Notes

In 2025, thanks to the debates of the late 20th century, it’s very easy to be skeptical of scientific authority. We know and can see everywhere that science is practiced by people who are products of a time and place. They are not gods and their special skills do not and cannot empower them as individuals or as part of an institution to see nature perfectly. Objective fact, ha! That is merely an ideological fiction meant to disguise the intrinsic domination of the powerless by the powerful—women by men, poor societies by affluent societies, etc.

Yet this creates a bind for scholars who are critical of their own societies. Claims that social institutions perpetuate domination and inequality or mystify bias and prejudice are themselves claims of fact, not opinions or beliefs. To say that one group dominates another is to assume that domination is real and that the differences between groups are real. Yet is it really domination if the dominated group does not diagnose it the same way as an external observer does? To understand domination, we need to see what things look like from another person’s perspective—we need relativism. But embracing relativism ultimately leads to incommensurate paradigms, islands of truth, each equally valid.

No one is God, and no one has omniscience or omnividence (see Abbott [1884] 1885, 125). Each of us has a body. Are we then always limited, minds trapped in bodies? What is the alternative?

Haraway’s works for this week lay the groundwork for a new framework that can abandon a priori foundations for either objective science or critical theory, and this will lead to the network perspective that we will examine for the rest of the semester.

Keywords

cyborg, oikos, objectivity, social construction, situated knowledge

Learning outcomes

• Understand Haraway’s desire to escape from a dilemma between seeing scientific knowledge as either objective and neutral or determined by social forces and distorting.
• Understand why basic kinds of questions and concerns for both radical politics and critical theory change in the absence of any settlement on the nature of human subjectivity.