Professor Sandra Harding, Women's Studies and Education, UCLA

Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism, Feminism: Do they require new research
epistemologies?

The prevailing philosophies of science, with their theories of what should
count as good method, were constriucted and institutionalised in the
natural and social sciences mostly prior to the end of World War Two. It
was only after the war that decolonization processes began to end formal
European rule of much of the rest of the world, and that race- and
gender-based civil rights movements arose in the US, Europe and many other
places around the world.These economic , social and political changes
generated needs for new kinds of knowledge about nature and social
relations for the dominant groups as well as for those in the former
colonies and in the race-and gender-based new social movements.
Epistemological and political assumptions underlying the classical research
methodologies were challenged by these social movements. Moreover, during
the same period, the classical philosophies, histories and sociologies of
the natural and social sciences were undergoing a critical reevaluation in
Europe and the European diasporia - the 'post-Kuhnian' philosophies and
social studies of the sciences, for short. This paper will point too
important ways in which similar calls for new ways of thinking about
research methodology have emerged from all of these post World War Two
social/science movements. Yes, multiculturalism, postcolonialism and
feminism join post-Kuhnian science studies to challenge the natural and
social sciences to produce more empirically and theoretically adequate, and
politically appropriate, research epistemologies.