empirical evidentiary claims can be subjected. (Goldenberg, 2015, p. 24,
emphasis added)
While framed as either social or empirical, one should ask: where is this clinician
getting her knowledge about the influence of Big Pharma? Why does she trust those
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sources instead of industry’s response? Whence come her standards and critical atti-
tude?
Much of Goldenberg’s (2015, p. 24) concern appears to be the impracticality and
inconvenience of “cumbersome recourse to epistemic communities” ostensibly from
Longino. Yet, this is an overly literal reading of contextual empiricism, as if the clini-
cian must wait to make her decision while “the jury is out.” The clinician can appeal to
public standards and depend on community-wide practices of peer-review while still
having an empirically grounded decision. Moreover, the cited studies about indus-
try bias have in fact resulted from interactions between researchers and their critics,
often from outside medicine, precisely because of the hegemony of medicalization
and entrenchment of commercial interests. For example, because of widespread bias-
ing practices in the research on using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
to treat depression—such as not publishing negative studies, ghostwriting, and not
reporting suicidal behavior—it took external criticisms from lawyers and journal-
ists to document harmful effects (Jukola, 2015). Part of the reason one can trust this
research about industry bias is because of the rigorous criticism it has undergone,
such as the meta-analyses evidencing how widespread the problem is, especially in
medicine (Bekelman et al., 2003; Lundh et al., 2018).
The final and most important problem with Goldenberg’s argument is that it appears
to exonerate the need for community-level reforms in medicine by focusing on
individual-level judgment as a sufficient solution: “No appeal to an idealized com-
munity of knowers needs to be made to come to a reasonable decision, and so the
great effort required to build this epistemic community need not discourage health-
care workers and researchers from pursuing smaller scale remedies to the problems
of evidence-based healthcare” (2015, p. 26). Because of the interdependence of indi-
vidual and social processes, we contend that a two-level approach would prove more
effective than either alone.
Moreover, we worry that this shift toward the individual for rational deliberation
unduly acquits the biomedical community of much needed structural change. While
some individual practitioners might be able to recognize funding bias, many others
will not on their own. Furthermore, industry can bias research communities without
corrupting any individual researcher. For instance, the pharmaceutical industry created
a consensus around the efficacy of (ineffective) antiarrhythmic drugs using the strategy
of selectively funding researchers with pro-industry conclusions—leaving the less
favorable ones underfunded—and it can use similar tactics effectively whenever there
is methodological diversity within a merit-based system (Holman & Bruner, 2017).
The composition of research groups is subject to the biasing pressures levied by the
pharmaceutical industry, so it would be fruitless to put our faith in individuals to simply
“follow the evidence” when they lack funds and other support. Instead, the solution
involves building social networks of trust and heavily reducing researchers’ financial
dependency on industry (Holman & Bruner, 2015; Holman & Elliott, 2018; Wilholt,
2013).
Thus, Goldenberg’s critique downplays the interaction of social and empirical
assessment in science, falsely suggesting the two are alternatives rather than parts of an
integrated process. Longino did not argue for a “recourse to epistemic communities.”
Instead, she contextualized how all individual judgment is necessarily dependent on
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community standards. Furthermore, Longino recognized that some value-laden back-
ground assumptions “may be subject to fairly straightforward empirical assessment,”
depending on the state of the science; even where there is a lack of reliable empirical
data, conceptual and normative assessments would be appropriate for value judge-
ments until such relevant empirical data could be produced (1990, p. 183). In either
case, fleshing out and improving empirical reasoning depends in part on community
standards and social processes.
3.3 Contextual empiricism revisited: values as heuristics
If it is too simplistic to think of values always as evidence per se, then what would
be a better understanding? This section elaborates our alternative account of values
as heuristics, in which values can be empirically assessed in a more partial sense of
communal validation in particular contexts of specific uses according to their fruit-
fulness, i.e., their empirical, historical, social, and explanatory success in a variety of
contexts.9Here, we supplement the contextual-empiricist approach with Deweyian
pragmatism for understanding the normative relations between values and empirical
evidence. Just like with models in scientific practice, direct validation and complete
confirmation of values is not possible (Oreskes et al., 1994).
In her more recent work, Longino describes values as having “heuristic but not
probative power,” meaning that they can offer reliable guidance but not mathematical
proof, usually transmitted to scientists as part of their “background” during scientific
apprenticeship, and their learning of the history of their discipline through stories of
success and failure (Longino, 2008, p. 74). She illustrates this historical evolution of
scientific heuristics with examples, such as the traditional reliance in medical research
on the value of simplicity that guided researchers to select primarily white cisgender
men as “the norm.” While this heuristic facilitated many advancements in medical trials
throughout much of the twentieth century, it also resulted in the systematic failure to
understand the safety and effectiveness of treatments in people of color, cisgender
women, and gender non-conforming people. Today, the heuristic of diversity and
inclusion has arisen in response to these empirical failings, which were also equally
political and ethical failures. This newer diversity-orienting heuristic has guided us
toward a more clinically useful, more empirically accurate, and more inclusive set
of practices for medical trials, such as representative sampling and sub-population
analysis (see Epstein, 2007).
