Here is Catharine Stimpson, editor of Signs, a fine journal devoted to women's studies, defending the level of scholarship and research in that field. She says that it is "as good as anything going," and then adds: "Sometimes it may be flawed by advocacy. But less so than people think. When there is advocacy it is easily discernible and it is there for good ends. Some of the research priorities are set by the politics of the women's movement, but that is all right as long as you're neither corrupt nor deceitful about what you are doing."

That is the voice of someone protesting too much: yes, there is some advocacy, but not much, and anyway it's easy to spot, and besides which, it is there for good ends, and furthermore, you don't really mean to imply that we are corrupt or deceitful, do you? Lawyers call it alternative pleading: Your honor, my client didn't do it, and even if he did, it was an accident, and the plaintiff really wasn't hurt very much, and besides which he had it coming to him. All of us can, I think, enter that sort of plea for ourselves--our advocacy is always visible, modest, and good-hearted, neither corrupt nor deceitful.

To put it another way: Professor Stimpson's apparent ingenuousness of tone may have to do with the fact that she is standing on a slippery slope and is trying not to look down. Many of us are on that slope; one gets there by addressing "relevant" or value-laden topics, and one must thereupon learn to keep one's footing, by which I mean one's objectivity, or, if not that, the earnest striving for it. Though I think Professor Stimpson is mistaken in her belief that it is easy to do so, I must admire her continuing belief in the effort itself, for if she were to look down that slope she would find others at the bottom who have given up the effort entirely.

At the last convention of the Association of Women in Psychology, an invited speaker, Judith Laws of Cornell, distinguished between feminist scholarship and the norms of objectivity and merit, characterized as male. In a keynote address at the same conference, Sandra Bem of Stanford made plain what some readers of her work had always suspected--that it was advocacy in the trappings of science. Her work on androgyny, she said, is "in the service of my feminist goals." She argues that this is not merely acceptable but conventional: "We all choose our questions and generate hypotheses in a social context. We all have values." Indeed, she commended her own candor: "In my case, the values were explicit rather than implicit, making it easier to guard against their doing any harm."

Professor Bem would appear to believe that her frankness, together with a willingness to abide by certain conventions of scientific discourse, will suffice to keep her work credible. It is not as simple as that. The doing of science and scholarship requires--in practice--a determined tentativeness of conviction, a willingness to suspend belief in the face of disconfirming evidence. That is hard enough to achieve even in areas where values are not significant; given the imperiousness of the political passions, one would question whether data collected in the service of belief can long resist its intrusion. This seems particularly unlikely in the soft areas of psychology, where the opportunities for conviction to work its mischief on evidence are almost endless. How does one label that trait--spontaneous or impulsive, well organized or rigid? Which among several possible statistical tests ought one to employ? What does one do about the anomalous or ambiguous findings all social research seems to uncover--dismiss it as "noise" or pursue it as a potentially valuable lead? And so on--there is almost no limit to the ways in which one's predispositions can influence what one finds. That the problem is by no means hypothetical will be evident if you read on in this issue, where you will find some depressing documentation of how values can so corrupt evidence as to make certain bodies of research suspect, if not entirely worthless.

What is most troubling is what unexamined or insouciant bias does to social science as, so to speak, a corporate enterprise. It is all well and good to carry on about masculine versus feminine scholarship (or Marxist versus capitalist, or black versus white); or to announce complacently that one's research is an instrument of one's political will; or to mock the notion of disinterested scholarship. But as these positions are more frequently taken, and come to be seen as chic, vanguard, and sophisticated, the atmosphere changes, and something begins to happen to the idea of social science itself. We begin to be doubted, and to doubt each other, and to doubt ourselves. We begin to be regarded differently, and to regard ourselves differently.

Another way of putting this is to say that we are beginning to drain our moral capital. I borrow that phrase from a chapter in Gertrude Himmelfarb's brilliant analysis of Mill's On Liberty, in which she demonstrates that his expansive views on freedom of action depended on the common conviction that men would continue to exercise self-restraint: