The epistemology of social justice
Black Label Logic | June 8, 2016 | by Black Label Logic
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[epistemology of SJWs]I made a joke on twitter, that I wasn’t going
write this post, because _“Make shit up based on your feelings”_
would not make a very good blog post. However, the thought ruminated
for a moment in my mind, and I figured that social justice lives and
breathes in academia. It seeks to legitimize feelings by through
giving them an air of sophistication and legitimacy through abusing
the tools of science. Much of the theory that feminists and modern
social justice warriors base their belief system on is Marxist theory
applied to social structures and groups, which is then validated by
abusing the tools of science. Epistemology is Greek and roughly
translates to “_word of knowledge_“, which includes the scientific
method, logic as a system and other tools and opinions on how we as
humans gain knowledge.

The purpose of this post is to outline how social justice warriors
obtain knowledge from their environments contrasted with how research
is conducted in order to obtain knowledge.

A QUICK RUNDOWN OF RESEARCH

Usually research starts with a literature review to get an overview of
the field and to trigger the reader into coming up with their own
research question or general field of interest. Once a field is
narrowed down to a topic, and perhaps even a research question, the
person conducts in an depth review of all the data available in the
field in order to make sure that nobody has asked and answered the
same question before, to gauge the literature base, and so on. Once
this is done the person tries to synthesize the various sources. For
instance if your research question was “_Is feminism cancer_” then
you would need to find information on both feminism and cancer, and
then synthesize the two topics into a coherent framework.

The next step after designing a theoretical research framework is to
determine the philosophical perspective of the research, which is
normally a choice between positivism and phenomenology, of course
feminist research also comes in here. The reason for picking a
philosophical framework first, is that your chosen framework will
impact your methodology quite a bit. For instance, positivism is best
suited for hard sciences and trends towards larger sample sizes,
whereas phenomenology trends towards social sciences and smaller
sample sizes. This comes from the fact that positivists have
historically been focused on the “what” and “how” of events,
where phenomenologists have been focused on the “why”.

Once you narrow down to methodological approach, you can start to
design your research, determining confidence limits, sample sizes,
your sources of data and data access, data types and so on. Then you
carry out your research, according to the theoretical framework using
the methodology you designed and then analyze the data and make your
conclusions.

SJW research largely focuses on grounded theory or phenomenological
research, trying to answer why questions, frequently using qualitative
methods, and small simple sizes to investigate specific situations.
This is where qualitative, phenomenological researcher is the
strongest it can be, and what it was developed for, however, SJWs take
“_small sample size_” to a whole new level, when they try to paint
single situations as a part of a bigger picture that proves their
bias.

THE APPLICATION OF RESEARCH

So far, feminist research tends to not be completely horrible, except
for the tendency of being extremely poor at avoiding bias, especially
when using soft methods. However, the major issue comes when one tries
to apply the research in a general manner. Positivist research often
gives the most approximate right answer due to often relying on large
sample sizes, statistical methods and having very high replicability.
This means that Positivist researcher if documented well, can have its
findings replicated and thus they become stronger. Positivist methods
tell us that a wage gap exists, but feminists want to answer why it
does and they are invested in that answer being sexism. When
alternative explanations are offered such as the choices females and
males make, the amount of hours work, amount of job risk, and
inconvenience, the gap is rapidly reduced [1] [2] but such answers are
rejected not on the basis of evidence but that of investment in your
existing conclusion.

I’ve mentioned numerous times that with the track record of
countries that have tried and miserably failed at applying Marxist
theory, the theory should be rejected. However, there are ardent
supporters of Marx’s theories all over the world, including in
governments in an academia that believe, but cannot prove that it can
work. From a research perspective, Marx’s theories have been tested
and found wanting.

Social justice and feminist theory on the other hand has never truly
been applied, however they are so invested in their answer and what
little support they can get from small-scale exploratory studies,

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

There are two major things that stand out about social justice warrior
epistemology, the focus on the individual and the dedication towards
finding the answer the researcher wants to find. The latter is not
uncommon in research, many researchers spend large parts of their
lives working within a field, developing theories, some build their
careers of the discoveries they may. If they suddenly find out that
their long held beliefs that they have invested 20 or more years of
their life into, it is a shock and they have to go through the 5
stages of grief. The former on the other hand spells trouble, because
while you can generalize from the population to the individual, you
cannot generalize from the individual to a population.

“_Listen and Believe_” is fine if you’re a religious leader,
it’s not a recipe for how to run a state or for how to decide what
is the best approximate explanation that accommodates all the known
facts. This is where SJW epistemology fails, as their theory of
knowledge, trends towards the experiences of a single person, meaning
that subjective perception of events becomes the baseline for what is
factual in their mind. This is no different than a religion, where
adherents are asked to believe in things that cannot be proven,
against their best judgment.

The SJW epistemology is based on belief, and extreme subjectivity,
which is also why feminists and SJWs can be presented with clear cut
objective truth, and still maintain their belief. Their subjective
truth, trumps the objective truth of others. The interesting events
happen when subjective “listen and believe” meets another
subjective “listen and believe” and the two are fundamentally
incompatible, in that case for SJWs their epistemology changes from
extreme subjectivity of the individual to the extreme subjectivity of
the group, and a majority vote is taken for which subjective view
prevails.

Sources:

[1] Sowell, economic facts and fallacies

[2]
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/harvard-prof.-takes-down-gender-wage-gap-myth/article/2580405

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Archived from https://theredarchive.com/blog/Black-Label-Logic/the-epistemology-of-socialjustice.24313