To develop this account of values as heuristics further, we point others toward
the insights of pragmatist philosophers of science Elizabeth Anderson (2004,2006)
and Matthew Brown (2020), who build on ideas from Dewey’s theory of inquiry and
valuation (e.g., 1939). Anderson emphasizes the instrumental value of values and
9Historically, many philosophers of science have taken the scientific value of fruitfulness to be merely
pragmatic, as opposed to its epistemic strength (e.g., McMullin, 1982). For example, Kuhn (1977, p. 322)
claimed that the value of fruitfulness lies in the reputational and professional prospects that a successful
theory promises for a scientist’s career. This traditional pragmatic-but-not-epistemic framing is precisely
what we oppose. Instead, we contend that fruitfulness offers jointly pragmatic and epistemic value because
empirical successes include every-day experiential fruits as well as more scientific and societal yields (see
Anderson, 2004).
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their dynamic nature in the process of inquiry: “Dewey argued that value judgments
function as tools for uncovering data for better living…We test our value judgments
by living in accordance with them, and seeing whether we find the results satisfactory”
(Anderson, 2006, p. 4, emphasis added). Such “tests” are humanistic “experiments in
living,” with the successes of feminism contrasting women’s lived dissatisfaction with
sexist values (Anderson, 2006,p.5).
Through a case study of feminist research on divorce, Anderson (2004) illustrates
how values can function like empirical hypotheses, able to be confirmed or discon-
firmed empirically by experience and observation if held non-dogmatically.Inthe
1990s, a team of social scientists led by Abigail Stewart uncovered new facts on the
benefits of divorce that were unwelcome by the dominant community of researchers.
Those conservative researchers held the following heuristics as background: they
endorsed “traditional family values,” assuming that divorce “breaks up” a (hetero-
sexual) family and necessarily harms children. Thus, looking for only the harms of
divorce—and ignoring its benefits—the traditionalists were unable to collect a fair
sample of evidence because they did not believe that positive evidence could exist.
Accordingly, their hypotheses were so biased that the traditionalists only confirmed
the values with which they began, amassing evidence that divorce harmed women,
children, and families. In contrast, Stewart and her feminist-scientist collaborators
documented the mixed nature of divorce, including its potential benefits as well (e.g.,
offering spouses an opportunity for growth), thus generating a more complete set of
evidence. Thus, Anderson argues that when values act fallibly (opening possibilities
rather than foreclosing them), they positively guide hypotheses toward empirically
fruitful research.
One way to judge whether a value as a heuristic is successful or not is by its empir-
ical fruits: does it help to produce well-specified models that are well-supported by
observations, experiments, and other knowledge rooted in lived experience? In Ander-
son’s divorce case, the (non-feminist) traditionalist heuristic led to limited research
questions, e.g., “What are the costs of divorce for men, women, and their families?”,
so the responsive models that the traditionalists developed were only partial. The tra-
ditionalists did not ask or learn about any of the benefits of divorce because benefits
were not imagined as possible or responsive answers to their originating question
and framework. This contrasts with the feminists’ more ambivalent and open-ended
research questions, e.g., “What are the consequences of divorce for men, women,
and their families?” The question here shows its superiority by its broader empiri-
cal range of possible and responsive answers. The feminist value was a more fruitful
guide toward understanding the empirical phenomenon of divorce—thus showcasing
the direct scientific yields of this heuristic in social science on families.
Building on Anderson’s ideas and Dewey’s logic of inquiry, Brown (2020) argues
that empirical inquiry is always situational, rather than radically holist in the manner
advocated by Clough. All empirical inquiry, including science, begins with an inde-
terminate situation and ends with a judgment, and what falls in between is highly
contingent on the context: “it is not their form or essence that suits [values] to be evi-
dence, but rather…their ability to play the functional roles of evidence that suits them
to be evidence” (Brown, 2020, p. 99, emphasis added). Nonetheless, Brown rightly
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notes that it would be an “equivocation across functional distinctions” to say that val-
ues are equivalent to evidence, in the radically holist manner advocated by Clough and
Goldenberg, because evidence is a functional relation of empirical support between
data and theory, while values are normative grounds for practical judgments in situa-
tions of uncertainty (Brown, 2020, p. 206).
When understood more broadly as heuristics, we see better how values are not
usually evidence per se (though they might at times play justificatory roles of empirical
support for/against a hypothesis), but rather guides for motivating empirical inquiry,
ordering data classification, and directing theory building. Here, Brown suggests that
values play an even more significant role in empirical inquiry that precedes evidence,
for the empirical support we gain is brought about by the values that guided the
search in their direction (Brown, 2020, p. 100). That is, values provide frameworks for
asking questions, constructing models, and defining relevant evidence, thus providing
the epistemic setup for any empirical data to become evidence.
