Truth Revolt
August 11, 2017
Science shouldn’t be misconstrued as truth because most of the foundations were laid by white men, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a particle physicist and philosopher of science at the University of Washington. Her argument appeared at Slate in an article titled, “Stop Equating ‘Science’ with Truth.”
Prescod-Weinstein’s entire premise was built on the Google employee memo which laid out factual differences between men and women and why women are less likely to enter fields of science and technology:
It is impossible to consider this field of science without grappling with the flaws of the institution—and of the deification—of science itself. For example: It was argued to me this week that the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains. The well-known scientist who made this comment to me is both a woman and someone who knows quite well that “peer-reviewed” and “correct” are not interchangeable terms. This brings us to the question that many have grappled with this week. It’s 2017, and to some extent scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s…
Science’s greatest myth is that it doesn’t encode bias and is always self-correcting. In fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias, and refusing to do anything about the fact that the data says something’s wrong.
Prescod-Weinstein puts “science” in quotations a lot in her piece because of its ties to Europe during the Enlightenment. “Much of the science that resulted from this system, conducted primarily by white men, is what helped teach us that women were the inferior sex,” she writes.
And those systems have been passed on through the ages through bad education and apparently, she is finally…