Feminist economics is concerned with the many ways in which economic life is shaped by gender as well as other significant categories of identity. Its goal is to reveal the gender- blindness of existing economic analysis. Feminist economists seek to the better by questioning implicit assumptions about traditional gender roles and about appropriate race, class, ethnicity and national hierarchies thus revealing the biases and distortions in masculinist view of economics. It has been noticed that absent gender and other markers of identity as categories of analysis, economic theories were, and linked to masculinist nations of sciences. So, feminist economists interrogate the problems and paradoxes associated with the scientific aspirations of the discipline. Their goal becomes to identify and change the practices that lead to exclusion of feminist concerns from the production of scientific knowledge. By reconsidering the nature of science and focusing on science as set of practices- by an approach that switches the focus in philosophy of science from knowledge to practices by which knowledge is produced- one can always ask of practices what is their goal, and then judge the adequacy of the practice in terms of the desirability of the goal according to specified ethical and/or political standard and the effectiveness of the practice in reaching it. In this context attempts in contemporary philosophy of economics to replace absolulist (epistemic rationalist) understanding of science by realism, critical realism, relativism or rhetoric to accommodate the issues feminist economists concerned with were not satisfactory; none can fully meet the exigencies of feminist economics. The switch of focus in philosophy of science from knowledge to practices knowledge gets produced underlines the inseparability of knowing from being. So, a break must be made from contemporary understanding (of economics) at the level of ontology. Since the process view sees the world, including the economic world, as unfinished and evolving, and sees the knowledge as adding to the world for better or for worse; points the importance of the consequences of knowledge, then meet the exigencies of feminist economics.
Key words: Feminist Economics, Philosophy of Science, Process Ontology. Article Language: EnglishTurkish
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