Recalling Anderson’s case study, feminist researchers approached the topic of
divorce with an open mind because of their feminist values, considering both the
positive possibility that divorce could liberate women from abusive husbands and the
negative potential that it might also enable negligent men to leave their wives and
increase their own fortunes in the process. We might call this mode interested inquiry,
the way in which values as heuristics direct us toward evidence for liberation. This is
perhaps an even wider, more social sense of fruitfulness than philosophers of science
typically have, under which values guide knowledge collection about aspects of living
that matter to us.
Thus, rather than treating values as evidence per se, we suggest it is often bet-
ter to think of values as heuristic tools, active and responsive to particular uses with
resistance or ease, signaling failure or success for the task at hand. Such pragmatic
interplay between values and evidence echoes Longino’s own words: “what constitutes
‘our world’ is not a given but a product of the interaction between the external material
reality that is ‘the world’ and our own pragmatic and intellectual needs” (1990, p. 221).
Now, one might object that, if contextual empiricists advocate for understanding val-
ues as heuristics, then maybe Longino really did “retreat from evidence” as Clough
claims. That is, a heuristic seems like a merely subjective, theoretical “scheme” that
filters objective, empirical “content,” so Longino’s empiricism would still be at risk of
skepticism and relativism. But this would be a misunderstanding of our approach: a
heuristic is an active framework—at least partially subject to community-wide empir-
ical evaluation—held by a community for building models that answer their research
questions, not merely a passive set of personal beliefs or idiosyncratic schemes. In
the next section, we use a case study to show how, contrary to this subjectivist view
of heuristics, their use is actually subject to communal validation according to their
fruitfulness, resulting in a partial, indirect dis/confirmation within certain contexts on
empirical grounds.
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4 A case study of contextual empiricism: disconfirming sexist values
in biology
The stakes of these debates about empirically assessing values include the contin-
uing threat of oppressive ideologies in science. What can Longino offer us against
unfair biases and in favor of feminism and social justice more generally? Goldenberg
and others charge that Longino’s brand of feminist empiricism lacks the “empiricist
grounds for endorsing feminist values over, say, androcentric and sexist values in
feminist research” (2014, p. 26). One might worry that “the feminism in [Longino’s]
gap feminist empiricism is [merely] a contingent feature of recent successful science
criticism” rather than something essential to its feminist values themselves (Solomon,
2012, p. 439). Likewise, Clough suggests that we need to see the problems associated
with sexist and racist values as an “empirical failure” rather than simply an ethical one
(2013a, p. 74).
While Longino’s view might legitimate feminist values in science prima facie,
Anderson contends that “it does not help us evaluate the different ways that values
might be deployed in inquiry” (Anderson, 2004, p. 2; see also Intemann, 2005,2010).
Without support for feminist values per se, Longino might be too inclusive and permis-
sive regarding sexist, racist, and other oppressive values in science. Dan Hicks (2011,
p. 337) calls this “the Nazi Problem”: that “Longino’s account of objectivity requires
the active cultivation of historically excluded and marginalized groups,” extended to
white supremacists, anti-Semites, misogynists, and homophobes.
In this section, we maintain that contextual empiricism can in fact supply empirical
grounds for excluding (delegitimizing) oppressive values like sexism from science
as empirically disconfirmed. To begin, recall that Longino advocates for a “practice-
based” feminism that frames “science as practice rather than content, process rather
than product” (1990, p. 188, emphasis added). Understanding Longino’s feminism as
practice-based and process-oriented, we can better see how contextual empiricists are
committed to feminism procedurally, particularly through shared communal norms.
She contends that feminist scientists practice “oppositional science” that challenges
dominant assumptions that exclude marginalized groups (Longino, 1990, p. 214).
Likewise, to promote diversity and inclusiveness in the process, more objective com-
munities practice democracy by attempting to mitigate hierarchies of authority among
scientists (1990, p. 78, 2002, p. 128).
Now, there is genuine disagreement here between Longino and her critics over these
procedural features in her account because of her focus on a diversity of values (and
background assumptions) rather than other kinds of diversity, such as a diversity of
social positions and embodied experiences (see Intemann, 2010). Yet, these procedural
norms exemplify anti-oppressive commitments, and so they provide practitioners the
grounds to challenge unequal power relations within science, even if their effective-
ness and inclusiveness is limited. From our perspective, such criticism minimizes the
additional normative force supplied by other Longinian norms of objectivity, espe-
cially shared public community standards like standards of evidence (1990, p. 77;
2002, p. 130). As Longino writes, “constitutive values provide a check on the role of
contextual values and cultural assumptions. These constraints include empirical and
conceptual evaluation of assumptions” (1990, p. 223, emphasis added).
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This section uses the case of androcentrism in biological research on the evolution
of female orgasm to demonstrate how a contextual empiricist like Elisabeth Lloyd
(2005) can use community standards to critique the empirical, epistemic strength of
sexist values, in terms of effects on the logic of research questions (see also Lloyd,
1993,2013,2015,2021). Here, evidence has empirically undermined widespread
background assumptions that prioritize cisgender men and male bodies and conflate
cisgender women’s sexuality with reproductive capacity. Echoing Longino, we main-
tain that while it is not always possible, there are some situations when oppressive
values like androcentrism and heteronormativity are disconfirmed on fairly straight-
forward empirical grounds for specific uses.10 This case study shows that Longino’s
contextual empiricism, contrary to the claims of her critics, is indeed empiricist about
values, particularly when it comes to the empirical fruits of feminist heuristics in fields
like sexology, genetics, and anatomy.
