[mo1ok]

I've been thinking lately about the "sloppy reasoning" problem of critical theory. I used to really love critical theory when I was younger, but now that I'm older I'm almost ready to dismiss it as entertaining crank writing at a time when western civilization was exploring new boundries and slightly adrift. It has more in common with artistic expression than critical methodology. Still valuable, but should not be taken as seriously as it currently is in academia - at least in my opinion.

I came to this opinion when I stayed at a friends' place recently who had a massive collection of critical theory, and I had not read any crit in years. I read a few of the books, and to my own surprise, my reaction was "what the hell is this nonsense?" The ideas were certainly interesting, but had no real provable basis, and just seemed to be the reasoned expression of one author's individual sense of alienation - more like artistic expression than any real solution to the dilemma of civilization or consciousness.

[pron]

> The ideas were certainly interesting, but had no real provable basis, and just seemed to be the reasoned expression of one author's individual sense of alienation - more like artistic expression than any real solution to the dilemma of civilization or consciousness.

Why do you think all ideas that need to be taken seriously should be provable, provide solutions, or, indeed anything other than the author's own sense of alienation? This isn't science and doesn't purport to be. Those are works of literature, intended, like all literature, to give one an interesting perspective on life and the world. Shakespeare is taken very seriously in academia, and he provides nothing more than an artistic expression.

If anything, I think that the problem is that laypeople and academics speak different languages, and laypeople misunderstand exactly how academics view this literature. In short, they do not consider it to be in the same genre as Newton's law and the same kind of applicability to physical reality.

[mo1ok]

I don't think it has no value - I'm just saying it has more in common with art (like Shakespeare, as you mentioned) than Theory. Perhaps it's a confusion of terms on my part.

I disagree that it's an academic/layperson divide, because I have a background in liberal arts at the academic level. When I was at school, I was writing papers where I REALLY needed to make sure my points were concrete, well-expressed, and well-cited. It was all about transforming a hypothesis into a theory. A lot of new critical theory seems to meander into oblivion in contrast to the strict expression of other academic fields.

Maybe, like you said, I'm just not up on the academics of it.

[msla]

> Why do you think all ideas that need to be taken seriously should be provable, provide solutions, or, indeed anything other than the author's own sense of alienation?

Because they're part of the Social Sciences.

> This isn't science and doesn't purport to be.

Well, it certainly purports to be.

[pron]

> Because they're part of the Social Sciences.

Critical theory? No. It's more part of the humanities.

> Well, it certainly purports to be.

Absolutely not. Why do you think that? Even many actual social scholars (historians, anthropologists) would object to being called scientists, or, at least, would always emphasize that if you want to call what they do science, it is not science in the same sense as chemistry.

[msla]

Them using the term "theory" while not doing any of the hard work of science is equivocation.

[pron]

They're doing hard work, just not scientific work. It's not "better" or "worse" than science; it's just something completely different. Science doesn't have a monopoly on the word "theory". It's been in use long before science (at least as we know it since the 17th century) existed.

[msla]

> They're doing hard work, just not scientific work. It's not "better" or "worse" than science; it's just something completely different.

It's amazing how much of this would apply to alchemy, or astrology, or religion.

So the question becomes, why would anyone pay attention to it?

[AlotOfReading]

The whole point of postmodern thought is to be a reaction to and an exploration of the inadequacies of scientific, modernist approaches. That said, most of the people critiquing that sort of thing are at least a couple decades behind the current state of academia.

[opportune]

Completely agree. To me critical theory has always seemed to represent more of a societal counterfactual (counterfactual meaning a "what if" scenario, not an actual falsehood) than valid economic/political arguments. The worst part about it is that everyone seems to have some pet individual theory about the way things should work, but there's no real way to objectively verify if someone's ideas are correct (and if there are, then those countries were somehow corrupted or didn't fit criteria 56 and 81), so people who should in practice agree with each other all divide up into their little competing camps over relatively minor ideological differences.

[pohl]

It would be interesting (maybe even amusing) to see a work of critical theory with distributed authorship via pull-requests to a repository, so as to filter-out the sloppiness during PR reviews.

[sillysaurus3]

http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

[sillysaurus3]

For an excellent example of sloppy reasoning, look no further than Ornament and Crime: https://faculty.risd.edu/bcampbel/Loos-Ornament%20and%20Crim...

It argues that all art is erotic, that if you have a tattoo it is only a matter of time until you murder someone, and expresses something about Negroes that I don't care to look for again. (It was written in 1900 or so. I wonder what people in 2120 will wince about when they read our important works?)

The frustrating thing is, I agree with many of the points in the essay. There's always something there: a grain of truth in the framework of obfuscation. But they dress it up. The essay even frames it as "Here is something I have discovered, which I now bestow upon the world." It's not a direct quote, but it may as well be; many philosophers share that air of fake importance.

If only he was relaxed, he could have gotten his points across to many more people. "I get over a fire much more easily when only worthless garbage has been burned." Interesting point. "Every age had its style, is our age alone to be refused a style? By style, people meant ornament." Great observation! Notice how we eschew ornament; HN is bare, Twitch is austere, Youtube is as minimalistic as possible. If you image search DaVinci, it's hard to find a single example of anything containing ornament. Coincidence? Works without ornament are timeless.

But something comes over people -- simple isn't enough. Me too. I wrote a downvote hiding extension for HN, and I was embarrassed that the v1 was only a few lines of code. "It doesn't even hide your karma if you look at your profile!" So I wrote a far more complicated v2 and shipped that. Surprise, HN shipped an update and now it broke. v1 works fine. You're certainly familiar with this phenomenon in almost every aspect of our profession. What is going on there? It's worth exploring.

But philosophers manage to obscure these observations in the most complicated ways. And unfortunately, those complications introduce mistakes that make it easy to dismiss the rest of the work, along with the good ideas.

[jhanschoo]

Simple is robust is best.

[ue_]

>The ideas were certainly interesting, but had no real provable basis, and just seemed to be the reasoned expression of one author's individual sense of alienation - more like artistic expression than any real solution to the dilemma of civilization or consciousness.

An example to what you're referring to would strengthen your case, though my own experience has been almost exactly opposite; although many works are certainly difficult to read not only for the obscurity of the terms and the form of content used but also for their disturbing and socially challenging content, I don't think they rely on sloppy reasoning; take Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man for example; he speaks in terms the reader can identify with, not using formal logic.

For example, an enlightening passage on freedom under the idea of freedom of enterprise:

>Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. If the productive apparatus could be organized and directed toward the satisfaction of the vital needs, its control might well be cen-tralized; such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible.

As we can see, he uses no historical examples (at least not yet), he uses no logic or even dielactic. It's philosophy which prompts the reader to think about their own situation and what that freedom means to them.

Ultimately all action begins with the thinking subject; if we restrict ourselves to strictly empirical forms of knowledge then I think we throw out too much as it relates to how people actually live. I would much much much rather than we and academics continue to search and define boundaries, as almost everybody recognises the relevance of critiques delivered by the likes of Debord, Marcuse and Baudrillade on the social side of the Marxian coin.