This: « A framework that denies that objective knowledge is obtainable cannot coherently demand to be believed. ». Thank you for posting this as a text, Helen. Very interesting. Very pluckrosian too, if I may say.
Helen - reading your writing after most of what's published on social media is like having a pure mountain stream run through my brain, washing away all the non-sequiturs, false premises, and just plain nonsense. Ahhhh...... Such clarity of thought! Thank you!
Here's the link to Amazon for preorders of either the Kindle edition (release date Sept. 15) or print edition (release date Oct. 29) of Cynthia Burack's
I also like that you, unlike most others writing about CSJ, actually point at what I think is the central contradiction within its "postmodernist" way of thinking:
One the one hand, they more or less dismiss objective knowledge in principle, on the other hand, they act very much as if they, because of their "critical" methodology, have by far the most objective views and almost any criticism of them can be assumed to be false.
It's a blatant contradiction, and yet most critics of postmodernism who write at length about the subject seem to miss it, for whatever reasons.
My BSc in the 70s was in Philosophy; JS Mill's essay On Liberty changed my way over thinking forever. Finding your Substack takes me back to that essay and to those university days. Yoyr essays are helping me reacquire the tools needed to think and argue clearly, as we face down a new Medievalism (and I dare say, at the risk of hyperbole, attempt to rebuild the Enlightenment). Thank you for your invaluable work.
"Some scholar-activists argue that insisting on evidence, reason and viewpoint diversity simply imposes another worldview." Indeed. This is how I understand the phrase "a different way of knowing". It doesn't work in the hard sciences - there really is only way of knowing how an airplane stays in the air, though I suppose it would be challenging for an aeronautical engineer to "prove" that is not the spirits who are responsible.
But I digress.
I completely agree with your argument. But I imagine that a worldview that insists on ("privileges"?) evidence and reason would be seen by some to deny the validity of a worldview under which airplanes fly because the gods will it.
Ultimately, I guess what you're proposing really comes down to letting opposing epistemologies fight it out in public, and let the more persuasive one win. That seems eminently reasonable.
Zach Cowan: ‘… there really is only way of knowing how an airplane stays in the air, though I suppose it would be challenging for an aeronautical engineer to "prove" that is not the spirits who are responsible’. Good epistemology carries over to day to day life. We all employ good epistemology when we successfully navigate roads, trails, hallways, stairs, rooms, etc. We do not need to be engineers or physicists to understand or practice good epistemology. People tend to go epistemologically rogue within those contexts where doing so is not critically important to their day to day welfare, in other words they are either not recognizing that they are applying self-inconsistent epistemological standards or they do not think such self-consistency is warranted. Good epistemology is an ethical/behavioral/intellectual constraint. People tend to prefer more freedom with their behavior/attitudes/beliefs than a consistent commitment to applying good epistemology across the board allows.
Also, “spirits” lacks explanatory utility because it explains anything and therefore explains nothing. Explanations need to discriminate between, and separate, that which is true and false. Plus it is an unjustified and unnecessary “explanation” since the air pressure explanation suffices.
Brilliant text. Manages to combine idealism and realism in the best way.
I agree that this would probably be the optimal way to actually "cure" the university of wokeness, but expect that, more likely, we will instead see right-wing governments attempting to go the other way, trying to defund and shut down gender and "critical theory" departments.
Maybe at some point in the future, we will get a revival of some of these studies where they actually adhere to scientific standards and contribute something worthwhile to society...
Love the boils & bacteria analogy! Lately obsessed with reading about and listening to the Slam Frank musical (and its social media posts) - genius satirical mirror to society and one way of challenging epistemological underpinnings of CSJ. Your balanced, reasoned approach and their in-your-face razzle-dazzle are my antibiotics of choice.
Heh, I am actually a little slower than usual at the moment. I'm still getting two pieces a week out but I am working a little less because I'm allowing talks I have given to be one of them. Prioritising diet, sleep and exercise for a couple of weeks!
Completely agree, though have a quibble with one sentence.
