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The Dialectic of Critique, Theory and Method in Developing Feminist Research on Inference

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Theoretical Issues in Psychology

Summary

Feminist critiques of rationalism as a masculinist cultural construction, and of logic as a component of this regime of truth, extend to the traditional psychological research on inference as well. This discussion explores issues entailed in reconfiguring the theoretical and empirical study of reasoning on new ground informed by critique, a task that I argue is necessary if feminist theories of logic are to avoid producing new canons through rationalist theorizing and if the study of reasoning is to be rescued from its domination by a rationalist tradition. An illustrative qualitative study of reasoning processes with a design and interpretive framework informed by the above critiques and by feminist perspective on epistemology, is used as a vehicle for exposing the meta-theoretical, theoretical and methodological tensions entailed by this transdisciplinary reconstructive project, the ramifications of critique for method and the theory-data problematic.

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Falmagne, R.J. (2001). The Dialectic of Critique, Theory and Method in Developing Feminist Research on Inference. In: Morss, J.R., Stephenson, N., van Rappard, H. (eds) Theoretical Issues in Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-6817-6_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-6817-6_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-4890-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-6817-6

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