4.1 Empirically assessing values in the case of the female orgasm
In her investigation of 21 evolutionary explanations of female orgasm, Lloyd applies
and further develops Longino’s contextual empiricism (2005, p. 220). Lloyd demon-
strates that certain values played major roles in causing the empirical deficiency of
explanatory models for the evolution of female orgasm. She focuses on Longino’s
requirement that objective science comes from communities with publicly recog-
nized standards for evaluating theories, hypotheses, and observations. Lloyd also uses
Anderson’s emphasis on the partiality of evidence to ground her contextual empiricist
analysis, appealing “to all facets of available empirical data,” especially “data that...
are inconsistent with one’s assumptions” (2005, pp. 244–245).
Lloyd treats the self-styled “ardent adaptationists,” that is, those extreme advo-
cates of natural selection who are strongly committed to finding adaptive, functional
accounts for each and every trait, while assuming that it arises from natural selection
(Alcock, 1987). She investigates their adherence to a distinct set of standards of evi-
dence compared to the main body of the evolutionary community, which considers
a broader range of evolutionary factors, including genetic linkage, phyletic inertia,
developmental byproduct, as well as adaptations (further elaborated and supported in
Lloyd, 2015,2021). Lloyd describes contrasting roles for the scientific value of adap-
tationism with more contextual background assumptions, focusing on three specific
sets (2005, pp. 233–36):
1. Androcentrism: looking at the world from an exclusively male perspective, neglect-
ing a unique female point of view;
2. Human uniqueness: emphasizing the differences between humans and our recent
common ancestors and relatives; and
3. Heteronormative procreative focus: assuming that all evolutionarily significant sex
is heterosexual intercourse between males and females with the direct potential
for offspring.
10 For more ethics/justice-oriented approaches for criticizing sexist science, see Kourany (2010) and Hicks
(2014).
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Showing how these value-laden background assumptions influence empirical reason-
ing and practice, she weaves a complex web of interactions of values, heuristics,
and evidence. Accordingly, Lloyd emphasizes Longino’s requirement that scientific
communities engage in critiques of their own background assumptions using publicly
recognized standards: “we can see that the [above three assumptions] are implicated
in partial treatments of the data, in which relevant data are ignored. The same is true
for adaptationism” (2005, p. 248).
Following Longino, Lloyd evaluates the background assumptions of androcentrism,
adaptationism, and heteronormativity relative to empirical data and communal norms
(Lloyd, 2005, p. 249). In an early articulation of the logic and pragmatics of research
questions (Lloyd, 2015,2021), she spells out her expansion of Longino’s community
standards, including:
1. Standards of what questions to ask;
2. Standards of what empirical evidence is relevant and appropriately established in
answering those questions; and
3. Standards of what kind of explanation is appropriate, or what answer to the question
is suitable (Lloyd, 2005, p. 250).
She then compares the various sub-communities’ uses of these sets of standards,
emphasizing empirical evidence.
What Lloyd found in the totality of evidence for the 21 available evolutionary
theories for female orgasm was very disappointing. Nearly all of the various “pair
bond” theories included an empirical assumption well-known to be false among sex-
ologists—as well as many cisgender women—namely the assumption that whenever
a heterosexual couple engages in vaginal intercourse, the woman reliably has orgasm
(90–100%). In fact, the most recent frequency for unassisted intercourse without man-
ual clitoral stimulation is 21–30% (Shirazi et al., 2018), with other studies giving even
lower estimates (from 4 to 18%) of cisgender women who reliably orgasm with vaginal
penetration alone (see Mahar et al., 2020).
In addition, the two accounts using the then-trending “sperm competition” theory
also failed on the evidence, since the ten features associated with sperm competition
were all missing in human cisgender men, and the statistics of the single experimental
study were extremely flawed (Lloyd, 2005, pp. 179–219; Dixson, 2012). Moreover, all
20 of the adaptation-based explanations required a firm positive correlation between
genetic fitness (number of offspring) and orgasm rate, which was undermined empir-
ically after the publication of her 2005 book, showing orgasm rate has no effect on
number of offspring (Zietsch & Santtila, 2013).
Amongst the shambles, Lloyd found that only one theory of the evolution of female
orgasm’s maintenance in the population was positively supported by a number of
pieces of empirical evidence. The “indirect selection” theory, founded in stabilizing
selection in males, says that the female orgasm reflex evolved along with the clitoris and
other structures, features, and properties, because those features were evolutionarily
advantageous in male members of the species. Because these features enabling the
reflex developed early in the process of emerging from embryo to infant to adult, both
the male and female fetus (and infant and adult) develop them. Lloyd (2005,2015) calls
this the “byproduct/bonus” theory, as female orgasm in primates, including humans
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assigned female at birth, is the result of the stabilizing selection on male primates,
which affords contemporary cisgender women and other humans born with a clitoris
the benefit of peaks of sexual pleasure.