The appeal of Critical Social Justice is ‘justice’, the aim to make the world a fairer, better place. CSJ presents impressionable students (and others) with a moral purpose.
Statements such as “the university exists to produce knowledge” are often taken by Social Justice sympathizers as evidence that empirical fields aren’t seeking a better world, but rather better means of controlling the world for some other, not necessarily benevolent purpose.
Most non CSJ academics who work to make the world a better place probably think their good intentions are too obvious to mention. They need to get over that and explicitly make the moral claim: “This is how to figure out what is happening, why, and how to change it for the better. Attempts to fix social ills based on untested and often fanciful theories makes things worse far more often than it makes them better.”
What continues to puzzle and horrify me is the speed by which these undefended ideas spread throughout all our major institutions, not just the university. The sort of epistemic stance Helen advocates was originally predominant at the university and was increasing in other institutions as is revealed by the growing use of “evidence based.” Unless we know how that infestation got by our original epistemic safeguards, I worry that we won’t be able to resist similar corruption in the future.
We should impose a "law of consistency". Who doesn't believe the scientific method is the best process we actually possess, shouldn't use WI-FI. Who dismantle reason as an universal necessity to inquiry shouldn't write sentences with rational meaning.
This: « A framework that denies that objective knowledge is obtainable cannot coherently demand to be believed. ». Thank you for posting this as a text, Helen. Very interesting. Very pluckrosian too, if I may say.
Helen - reading your writing after most of what's published on social media is like having a pure mountain stream run through my brain, washing away all the non-sequiturs, false premises, and just plain nonsense. Ahhhh...... Such clarity of thought! Thank you!
Well, now I have warm, fuzzy feelings of happiness and you are responsible. :)
“We need more clarity” said Churchill…
“Get Pluckrose on the phone!”
‘Right you are, Sir!!”
Shouting after him
‘And don’t put the milk in first, Thomson!!’
‘Right you are, Sir!!”
Here's the link to Amazon for preorders of either the Kindle edition (release date Sept. 15) or print edition (release date Oct. 29) of Cynthia Burack's
How Gender Studies Broke The University:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Gender-Studies-Broke-University-ebook/dp/B0H9S7B9MC/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.n9Yya6zzQzkkyMprnnPWUg.Kw58tg_HGwcDGSBWwuGNWWzHxMelu_a0Uc63NONfmA0&qid=1785889606&sr=8-1
I’ve preordered this book in regards to my own worry about immunizing our institutions.
I also like that you, unlike most others writing about CSJ, actually point at what I think is the central contradiction within its "postmodernist" way of thinking:
One the one hand, they more or less dismiss objective knowledge in principle, on the other hand, they act very much as if they, because of their "critical" methodology, have by far the most objective views and almost any criticism of them can be assumed to be false.
It's a blatant contradiction, and yet most critics of postmodernism who write at length about the subject seem to miss it, for whatever reasons.
My BSc in the 70s was in Philosophy; JS Mill's essay On Liberty changed my way over thinking forever. Finding your Substack takes me back to that essay and to those university days. Yoyr essays are helping me reacquire the tools needed to think and argue clearly, as we face down a new Medievalism (and I dare say, at the risk of hyperbole, attempt to rebuild the Enlightenment). Thank you for your invaluable work.
This is high praise indeed! I am honoured and encouraged!
"Some scholar-activists argue that insisting on evidence, reason and viewpoint diversity simply imposes another worldview." Indeed. This is how I understand the phrase "a different way of knowing". It doesn't work in the hard sciences - there really is only way of knowing how an airplane stays in the air, though I suppose it would be challenging for an aeronautical engineer to "prove" that is not the spirits who are responsible.
But I digress.
I completely agree with your argument. But I imagine that a worldview that insists on ("privileges"?) evidence and reason would be seen by some to deny the validity of a worldview under which airplanes fly because the gods will it.
Ultimately, I guess what you're proposing really comes down to letting opposing epistemologies fight it out in public, and let the more persuasive one win. That seems eminently reasonable.
