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| female philosopher of science |
A reader sends me a discussion post from a website Butterflies and Wheels:Fighting Fashionable Nonsense
Luna the Cat says (Oct 22, 2011):
I never had much time for philosophy, personally, until I got interested in the question of how do we know what we know, and the philosophy of science; and when I started looking more into that, I stumbled across Deborah Mayo, http://www.phil.vt.edu/dmayo/dmayo.html. I was blown away at the rigorous logic of her thinking, and I have to admit to learning a great deal from reading her work.
The thing that pisses me off is, nobody outside a very narrow field seems to know who she is, and I almost never see her name in discussions of the modern forms of philosophy of science, even when the discussion is all about the limits of falsification and Duhem’s problems, areas where her work is squarely situated. And when I have discussions with the occasional person who is interested in this kind of thing, I often get a reaction of “really? I’ve never heard of her; a woman, eh?”
And I cannot believe this is because of the quality of her work. Read some of it, judge for yourself. http://www.phil.vt.edu/dmayo/personal_website/bibliography%20complete.htm
I’m so disheartened about the fact that sexism seems to be getting worse. I hate to say it, but I think JennieL might be right, there has been a kind of male backlash where some who don’t think women have any business intruding into such a serious field have gathered and made an immovable and hostile cohort. But that’s just so damned backwards.
Dear Luna the Cat: Get in touch! I’ll send you a copy of my new book!: error@vt.edu
Rejected Posts of D. Mayo 
It did get a bit of notice as winner of the Lakatos Prize of 1999.