The anthropologist and sociobiologist Donald Symons (1979) created this byprod-
uct theory, carefully eliminating competing theories and advancing empirical evidence
for this explanation. Unfortunately for the reader, his well-supported indirect selec-
tion theory was buried in such an unfortunately androcentric book that, naturally, some
feminists took objection to his work (see Lloyd, 2005, pp. 139–140). These critics,
both philosophers and biologists, objected that Symons’ theory of female orgasm did
not take account of the full complexity of female sexuality, that it devalued women’s
sexual experiences, and that it still treated female orgasm androcentrically as a proxy
for male orgasm (see Wakil, 2021).
Disregarding the indirect selection theory’s origin in this clearly male-centered
book, Lloyd concluded that it was nevertheless the most empirically well-supported
approach of all 21 theories, and that because of the strength of the evidence, it should
be considered seriously and more research done (2005, pp. 220–257). She further
maintained that this byproduct/bonus explanation was less biased with androcentric
values than the others because it separates women’s sexuality from its reproductive
function (Lloyd, 2005, p. 238). Furthermore, simply because this “bonus” is causally
derivative from a male trait does not entail the female trait has any less value (since
natural selection is not the arbiter of human values). On the contrary, androcentric
heuristics have obscured many of the relevant observations supporting the by-product
hypothesis.
As Lloyd herself has argued (2005, p. 220), her treatment of this case is exem-
plary of the Longinian framework: she shows where evidential reasoning depends on
value-laden background assumptions like androcentrism and uses external (feminist)
criticism to improve the empirical adequacy of the explanations.11 Critics of our link-
ing Lloyd and Longino might contrast the apparent singularity of Lloyd’s conclusion
with Longino’s permissiveness: that is, they might object that while Longino is an
empiricist, she supports a thorough-going “theoretical pluralism,” in which different
approaches with different background assumptions “constitute a nonunifiable plurality
of partial knowledges” (Longino, 2006, p. 127; see also 1990, p. 230). For instance, her
more recent work has contrasted competing scientific approaches to studying human
behavior (quantitative behavioral genetics vs. developmental systems theory vs. socio-
environmental approaches, etc.). Here, Longino famously argued there is “a plurality
of approaches generating accounts of the etiology of individual behavioral dispositions
that are not reducible to some fundamental level of causation, not integratable into
a single comprehensive account, and not empirically commensurable in a way that
would permit elimination of rivals in favor of one” (2013, p. 135, emphasis added).
Accordingly, one might reason that contrary to Lloyd’s analysis in her 2005 book, a
true contextual empiricist should embrace not just one theory but several theories, as
a plurality is necessary for understanding complex phenomena like female orgasm.
11 Longino herself agrees with the authors that Lloyd’s work fits well within the framework of contextual
empiricism (pers. comm., 2019).
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Synthese (2023) 201 :220 Page 21 of ?? 220
This objection is misleading because it mistakes pluralism for a commitment to a
plurality of theories, when in fact pluralism is more of an attitude that contrasts with
the dominant monism among scientists who assume they will eventually eliminate
plurality: “Monism exists primarily as a default assumption underlying polemical and
philosophical arguments about these [various scientific] approaches [to behavior].
Pluralism is best understood as an attitude to adopt with respect to the multiplicity
of approaches in contemporary sciences” (Longino, 2013, p. 138). Thus, a pluralist
of Longino’s stripe would be satisfied with holding incompatible theories but remain
open to the possibility that, in some cases, there may be only one theory with adequate
empirical support.12 Accordingly, a pluralist should not support the remaining 20
theories (in the literature at the time) after Lloyd and others have shown that they were
contradicted by abundant relevant evidence, along with their constitutively value-laden
background assumptions.
Thus, while one might see this as a possible tension between Lloyd and Longino,
it actually exposes a shared response to the threat of relativism. Lloyd’s analysis
illustrates how Longino’s contextual empiricism is capable of avoiding a pernicious
relativism and the “global skepticism” that “all of our representations could be floating
free of the world, to varying degrees” (Clough, 1998, p. 101; see also Intemann, 2005):
The pluralism of contextual empiricism here is better understood as rooted in fallibilism
(the refusal to accept any belief as certain) rather than radical global skepticism (the
active doubting of all beliefs in the absence of absolute certainty). Advocating for a
plurality of approaches, in line with Longino and Lloyd, is rooted in the historically
established ability of science to fail and the tight alliance between dominant science
and hegemonic powers. Lloyd herself notes that female orgasm can be described in a
variety of ways, including “relatively reductionist biological descriptions” involving
muscle spasms and blood flow in the pelvic and genital area, or a more psychologically
robust description involving hormones and neurotransmitters since “female orgasm
turns out to be quite a bit more neurologically complicated than the simple knee-kick
reflex” (2005, p. 23). In typical fallibilist manner, Lloyd emphasizes in her introduction
that her analysis is partial and provisional: “Though at this time I find no credible
evidence that female orgasm is an adaptation, I am open to such a finding. Female
orgasm may very well turn out to be an adaptation, exquisitely designed for some
special but obscure function. None of my arguments is meant to rule this possibility
out” (2005, p. 17). The key here is that because of the joint commitment to fallibilism
and pluralism, contextual empiricism can accommodate both the parsimony that Lloyd
(2005) promotes with her work on female orgasm as well as the permissiveness that
Longino (2013) has advocated in her work on human behavior (for more on pluralism
in evolution, see Lloyd, 2001).
