Ask any student what makes science different from religion, tradition, or plain guesswork, and the answer usually comes fast: science is objective, testable, and universal. It doesn’t matter who conducts the experiment or where; the result should hold true everywhere. This assumption sits so deep in how we’re taught to think that questioning it can feel almost heretical. Yet some of the most searching critiques of this idea have come not from science’s enemies, but from historians, philosophers, and feminist scholars who have spent their careers studying how scientific knowledge actually gets made. Their arguments don’t reject science. They ask a more uncomfortable question: is the picture of science we’ve inherited actually accurate?
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Knowing versus knowing about
The historian Jacques Barzun made a simple but sharp distinction that helps frame this whole debate: the difference between “to know” and “to know about.” Knowing about something is what the scientific method is built for. It is systematic, testable, and built from outward observation. Knowing, in the intimate sense, is different. It is the kind of awareness that comes from direct experience, intuition, or what Barzun called inward revelation.
This distinction matters because even the towering achievements of Western science don’t fit neatly into a picture of pure, step-by-step logic. Isaac Newton didn’t simply calculate his way to the laws of motion through mechanical reasoning alone; contemporaries describe a process involving sudden insight as much as deduction. Marie Curie’s breakthroughs in radioactivity similarly involved leaps that logic alone cannot fully account for. Even geometry, often held up as the purest of the sciences because it rests on abstract logic, took its foundational concepts, like points, lines, and angles, from human beings observing and measuring the physical world around them. If the “hardest” sciences carry traces of intuition and lived observation, the claim that science is nothing but detached, rational method starts to look incomplete.
Why feminist scholars started asking harder questions
From the 1970s onward, a group of feminist philosophers of science began examining not just what science discovers, but how it decides what counts as knowledge in the first place. Their central worry was that science, while claiming to be neutral, had actually developed within specific historical and social conditions, most of them shaped by men, by Western institutions, and by particular assumptions about whose perspective mattered.
Situated knowledge, not universal truth
Sandra Harding’s work on the philosophy of science argued that the major schools of feminist critique, whether pointing to bad science, to women’s distinct social experience, or to deeper flaws in scientific assumptions themselves, all converged on one point: knowledge is never generated from nowhere. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, feminist epistemology treats every knower as a situated knower, meaning that gender, along with race, class, and history, shapes what questions get asked and what counts as a valid answer.
Donna Haraway pushed this further with her concept of situated knowledge. Rather than aiming for an impossible “view from nowhere,” Haraway argued that useful, responsible knowledge comes from acknowledging exactly where the knower is standing, socially and historically, and being answerable for that position. Scholars analysing her work note that Haraway wanted a revised idea of objectivity built around embodiment rather than detachment, replacing the fantasy of seeing everything from nowhere with the more honest goal of seeing clearly from somewhere.
The problem with pretending to have no location
Haraway called the old model of scientific objectivity a kind of trick: the pretense that a researcher can split themselves entirely from their subject and observe it from an impossible, all-seeing vantage point. In reality, every researcher carries assumptions shaped by their background. Feminist scholars argued that true objectivity doesn’t come from erasing this location, it comes from naming it openly, so that readers can judge a claim with full knowledge of where it came from. This idea has quietly reshaped how anthropology trains its researchers to write about fieldwork, encouraging reflexivity about the anthropologist’s own position rather than a false claim of invisibility.
Science and the machinery of power
The feminist critique didn’t stop at gender. Scholars extended the same logic to race, class, and colonial history, arguing that knowledge produced under conditions of inequality tends to reinforce that inequality. A science built inside patriarchal institutions is likely to encode patriarchal assumptions. A science built inside colonial empires is likely to encode colonial ones.
This is not just a theoretical claim. Historians of science have documented how European powers used scientific classification, from botany to physical anthropology, to justify the idea that colonised peoples were intellectually inferior and therefore fit to be ruled. As one Smithsonian Magazine analysis of colonial science notes, nineteenth-century imperial thinkers pointed to the scientific successes of the West as supposed proof of European superiority, using that claim to justify colonisation itself. Scientific expeditions to catalogue plants, minerals, and peoples across Asia and Africa were rarely neutral fact-finding missions; they were often tied directly to the economic and administrative needs of empire.
Anthropology, as a discipline, was born inside exactly this arrangement. Its early practitioners studied colonised societies largely through a Western lens, often assuming that European categories of religion, kinship, and economy were the universal standard against which every other society should be measured. Historians studying this period point out that scientific institutions in colonies were frequently structured to serve imperial administration and legitimise European rule, rather than to build genuinely collaborative or locally rooted knowledge. This history is part of why contemporary anthropology spends so much energy examining its own assumptions rather than treating its methods as automatically neutral.
When physics doubts itself
Perhaps the most striking twist in this story is that the challenge to scientific objectivity hasn’t come only from outside science. It has come from within physics itself. Classical science assumed that a careful, well-trained observer could measure the world without disturbing it, that facts existed “out there,” waiting to be recorded exactly as they were.
Quantum theory unsettled this picture. At the subatomic level, the very act of measurement affects the system being measured, and outcomes that once seemed like straightforward, observer-independent facts turn out to be far more entangled with the position of the observer than classical physics ever imagined. Philosophers of physics have spent decades wrestling with what this means for the concept of objectivity itself. A recent paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science examines whether quantum measurement outcomes can still be considered fully objective facts, concluding that physics may need to settle for a more modest kind of objectivity than the absolute version science once claimed. If physics, the discipline most associated with hard, measurable certainty, is willing to admit this much doubt about its own foundations, the idea that Western science offers a single, complete, unchallengeable account of reality becomes much harder to defend.
Alongside this, the sheer scale of what remains unknown, from the vast, largely undetectable dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe, to the limits of human sensory perception itself, has made many scientists more cautious about older claims of near-total mastery over nature. Expanding frontiers of research are producing more open questions than settled answers, and a growing number of scientists are willing to engage seriously with knowledge systems outside the Western scientific tradition rather than dismissing them outright.
Situated knowledge as a way forward
None of this amounts to an argument that science is worthless or that all knowledge claims are equally valid. That is a common misreading of the feminist critique. The point is more precise: knowledge is always partial, always produced from somewhere, by someone, under specific historical conditions. Recognising this doesn’t weaken science; it makes it more honest and, ideally, more accountable.
For anthropology, a discipline that studies human diversity itself, this lesson has particular weight. If the field spent its early decades treating one culture’s categories as the universal yardstick for all others, then acknowledging the situatedness of knowledge is not an academic nicety. It is a correction that changes how research gets designed, who gets asked which questions, and whose interpretations are allowed to count as legitimate. Contemporary anthropologists are increasingly trained to be transparent about their own position, be it their nationality, class background, gender, or institutional affiliation, rather than pretending it has no bearing on what they observe and record.
What do you think? If all knowledge is shaped by the position of the person producing it, does that make objectivity an impossible goal, or simply a different kind of goal, one built on transparency rather than detachment? And where else, beyond science, do you see the same tension between claims of neutrality and the lived reality of who gets to define what counts as truth?
References
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11449887/
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-bears-fingerprints-colonialism-180968709/
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-science/science-and-imperialism-since-1870/5E0CA9C649A4542E398DEC33E19B7457
- https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/716169
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