Reflections On Gender And Science. Evelyn Fox Keller. New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1985,  viii + 193 pp..

The aim of Reflections on Gender and Science, writes Evelyn Fox Keller, is to propose and outline a new “psychosociology of scientific knowledge.” By this Keller means that she intends to analyze the conditions of knowledge that derive from the psychology of gender inequality. In different ways, the central question of “how we know” has long been the concern of epistemologists, philosophers of science, and sociologists of knowledge; but the psychoanalytic exploration of the relationship between knower and known, subject and object, mind and nature has yet to come into its own. It is no accident that this task should have been undertaken as a direct result of the wish to understand the role of gender and the effects of male dominance on the construction of science. As the book demonstrates, the stereotypical equation of mind with masculinity and nature with femininity has informed the construction of science. Keller perceives that psychoanalytic theory, in which masculinity and femininity are inalienable constituents of the human mind, can be used to analyze this split between subject and object in the foundations of science.

As a mathematical biophysicist, Keller approaches this inquiry with a dual perspective, founded in both her outsider status as a woman in a male dominated field and her insider status as a scientist. From this perspective, the view that social and political forces influence the evolution of science has not penetrated deeply enough into the actual work of scientists, nor into the mental attitude, the masculine orientation, that infuses their work. Although studies in the sociology of science reject the scientific claim to absolute neutrality and objectivity, they have not developed that challenge into an understanding of the role of gender. This is precisely what Keller's book aims to do.

By way of illustrating the difficulties in even identifying the problem