Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT115 S1 P3 Q13 Explanation

Haraway’s Primate Visions

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsPrimary PurposeScience

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Passage

Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions is the most ambitious book on the history of science yet written from a feminist perspective, embracing not only the scientific construction of gender but also the interplay of race, class, and colonial and postcolonial culture with the “Western” construction of the very concept of nature itself. Primatology for scientists’ conscious and unconscious projections of their beliefs about nature and culture.

Haraway’s most radical departure is to challenge the traditional disjunction between the active knower (scientist/historian) and the passive object (nature/history). In Haraway’s view, the desire to understand nature, whether in order to tame it or to preserve it as a place of wild innocence, is based on a troublingly masculinist and colonialist agents cannot be reduced to a single, coherent reality—there are necessarily only multiple, interlinked, partial realities.

This iconoclastic view is reflected in Haraway’s unorthodox writing style. Haraway does not weave the many different elements of her work into one unified, overarching Story of Primatology; they remain distinct voices that will not succumb to a master narrative. This fragmented approach to historiography is familiar enough in historiographical theorizing but history, whether strictly narrative or narrative with emphasis on a causal argument.

Haraway is equally innovative in the way she incorporates broad cultural issues into her analysis. Despite decades of rhetoric from historians of science about the need to unite issues deemed “internal” to science (scientific theory and practice) and those considered “external” to it (social issues, structures, and beliefs), that dichotomy has proven one must shed a great many assumptions about what properly belongs to the study of science.

What this question is testing

Primary Purpose

Your task

Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.

Common trap

Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.

Winning move

Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
13.

The passage is primarily concerned with discussing which one of

Answer choices

  1. Wrong Emphasis: no book mentioned9% picked this

    the roles played by gender and class in Western science in general, and in the field

    The primary concern of this passage is Haraway's book, which this answer is failing to even mention. This answer sounds more like an answer to the question of, "Haraway's book is primarily concerned with what?"

  2. Wrong Emphasis: need more Haraway6% picked this

    two different methods of writing the history

    This is off-putting because it still doesn't say "It's about Haraway's book", but we could maybe consider it, since the author's description of the book involves Haraway's unique method of thinking about science. But this answer makes it seem like the passage was relatively evenly divided between two different methods: Haraway's and .... the traditional method? Although the author is constantly telling us how Haraway is different and special (allowing us to infer traits that are presumably not applicable to the traditional method), the passage spends almost no time ever directly talking about the traditional method of writing the history of science. So we can't put it on center stage, giving it equal billing to Haraway's methods.

  3. Correct59% picked this

    the content and style of a proposal to reform the scientific

    Why this is right

    Finally, we have an answer saying "the passage is about a book!" Obnoxiously, they're alluding to the book in weird code language -- a proposal to reform the scientific approach to nature. Can we make that language work? Was Haraway's book proposing to reform the scientific approach to nature? Well, the 2nd paragraph tells us she is challenging the traditional disjunction between the active knower and the passive object. She argues that this traditional approach to nature is "based on troublingly masculinist and colonialist views of nature" and "she argues that it is a view that is no longer politically / ecologically / scientifically viable", and then "She proposes an (alternative) approach." Okay, so we can accept "proposal to reform the scientific approach to nature" as a phrase that means "Haraway's book". Did the passage primarily concern itself with the content and style of Haraway's book? Sure. Every paragraph is about content, style, or both.

    Skill tested: Primary Purpose · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  4. Unsupported: history of scientific women20% picked this

    the theoretical bases and the cultural assumptions underlying a recent book on the history of

    This isn't a book on the history of women in science. It's a book on the history of science, but written from a feminist perspective.

  5. Wrong Emphasis: not about H's book7% picked this

    the effect of theoretical positions on writing styles in books on the

    The primary concern of this passage is Haraway's book, which this answer is failing to mention. This answer talks about books on the history of science, in general, but this answer doesn't communicate that this passage was written about one specific book on the history of science.

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