 Longino proposes an alternate understanding of objectivity. The social character of science provides the opportunity for “transformative criticism”. Such criticism requires the adherence to social norms: publicly recognized forums for the criticism of evidence, methods, and assumptions and reasoning; uptake of criticism, which requires that the community not merely tolerate dissent, but alter its beliefs and theories over time in response to the critical discourse; publicly recognized standards by reference to which theories, hypotheses, and observational practices are evaluated and by appeal to which criticism is made relevant to the goals of the inquiring community; and finally, communities must be characterized by tempered equality of intellectual authority (Longino 1993, 2002). When science is conducted according to these norms, Longino argues that it balances partialities and hence is objective to the degree that it fulfills these norms. But it is neither neutral nor impartial since scientific theory is informed by values that shape the context in which the relevance of evidence is determined. 