HC 421H, Honors College colloquium: Women Write Science

Summary of first week's readings

From Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, "A Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 13, 2004
--humanities analyze representation, and investigate "conditions of expression, signification, and power" (later in the essay, humanistic training is characterized as "taxonomical, philosophical, indexical")

The triad on which analysis in the humanities is based: meaning, value, significance

Skills the humanities teach: insight, analysis, logic, speculation, historical knowledge, linguistic mastery, geographical precision, aesthetic production, complex religious understanding

The "manifesto":
• History matters
• Relationality reveals
• Conscience and critical memory trouble
• Creativity counts
• Social policy contains social assumptions and values
• Communication clarifies
• Diversity is important
• Linguistic diversity is essential to real heterogeneity

(Parallel this list with Fox Keller (2001) on what needs to be integrated with science: "Multiple social and political forces, psychological predispositions, experimental constraints, and cognitive demands," p. 141)

Evelyn Fox Keller readings–issues

–science discursively defined by reason and experiment, "objectivity," "neutrality," but these ideas themselves discursive

–conceptual and linguistic work does not occur in a vacuum

–the allied axes:

• the aims of scientific inquiry
• the questions judged most significant to ask
• the theoreticl and experimental methodologies deemed most productive
• what couts as an acceptable answer or satisfying explanation

–science as compelling

Second article–McClintock: "if you'd only just let the material tell you"; exceptions have meaning; a different goal for science: understanding rather than prediction, affirming connections; pluralistic

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