Tony Lawson makes a compelling case that it is only naive realism that feminist social scientists and philosophers need to avoid, not any and all realist arguments. However, he leaves mysterious, on the one hand, why so many feminists have preferred epistemological to ontological arguments and,...

Feminist research is often perceived to be less objective than conventional research on the grounds that the latter is value-neutral and the former is not. This essay shows that a major problem with the familiar standards for maximizing objectivity that permit such a conclusion is that they are...

Is there only one basic structure of reality? Can anyone produce culture-free representations of reality? Is the partiality of our representations only a problem or inconvenience rather than also an epistemic resource? Should we think of the goal of sciences as the production of accurate...

This response locates feminist methodological strategies, first, as both “outside” and “inside” familiar processes of the sciences and, second, in relation to a formulation of the democratic ethos.

Is it worthwhile for feminist economists to delve into questions about the nature of reality? This essay argues that "feeling" is an aspect of reality that is neglected by both standard and critical-realist approaches to ontology. The author contends that a "process" approach to characterizing...

If caring work were well paid, would it lose some of the special, emotional, interpersonal aspects we want in "real" care relationships? Some fear that the introduction of "market values" would lead to such an outcome. This article seeks to bring to light some logical fallacies and...

Nurses in many industrialized countries are under pressure to prove that the care they provide is cost effective and an appropriate use of scarce healthcare funding. Attempts to describe what nursing care involves, however, have not yet resulted in a generally accepted articulation that is fully...

In an earlier paper in Feminist Economics (Tony Lawson 1999), I suggested that there are likely significant benefits to feminist theorizing from adopting an explicit and sustained concern with ontology. I suggested this in the context of observing that theorizing of an explicitly ontological or...