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Born
Birth -
Education
Longino received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1966 -
Masters
M.A. in philosophy from the University of Sussex, England, in 1967 -
PhD
She earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1973, under the supervision of Peter Achinstein -
Period: to
Teaching
Taught at the University of California, San Diego -
Work
In her work, Longino discusses the social dimensions of scientific knowledge and the relations of social and cognitive values. She examines feminist and social epistemologies and their implications for scientific pluralism.[12] Rather than suggesting that there is a distinctively female way of knowing, Longino emphasizes the idea of "doing epistemology as a feminist", an approach bringing with it an awareness of the many ways in which a question may be characterized. -
Science as Social Knowledge
In her first book, Science as Social Knowledge (1990), Longino argued for the relevance of social values, or values which are part of the human context of science, to the justification of scientific knowledge as objective. In her contextual empiricism, she argues that observations and data of the sort taken by scientists are not by themselves evidence for or against any particular hypotheses. -
The Fate of Knowledge
Helen Longino seeks to break the current deadlock in the ongoing wars between philosophers of science and sociologists of science--academic battles founded on disagreement about the role of social forces in constructing scientific knowledge. While many philosophers of science downplay social forces, claiming that scientific knowledge is best considered as a product of cognitive processes, sociologists tend to argue .
