seeks to challenge the social and cultural certainties that result in objectivism and scientism, which in turn result from extreme positivism and the epistemological search for "reality" that are based on biased assumptions. Hormone research or investigation of "normal" from "deviant" behavior related to sex roles are her principal examples. Her solution is what she calls empirical contextualism, which "makes the exercise of reason and the interpretation of data similarly dependent on a context of assumptions" (Longino, 1990, p. 66). This is connected to a social theory of science research, which means that scientific effort is subject to an analysis of the culture from which it proceeds.
The realist position is therefore challenged by the relativist view of science, which acknowledges the reality of the natural world but also acknowledges that the culture of the scientists themselves influenc
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