Helen Elizabeth Longino[1] (born July 13, 1944) is an American philosopher of science who has argued for the significance of values and social interactions to scientific inquiry.

She earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1973, under the supervision of Peter Achinstein.

In her contextual empiricism, she argues that observations and data of the sort taken by scientists are not by themselves evidence for or against any particular hypotheses.

This gap, too, must be bridged by beliefs and assumptions about legitimate reasoning in order for evidence to help us decide which hypotheses to accept as true.

Her key idea is that the production of knowledge is a social enterprise, secured through the critical and cooperative interactions of inquirers.

[26] Most recently, in Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (2013), Longino examines five scientific approaches to human aggression and sexuality in terms of their epistemological frameworks, the types of knowledge that they produce, and their pragmatic goals.

From her perspective in social epistemology, Longino argues that scientific research will be more useful as a guide to public policy makers if the plurality of different approaches to knowledge is acknowledged.

[27] Though her work on the nature of scientific knowledge is broadly feminist in the sense that it argues for the value of contributions by diverse people (and accordingly the value of the contributions of women) to science, some of Longino's other work has been more explicitly feminist and concerned with women.

For example, she has presented and analyzed alternative narratives of female and male-centered accounts of human evolution, emphasizing the impact of gender-centered assumptions on the formation of theory.