Reviews for Governing America's Urban Areas

The average rating for Governing America's Urban Areas based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-26 00:00:00 Peter-yves Thynne I found this work to be very illuminating in certain respects, and yet intractably problematic in others. The first few chapters are mostly great, but it begins a slow dissent from there into some questionable assertions. To begin, Longino's emphasis on the importance of background assumptions is vital and cannot be ignored. She successfully demonstrates their necessity to the framing of evidence and provides a precise account of the relation between hypothesis and evidence. Moreover, her distinction between constitutive and contextual values, which provides a foundation for the work as a whole, provides a nice balance between the influence of the internal epistemic values of science and the external social values of society at large. Finally, the weight she attaches to the social character of science (a debt to Popper, among others) continues the trend of "socializing" knowledge, and it is, indeed, important that science be recognized as a social activity and practice. However, as I read on, little things here and there would pop up that were clearly wrong, and those little things led into bigger things that I couldn't bring myself to agree with Longino on. For instance, she falsely groups Popper with the logical positivists, and then she makes the error of claiming his demarcation criterion as one differentiating significance and non-significance, rather than marking the difference between science and non-science. Around the same time, out of nowhere she claims that values can have no place in scientific realism (a claim defended weakly, if even at all). It's also interesting to note that she stresses the individualistic character of "positivism" (a term she uses vaguely and liberally throughout the work) when Popper himself (one of the arch-positivists to her, no doubt) repeatedly stressed the social character of science. What else did I find inaccurate or misleading? Well, in discussing the contextual values that may influence science, she never considers the way contextual values may influence her own criticisms of certain forms of science, which seems oddly lacking when such an examination presumably must follow from her entire argument (contextual values must be able to affect philosophy as well as science). And, furthermore, in writing of a possible influence from profit-interests to scientific findings, she's never clear about how to distinguish between an incidental link from a causal one, so as a reader I'm left wondering how we can tell when, for example, a pharmaceutical company's scientists are being unduly influenced by profit motives rather than epistemic considerations. Also, Longino fails to consider the possibility of any objective, lasting ways to characterize objects of inquiry within science. Or rather she may have considered it, but she doesn't write anything about it, or she dismissed the notion as impossible, which seems premature to me. When discussing actual research programs, it gets worse. She says that she's not out to dismiss any research, but of course that's exactly what she tries to do, so she's disingenuous in that regard. And she also says that she isn't out to characterize any of it as "bad science," but of course that's the strongly implicit message. Another problem is that she continually confuses sex-appropriate/inappropriate traits with sex-typical/atypical ones. Her discussion of man-the-hunter and women-the-gatherer theories of intelligence, moreover, assumes mutual exclusivity. About the two theories she says, "As long as both frameworks offer coherent and comprehensive accounts of the data, neither can displace the other." But that misses the point, because that's precisely what's at issue--followers of one theory argue that the other doesn't completely account for the data in some way, or that the other theory is conceptually mistaken in some regard. On a different note, she dismisses what she calls the "linear-hormonal" model of behavior for appealing to animal studies, among other considerations. But then, ironically, she directly appeals to an animal study to support her "selectionist" model! I should, however, interject here and say that I do appreciate her account of "strong interactionism," and agree completely with it. But another crude confusion she makes quite often is between biologically influenced behavior and biologically determined behavior. It may have saved her some critical remarks if she had heeded that difference. I also want to say something of her notion of objectivity: She claims that objectivity in science is a function of community practices rather than any kind of accurate representation of reality independent of mere opinion. So, she goes on, scientific objectivity is no different than the sort of objectivity found in literary theory or art criticism. I don't know how someone can sincerely make such a claim, but it wholly undervalues the successes that the sciences have reaped and the progress they have demonstrated in comparison to something like literary theory. Lastly, for the kicker. She says, "When faced with a conflict between these [political] commitments and a particular model of brain-behavior relationships we allow the political commitments to guide the choice." Wow. That's exactly what's wrong with the heart of her views about science. Rather than guiding our decision by explanatory scope, empirical content, or predictive success, for example, we just, instead, let our politics dictate the choice for us if we must make a hard decision. So why did I give this work 3 stars? Well, like I mentioned in the first paragraph, I really did find the stuff on background assumptions, contextual/constitutive values, and the social character of science to be well argued and important. I also think it's worthy of commendation for the attempt to bridge the gap between extreme relativism and naive scientism. But her conclusions and case studies? Not so hot.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-15 00:00:00 Mark Lazor Way underappreciated in (general, not feminist) philosophy of science.