system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Having a bit of a problem with feminist epistemology (not what you think)

Recently I picked up "Feminist Epistemology" aggregated by by Alcoff and Potter. It's an interesting discussion and I'm always willing to look at something that questions my worldview.
I'm kind of lost on what article within it though. In Helen Longino's essay "Subjects, Power and knowledge" she goes at such a length to say something that it gets a bit convoluted.

>One way to articulate the distinctions I am urging is to treat analysis of the context of discovery as a primarily descriptive process of how hypotheses are generated and to treat analysis in the context of justification as involving the normative or prescriptive analysis regarding the appropriate criteria for the acceptance of hypotheses.


Is she suggesting a more holistic approach to forming a hypothesis? Is she perhaps suggesting much more weight in the qualitative data than of the quantitative?
Please help. I feel a bit overwhelmed.
gpt
Longino is arguing that there is a big difference between the "context of discovery"--what scientists do in the lab and the "context of justification" what scientists write about what they did in the lab (journal articles, etc). This part of a broader feminist critique of traditional philosophy of science, specifically normative theories about what makes good science good science. Such normative theories (e.g. logical positivism, falsification) are built on what happens in the regime of justification. That is, scientists write that they have a hypothesis that they did such and such to test it and it produced such and such results. But if you ask any scientist about how well the write-up reflects what actually happened in the lab, they laugh. The lab is a messy, messy place and the context of justification pretends that its clean. The end of all this is that Longino and others are arguing that philosophies of science built on the context of justification are built on fictionalized accounts of how science happens and, as such, not appropriate to the reality of scientific practice. 

And this is only the beginning. If all context of justification is fictionalized then it doesn't make any sense to talk about the "accuracy" of findings. And if it doesn't make any sense to talk about the accuracy of findings, then it doesn't make any sense to develop a normative philosophy of science based on accuracy.