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Helen Longino has debated for the significance of values and social interactions to scientific inquiry. She's the main figure in feminist and social epistemology. She has written multiple books about the role of women in science.
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In her first book, Science as a Social Knowledge, she argued for the relevance of social values, or values which are part of the human context of science, to the justification of scientific knowledge as objective. In her contextual empiricism, she argues that data and observations of the sort taken by scientists that are not by themselves evidence for or against any particular hypotheses. Rather, the relevance of any particular data for any given hypothesis is decided by human beliefs
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(cont'd) and assumptions about what kinds of data can support what kinds of hypotheses.
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Notable works:
Helen Longino, Cornelia Homburg, Catherine Wagner. Art and Science: Investigating Matter. 1965.
Longino, Helen. Feminism and Science . 1996.
—. Science as Social Knowledge. 1990.
—. Scientific Pluralism. 2006.
—. Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. 2013.
—. The Fate of Knowledge. 2002. -
Longino writes a new book, The Fate of Knowledge. In this work she goes over and attempts to reconcile the accounts of knowledge of philosophers and sociologists of science.
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Longino wrote her most recent book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. In this piece, Longino investigates five scientific approaches to human aggression and sexuality in terms of their epistemological frameworks, the types of knowledge they can produce, and their pragmatic goals.