In line with such pluralism, one might also support a complementary theory on
female orgasm. Inspired by Lloyd’s research, Pavliˇcev and Wagner (2016) have pur-
sued another related research question about evolution and orgasminvolving its deepest
origins among mammals. They offered empirical evidence supporting a view that the
orgasmic reflex derived from the reflex contraction of the ovary upon release of an
ovum (Pavliˇcev et al., 2019). This hypothesis (concerning adaptive spasms of the ovary
12 We thank Helen Longino for her help in wording this response.
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220 Page 22 of ?? Synthese (2023) 201 :220
in the deep past) may seem to undermine the byproduct/bonus hypothesis because it
appeals to an archaic adaptation, yet, as Lloyd has argued, the two explanations are
compatible13: An ovarian spasm is not functionally equivalent to a modern spasm of
the circle of muscles and tissues around the vaginal opening (a common contemporary
physiological definition of a female orgasm), nor do these authors claim that it is. And
Pavliˇcev and Wagner (2016) are clear that they do not see female orgasm as being
adapted by evolution to its present state in humans (see also Pavliˇcev et al., 2019).
We contend that these successes of Lloyd’s case study support Longino’s idea that
empirically assessing values like androcentrism is a communal process. However, one
might worry that while we have argued that shared norms provided the resources to crit-
icize sexist science, the value of androcentrism itself was one of evolutionary biology’s
entrenched communal norms. That is, one might see Lloyd’s intervention as simply
another “traditional logical empiricist framework” that is continuous with “business
as usual” science, premised on the naïve idea that “gender bias—in common with all
biases—produces inferior science, sometimes called ‘bad science’” (Solomon, 2012,
pp. 436–438). Thus, it could appear that the success achieved by Lloyd’s intervention
was not because of Longino’s “transformative criticism” based on specific values like
feminist heuristics, but rather because of the simple self-correcting mechanisms of
biased science based on empirically false assumptions.
In response, we contend that Lloyd has shown how her analysis of evidence and
values is a natural extension of the Longinian picture: Contrary to Solomon’s (2012,
p. 437) characterization of Lloyd (2005) as a logical empiricist “trained to try to keep
scientific reasoning free of all bias,” Lloyd’s actual framework of analysis, the Logic
and Pragmatics of Research Questions (Lloyd, 2015; Morrison, 2021), emphasizes
the importance of values and the community work entailed in science. It is the active
scientific community of researchers who determine not only the research questions
being pursued, but also their possible and responsive answers, and what the standards of
acceptable evidence might be in any given case (Lloyd, 2015). Contextual empiricism
offers a social and evidential analysis of the relations between values, questions,
answers, and their empirical support. The relevant standards and values derive from the
community and are applied by individual scientists and smaller groups (Lloyd, 2021).
Empirical evidence does in fact work against androcentrism and ardent adaptationism,
in accordance with the empiricist values held in the wider evolutionary community—a
vivid and concrete example of the Longinian picture. But what does this communal
process of disconfirming values actually look like under Longino’s view?
4.2 The process of confirming/disconfirming values empirically
Lloyd’s (2005) case study demonstrates how there is a constellation of values working
as heuristics and interacting synergistically with evolutionary and scientific norms of
explanation to generate community accepted science. Here, adaptationism, heteronor-
mativity, and androcentrism have worked in concert, supplementing the (misperceived)
13 Lloyd’s talk in October 2016, “Evaluating the New Theory of the evolution of female orgasm,” Human-
ities Center, Yale University.
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Synthese (2023) 201 :220 Page 23 of ?? 220
empirical strength of functionalist accounts and their supporting evidence. The heuris-
tics of androcentrism and heteronormativity were reinforced by ardent methodological
adaptationism, only to be detected and undermined as such by a feminist, scientific,
and philosophical critic (see Lloyd, 2013).
Thus, there is no one, single value or heuristic being confirmed or disconfirmed in
relation to community norms. We cannot get a unique determination (akin to Popperian
falsification) in science; however, we are not left with radical underdetermination or
subjectivism in a given case like ours. The values embedded in various evolutionary
biological accounts are based on community norms of explanation and confirmation
of evolutionary models, which follow certain standards, explored independently and
confirmed by their empirical fruits (Lloyd, 1988b).
