"Second Sex": Second Thoughts

Abstract

Although simone de beauvoir, in "the second sex", and sarah blaffer hrdy, in "the woman that never evolved", both criticize the misappropriation of biological research to belittle women, they fail to recognize that misogynist assumptions also infect many biological theories. the belief that science at its best is objective and value-free facilitates rather than mitigates its distortive possibilities. a discussion of what constitutes appropriateness in constellations of values influencing what we take to be good science can supply the check to relativism thought to follow inevitably from the collapse of the fact-value distinction.

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