Talk:Sandra Harding

incorrect citation
The quotation "Isaac Newton's Principia ... of female nature'" does NOT appear on p. 264 of Harding 1986 (the page in question is part of the index). Please provide the correct citation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by OverOceans (talk • contribs) 15:51, 27 September 2006 (UTC)


 * you can go to amazon and search inside this book and it seems to be on page 113. I can't completely verify, amazon kept crashing an old version of mozilla. 71.223.102.125 06:12, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Assessment of Harding's claims
I removed the following sentence:

In particular, her assertion that men and women produce fundamentally different scientific truths is considered to be nonsense by mainstream scientists.

Harding doesn't actually make this claim (or, if she does, you'll have to show me the citation! Her positions on gender, race etc are far more subtle than this.) Furthermore, a single paragraph on Harding by a mathematician in the AMS notices in no way proves that "mainstream scientists" as a group think any such thing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Scorpia.mossmonn (talk • contribs) 00:46, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I've added back the Sullivan reference removed by the above WP:SPA, though with softened wording. Here's a short, fair-use quote from that article from pp 1128: "Likewise, men and women would produce masculine and feminine sciences." It seems pretty clear that at least one scientist interprets her writing this way. (Mainstream scientists do, in fact, largely believe this as a group too – to wit, the whole Sokal affair affair was started by this very issue of Social Text which dealt with the "Science Wars".) If you feel that Sullivan is in error, please add additional sources that counter his claim – It is generally unacceptable to remove relevant, sourced material from an article. Thanks, Agricola44 (talk) 17:37, 15 November 2010 (UTC).

From Harding's article in Feminism and Science (ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino, Oxford 1996): "The starting point of standpoint theory--and its claim that is most often misread--is that in societies stratified by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or some other politics shaping the very structure of society, the activities of those at the top both organize and set limits on what persons who perform such activities can understand about themselves and the world around them." (240) In other words, *under conditions of sexism and gendered division of labor*, women will be able to make different knowledge claims than men. At least some "other scientists", including Donna Haraway and Fox Keller, agree (as cited in the same article). Finally, note that Sullivan doesn't refute Harding's claim, he simply states a different position ("it is my view that... the engine is sound".) So, three reasons I cut "relevant, sourced material" from the article: 1) it egregiously misrepresented Harding (and Sullivan, who doesn't cast her as an essentialist); 2) it is factually inaccurate to say that "mainstream scientists" as a group disagree; 3) Sullivan doesn't offer a refutation, let alone show that Harding's work is "nonsense".

Re: point two, I'm adding a "some" to further soften the claim.

The science wars produced a lot of vituperative, uninformed material on both sides. Let's not contribute on Wikipedia, eh? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Scorpia.mossmonn (talk • contribs) 16:08, 17 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Changing to "some" sounds like a very constructive compromise! Thanks. I plead ignorance on the esoterica you've posted above. However, I do disagree with your assertion about mainstream scientists. I think it is a fact that those scientists who are aware of postmodern philosophy (not the majority, to be sure, but more than you might think) do indeed hold it in low regard. Lots has been written to this effect, e.g. Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense. Anyhow, this is certainly not the place to debate such a broad subject. Appreciate your edit. I think it now represents the facts as they are in a fair and accurate way. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 17:38, 17 November 2010 (UTC).

Newton and "rape manual"
I think it would be useful if someone with knowledge in this area could expand a bit on some of her more well known controversies, such as her (now retracted) claim that Newton's Principia Mathematica is a "rape manual." This is mentioned very briefly at the end of the lead but offers no context or background for why she made this claim and why she later regretted it. Laval (talk) 23:22, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I edited the passage as she never referred to the book as a rape manual, she mentioned that a hypothetical feminist could call it a rape manual if a certain condition was true about metaphor in science. 24.193.83.14 (talk) 20:30, 30 June 2016 (UTC)Antithesis

I don't know know why or who included the last sentence of the lead about Newtons' 'rape manual' - either a. there (in the lead, or b. why the line reads:'In her book...' and then cites Scientific America? You can't smear a prominent feminist postcolonial science studies figure in the lead of their article. There could either be a controversy section added, which people can research and populate if necessary, or this needs to be removed immediately. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Joldt (talk • contribs) 16:42, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * For a variety of reasons, we generally don't add "Controversy" sections to articles about living persons. It might be appropriate to summarize this content in the body of the article, however, but we really need to make sure it's supported by reliable sources. Now if it's supported by so many sources that the issue is considered a significant part of the subject's biography, it certainly could warrant a mention in the lead. Our article are supposed to summarize what reliable sources say about the subject, and the lead is supposed to be a summary of the article body, so it makes sense that significant controversial content could get a mention in the lead. Now I personally don't know much about the issue or the sourcing, so I can't comment on any of that.
 * I will say that the lead seems long for what's in the body, and it's not a true summary. Some of that should probably get moved into the body itself. Woodroar (talk) 21:05, 10 June 2020 (UTC)


 * why the line reads:'In her book...' and then cites Scientific America? This one is actually easy: for reasons of weight and npov, if we're going to select parts of someone's writings to comment on, we should be guided by what parts of their writings have been noted by secondary sources. I also agree with everything  said. (I have no knowledge or opinion opinion on the following topics: (1) what did Harding write on this topic? (2) was it covered in secondary sources to the extent that it belongs in her biography? (3) was the sentence you removed an appropriate combination of source and content?) --JBL (talk) 22:42, 10 June 2020 (UTC)