[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?

[pron]

Why would anyone pay attention to science? It all depends on what you want to achieve and what your values are. The difference between alchemy and literature is that alchemy purports to have the same goals as science -- at which it fails -- while literature has completely other goals.

[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.