Zach Cowan: ‘… there really is only way of knowing how an airplane stays in the air, though I suppose it would be challenging for an aeronautical engineer to "prove" that is not the spirits who are responsible’. Good epistemology carries over to day to day life. We all employ good epistemology when we successfully navigate roads, trails, hallways, stairs, rooms, etc. We do not need to be engineers or physicists to understand or practice good epistemology. People tend to go epistemologically rogue within those contexts where doing so is not critically important to their day to day welfare, in other words they are either not recognizing that they are applying self-inconsistent epistemological standards or they do not think such self-consistency is warranted. Good epistemology is an ethical/behavioral/intellectual constraint. People tend to prefer more freedom with their behavior/attitudes/beliefs than a consistent commitment to applying good epistemology across the board allows.
Also, “spirits” lacks explanatory utility because it explains anything and therefore explains nothing. Explanations need to discriminate between, and separate, that which is true and false. Plus it is an unjustified and unnecessary “explanation” since the air pressure explanation suffices.
Brilliantly written. If left-wing ideas are clearly the correct ones, they should be able to compete against other ideas and come out victorious.
The fact that these ideas are not allowed to be empirically tested speaks for itself.
Brilliant text. Manages to combine idealism and realism in the best way.
I agree that this would probably be the optimal way to actually "cure" the university of wokeness, but expect that, more likely, we will instead see right-wing governments attempting to go the other way, trying to defund and shut down gender and "critical theory" departments.
Maybe at some point in the future, we will get a revival of some of these studies where they actually adhere to scientific standards and contribute something worthwhile to society...
Love the boils & bacteria analogy! Lately obsessed with reading about and listening to the Slam Frank musical (and its social media posts) - genius satirical mirror to society and one way of challenging epistemological underpinnings of CSJ. Your balanced, reasoned approach and their in-your-face razzle-dazzle are my antibiotics of choice.
Have you been cloned or uploaded into an AI machine? You're publishing faster than I can read.
Heh, I am actually a little slower than usual at the moment. I'm still getting two pieces a week out but I am working a little less because I'm allowing talks I have given to be one of them. Prioritising diet, sleep and exercise for a couple of weeks!
This is a review I wrote a few year's back of Helen's excellent book, co-authored with James Lindsay, on how to combat woke ideology, written before that term started to be commonly used. I commend it to all Helen's followers who have not already had the opportunity to read it. https://www.societalvalues.co.uk/book-review-helen-pluckrose-and-james-lindsay-cynical-theories-how-universities-made-everything-about-race-gender-and-identity-and-why-this-harms-everybody/
Completely agree, though have a quibble with one sentence.
The appeal of Critical Social Justice is ‘justice’, the aim to make the world a fairer, better place. CSJ presents impressionable students (and others) with a moral purpose.
Statements such as “the university exists to produce knowledge” are often taken by Social Justice sympathizers as evidence that empirical fields aren’t seeking a better world, but rather better means of controlling the world for some other, not necessarily benevolent purpose.
Most non CSJ academics who work to make the world a better place probably think their good intentions are too obvious to mention. They need to get over that and explicitly make the moral claim: “This is how to figure out what is happening, why, and how to change it for the better. Attempts to fix social ills based on untested and often fanciful theories makes things worse far more often than it makes them better.”
Yes! I’d agree with that!
Yes, that's true of CSJ Professors. So we have to show 'why' objective knowledge production is good for the less fortunate of society.
What continues to puzzle and horrify me is the speed by which these undefended ideas spread throughout all our major institutions, not just the university. The sort of epistemic stance Helen advocates was originally predominant at the university and was increasing in other institutions as is revealed by the growing use of “evidence based.” Unless we know how that infestation got by our original epistemic safeguards, I worry that we won’t be able to resist similar corruption in the future.
Yes how we frame issues says a lot about our meaning. I try to look at who benefits from the trajectory of this or that framing.
We should impose a "law of consistency". Who doesn't believe the scientific method is the best process we actually possess, shouldn't use WI-FI. Who dismantle reason as an universal necessity to inquiry shouldn't write sentences with rational meaning.