Can anything worthwhile and accurate come from using Critical Theory in lieu of the scientific method?

Egalitarianwhistle · 2019-12-01T16:04:12+00:00

This strikes to the heart of the tumor in academia. It's an academic engine whereby bizarre papers are turned out with critical theory but then they are cited by later papers which lends them credibility.

There is no evidence of Blank Slate-ism.

There is no evidence that gender is a social construct.

There is no evidence of Patriarchy.

These are all just first principles of feminism.

Kuato2012 · 2019-12-02T22:17:31+00:00

The difference between physics and metaphysics [...] is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory

Carl Sagan (quoting/paraphrasing something said by physicist Robert Wood. Full quote in the link)

There's certainly room for metaphysics in academia. There are plenty of religion and philosophy departments at universities, and obviously those are valid areas of study. The problem with metaphysics though, throughout all of human history, is that you can't actually know whether an idea is true or not simply by reasoning your way through it. You can find the idea appealing or comforting or consistent with your worldview... but as Wood and Sagan pointed out, you need to put ideas in a laboratory and do a rigorous tests to see whether or not they're actually true.

For a concrete example, pure reasoning is how we got the humoral theory of health and medicine. The logic was internally consistent, after all! Fortunately, people figured out ways of actually measuring health and testing their medicinal practices, and so humoral theory was eventually supplanted by modern medicine.

And that's the core problem with Critical Theory (the fact that the field seems rife with intellectual dishonesty is another huge problem that I'll just ignore for now). So someone came up with an idea and called it The Patriarchy. Great. That's a nonfalsifiable hypothesis though; critical theory builds "narratives," i.e. big webs of confirmation bias, and emphatically does NOT require those narratives to go through any sort of skeptical scrutiny (in fact, expressing skepticism towards feminist theories will quickly get you banned in most feminist spaces). So we should treat critical theory narratives with all the same weight as humoral theory or arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But for some reason, academia has lended an enormous amount of credence to some of those narratives. Peter Boghossian, one of the guys who wrote the Grievance Studies papers OP linked, recently articulated an important and timely turn of phrase: idea laundering in academia.

It's analogous to money laundering: you start with something highly questionable or illicit, run it through a process, and get something that looks legitimate in the end. This is why, if you accuse someone of being sexist against men, you will reliably hear that such a thing is impossible; sexism = power + prejudice, and since men have all the power, blah blah blah. It's all bullshit, but many people uncritically accept it because the idea got laundered through academia, acquiring a veneer of credibility along the way. But because that formula for sexism was never tested, and arguably can't be tested, it has no more claim to truth than the idea that there's a teapot in orbit between here and Mars.

Now to finally answer your headline: can something worthwhile come of such an unscientific approach to life's questions? Tentatively yes... in a limited fashion. People arrive at core philosophical and religious beliefs through various nonscientific avenues, and I'd be hard-pressed to dismiss those as not being worthwhile. If going to the church or temple or mosque brings you comfort, have at it. You can't claim with any authority that your personal beliefs map directly onto what we might call consensus reality though. And you certainly don't get to force your beliefs on others. Critical Theory narratives fit in that same box.

tl;dr Critical Theory is to reality as humoral theory is to modern medicine. Or as alchemy is to chemistry. Until they get supplanted by data-driven approaches, critical theory "narratives" will remain mere metaphysical speculations, stuck in the dark ages.

Title	Can anything worthwhile and accurate come from using Critical Theory in lieu of the scientific method?
Author	czerdec
Upvotes	8
Comments	4
Date	December 1, 2019 2:53 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/e4iced/can_anything_worthwhile_and_accurate_come_from/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/can-anything-worthwhile-and-accurate-come-from.1202372 https://theredarchive.com/post/1202372

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