Tactics of Legitimation in the Psychedelic Sciences

Psychedelic substances enabled spirituality to enter the scientific laboratory by making it more accessible to scientific methods. From a feminist sociology of knowledge perspective, these controversial sciences reveal how politics of knowledge shape the relationship between demarcated and historically hierarchical systems. Discourse analysis shows that psychedelic scientists used tactics of legitimation to justify studying these substances and their associated spirituality against dominant scientific knowledges. Drawing on feminist theories, the analysis examines the epistemological costs of this assimilation in relation to intersecting politics of race, class, and gender. The project demonstrates how a feminist perspective on sociology of knowledge enhances analyses of the co-constitutive relationships between knowledge, power, and consciousness.

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Abstract

I argue that psychedelic substances served as a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory to an unprecedented degree by making spirituality more accessible to scientific methodologies. From a feminist sociology of knowledge perspective, these controversial sciences represent a unique opportunity to investigate the politics of knowledge constituting these traditionally demarcated and historically hierarchical systems of knowledge. Using discourse analysis I found that psychedelic scientists utilized a range of what I call tactics of legitimation to justify the scientific study of these peculiar substances and the spirituality associated with them vis-à-vis dominant scientific knowledges. Drawing on feminist theories of science and knowledge, I analyze the attendant epistemological costs of this assimilation in relation to the intersecting politics of race, class and gender. More broadly, this project demonstrates how a feminist theoretical perspective on sociology of knowledge enhances politically essential analyses of the co-constitutive relationships between knowledge, power and consciousness.