As Longino noted, at times there may be no studies available to empirically test a
given value-laden background assumption: these can involve conceptual and norma-
tive dimensions at first before empirical data become available (1990, p. 183). As one
reviewer of Lloyd’s book wrote, tongue-in-cheek, “The sad fact is that, for now, all
statements about the evolution of the female orgasm are conjectures in an empirical
vacuum. To advance the debate, we need data… In short, it’s time to collect data. With-
out it, the debate will remain like sex sometimes is: furious, empty and anticlimactic”
(Judson, 2005, pp. 916–17). While there was significant evidence against adaptationist
accounts at that time, conceptual critiques by Lloyd directly inspired further empir-
ical studies (e.g., Wallen & Lloyd, 2011, p. 780; Zietsch & Santtila, 2011, p. 1097,
2013, p. 253; Shirazi et al., 2018, p. 606; Blair et al., 2018, p. 2), eventually building
the capacity to more directly empirically evaluate these heuristics.14 For example,
the androcentrism that had anchored early adaptationist accounts was decisively chal-
lenged by later studies demonstrating the anatomical reason for why some cisgender
women have orgasm reliably with (unassisted) vaginal intercourse while most do not
(Oakley et al., 2014; Shirazi et al., 2018; Vaccaro, 2015; Wallen & Lloyd, 2011).
Because of new interest in the byproduct explanation from Lloyd (2005), new empir-
ical studies became available confirming and discussing this hypothesis, which had
been largely neglected for decades, and more recent scientific reviews now take this
non-adaptation hypothesis as an equal contender in the field (e.g., Welling, 2014).
Adaptationist explanations assumed a strong fitness effect of female orgasm, but
geneticists inspired by Lloyd’s critique found no correlation with genetic fitness, once
they investigated this assumption directly through two twin studies (Zietsch & Santtila,
2011,2013). These geneticists acknowledged their debt to Lloyd’s critique explicitly:
“The heat of this debate has recently intensified …after the 2005 publication of a
provocative book by Elizabeth [sic] Lloyd” (Zietsch & Santtila, 2011, p. 1097). This
genetic evidence constitutes an existential challenge to all adaptationist theories, which
now needed to explain why, if selection produced female orgasm, there is no evidence
of adaptedness.
All this shows the importance of social processes of transformative criticism for
investigating value-laden background assumptions empirically: In this instance, sci-
entists set out to test the byproduct approach to determine empirical support for it.
14 All of these empirical studies cite Lloyd (2005) as foundational. For instance, Talia Shirazi and her
colleagues note the major significance of Lloyd’s critique for the framing of their research (2018, p. 606).
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Lloyd’s critical feminist work had large impacts on positive scientific developments,
especially in genetics, anatomy, and sexology, changing the very research questions of
these fields. Empirical evidence is cultivated in the context of inquiry guided by val-
ues operating as heuristics including background assumptions, dissatisfaction with the
current state of the evidence, and desires for new evidence. Developing such empirical
evidence requires values and can disconfirm values as more or less fruitful heuristics
for building models to make sense of the empirical world. Thus, contra Clough’s (1998)
claim that contextual empiricism takes values to be passive and negative “schemes”
that merely screen off empirical “content,” we see here how feminism can operate as
an active heuristic that positively influences the empirical bases with which we can
assess value-laden background assumptions.
Lloyd’s book has continued to motivate genetic, physiological, and behavioral
research expanding knowledge about female orgasm. In sexology, these include the
first statistically significant findings on the orgasm rate for bisexual and lesbian women
(Garcia et al., 2014). This study, led by Justin Garcia including Lloyd herself, high-
lighted the issue of women’s neglected sexual satisfaction: while heterosexual men
orgasm 86% of the time during sex with a familiar partner, for heterosexual women the
rate is 24% less (62%) (Garcia et al., 2014). Given that lesbian women had higher rates
of orgasm (75%), one likely explanation—pursued by feminists many decades earlier
(e.g., Hite, 1976)—is that the difference results less from female anatomy and more
from poor technique, gender roles, and sexual attitudes. In the time since Garcia et al.
(2014) established the sizable gap between lesbian and heterosexual women’s orgasm
frequencies, there has been an explosion of research on gendered “orgasm gaps” (see
review by Mahar et al., 2020), including empirical studies on the most effective behav-
iors for stimulating partnered female orgasm across heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian
women (Blair et al., 2018; Frederick et al., 2018) as well as study of the gender dif-
ferences in sex questionnaires regarding cisgender women’s orgasm with intercourse
(Shirazi et al., 2018).15
Now that we have seen how feminist values have motivated this research on dispar-
ities in orgasm frequency by gender and sexuality, one might ask: why have feminist
values steered researchers in this particular direction? Recalling the idea of interested
inquiry (see Sect. 3.3), feminist heuristics guide us toward creating a world that pro-
motes sexual pleasure for all genders and sexualities and, thus, a world free from sexual
guilt, shame, and frustration. Many cisgender women have been made to feel shame
at not having orgasm from unassisted heterosexual intercourse; yet, through femi-
nist guided-research, we can now show empirically that variation in women’s orgasm
frequency is partially explained by anatomy and cultural attitudes: these include the
distance between the clitoris and the vagina and the likelihood of penile stimulation
with penetration (Vaccaro, 2015; Wallen & Lloyd, 2011), as well as androcentric, het-
eronormative attitudes toward sex that prioritize vagina-around-penis/penis-in-vagina
intercourse over more direct clitoral stimulation (Mahar et al., 2020).
Thus, at the root of these sexual inequalities are harmful gender roles that neglect
women’s pleasure, normalized by the dated Freudian theory that clitoral orgasms are
15 Frederick et al. also explicitly note the scientific impact of Lloyd’s book for their field (2018, p. 274).
See footnote 14.
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“immature” and that becoming a woman involves developing the ability to orgasm
with (unassisted) heterosexual vaginal penetration; yet, those people born with bodies
assigned female at birth and socialized as cisgender women have long experienced the
inadequacy of this account of “frigidity” and have developed feminist critiques of it
rooted in the current science (e.g., Beauvoir, 1953; Koedt, 1970). Their experience of
such sexual inequality and neglect has enabled scientists to generate knowledge about
the existence of the phenomena of orgasms gaps because of their scientific desire to
create models and collect relevant data to quantify it more systematically (see Lloyd,
2005, pp. 26–27; Shirazi et al., 2018). Values are rooted in our embodied experiences
of the world, and feminist values operate as guides for creating new scientific facts,
particularly knowledge in service of liberation for all.
5 Not values as direct empirical evidence, but values as heuristic
tools in the logic of research questions for specific studies
Therefore, with this case it is clear that value-laden background assumptions oper-
ating as heuristics are empirically assessable. From the perspective of contextual
empiricism, a value in the very abstract sense (like androcentrism or feminism) is
disconfirmed only limitedly and indirectly (see also Solomon, 2012). However, when
a value functions as a “heuristic” that constructs evolutionary models, motivates sci-
entific data collection, and prompts biological explanations about female orgasm, it
is more strongly dis/confirmed within a specific domain like primatology, human
anatomy, and human genetics. As contextual empiricists, we judge these values by
their empirical fruits in our scientific pursuits.
We have defended contextual empiricism’s approach to assessing values empirically
as a more viable form of feminist empiricism than the direct “values as evidence”
approach developed in opposition to a caricature of Longino. In fact, the very language
of “values as evidence” coined by Goldenberg (2015) comes not from older feminist
studies of values in science like Longino’s work, but rather from more recent work
in the environmentalist line of philosophy of science, specifically Heather Douglas’s
groundbreaking (2009) book. There, Douglas introduces the conception of direct vs.
indirect influences of values, which crucially prohibits scientists’ use of values as
evidential support for their acceptance/rejection of hypotheses (2009, p. 97). That is,
values could either influence scientific decisions directly, functioning as the primary
warrant or reason in support of the judgment, or indirectly, influencing the standards
of evidence that a scientist requires for accepting a claim. While Douglas accepts
the direct function for non-technical judgments, like choosing research topics, she is
critical of values playing a direct role throughout the technical parts of the scientific
process: “Values should never suppress evidence, or cause the outright rejection (or
acceptance) of a view regardless of evidence” (2009, p. 113). It seems to us that
feminist empiricists like Goldenberg have appropriated Douglas’s categories (values
as evidence vs. values as standards of evidence) and her normative position (when the
direct/indirect role is appropriate) and then misattributed them to Longino.
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220 Page 26 of ?? Synthese (2023) 201 :220
Given that Clough and Goldenberg do in fact wish to support a more direct approach
to treating values as evidence—in which there is a more radical holism and a “fac-
ticity of values” in general (Goldenberg, 2021, p. 57)—this connection with Douglas
helps contrast our middle-ground approach: While contextual empiricism does not
go quite as far as Douglas to completely prohibit direct use of values (in the more
technical contexts), our understanding of values as heuristics means that they are less
directly evaluated than Clough and Goldenberg suggest is typically possible, as they
are embedded in the background of a community in the logic of research questions.
Values as heuristics can be subject to empirical disconfirmation as we have shown, but
more indirectly through the failure of their use in generating useful research questions,
motivating more complete data collection, and building empirically adequate models.
In sum, we have elaborated Longino’s vision of values as heuristics, and we have
shown the applicability of this empiricist account to values in biology. We expect this
robust, contextualist view to have many successful applications in other domains of
science as well. Over three decades after its publication, we might have more to learn
from what we have forgotten about Science as Social Knowledge than what we think
we remember.
Acknowledgements We gave an earlier version of this paper at the 2022 International Conference on
Engaging Ethics and Epistemology in Science at Leibnizhaus in Hannover, Germany, and received many
helpful comments from the audience. We have benefited from the generous feedback of many colleagues
and friends, including Kevin Elliott, Ryan Ketcham, Anna Leuschner, Helen Longino, Naomi Oreskes,
Ryan O’Loughlin, and Manuela Fernández Pinto, as well as three anonymous reviewers.
Funding Open access funding provided by SCELC, Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium.
Declarations
Competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal
relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use
is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/.
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