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→Critical Theory, post-modernism, and the death of objective truth
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We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons? | We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons? | ||
===[[Critical | ===[[Critical theory]], [[post-modernism]], and the death of objective truth=== | ||
They say every successful conspiracy theory contains a grain of truth. They have to | They say every successful conspiracy theory contains a grain of truth. They have to be something for even credulous people to glom onto. | ||
Critical | Critical theory’s grain of truth, ironically, is that ''there is no truth''. This is its debt to postmodernism, and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept. | ||
The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical Theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical | The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical Theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones. | ||
The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher | The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher Hitchens, {{author|Richard Dawkins}}, {{author|Helen Pluckrose}}, {{author|Douglas Murray}} and recently {{author|Matthew Syed}}) is that something things — physical sciences are a favourite example — just ''are'' true. No amount of identifying with an alternative theory of gravity will stop you from hitting the ground if you throw yourself out of a window. | ||
On the other hand [ | On the other hand [https://www.city-journal.org/american-campus-as-a-factory Jacob Howland] made the interesting assertion recently that so completely has [[critical theory]] escape its [[postmodern]] origins, that it has become captured by, of all people the [[high modernist]]s who inhabit an intellectual world that seeks to solve all problems by top-down taxonomies and computation. Critical theory has escaped its usual confines in the liberal arts faculties of universities and is now inhabiting the management and human resource departments of corporations, and who are using their rationalist framework to advance what is a fairly radical political agenda. [[Critical theory]] is not an alternative narrative by which we can puncture the arrogant assumptions of the capitalist class: it has ''displaced'' them altogether and is making its own arrogant assumptions in their place. | ||
That's not altogether a bad thing — although the | That's not altogether a bad thing — although the practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another. | ||
practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another. | |||
The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not ''false'' (that would be a paradox right?) So much as ''incoherent''. It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language. | The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not ''false'' (that would be a paradox right?) So much as ''incoherent''. It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language. | ||
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The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way: you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright. | The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way: you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright. | ||
If you accept the proposition that truth is a function | If you accept the proposition that truth is a function of a sentence and therefore the language of that sentence comma for there to be a transcendent truth the language in which it was uttered would necessarily need to be complete, comprehensive, and itself true. The nearest linguistic structures that we have to to complete languages are those of mathematics and perhaps science. Yet we know that mathematics is a necessarily incomplete language something Colin from that we know that any natural language is necessarily incomplete semicolon and in the case of science we know with certainty that science is not what a complete and comprehensive statement of the laws of the physical universe. We haven't solved the universe yet. There are large fundamental unknowns; dark matter; dark energy; the incommensurability of quantum mechanics and and special relativity. Even if the concept of transcendent truth were coherence we have nothing like enough information to access it. In the same way that the fielder does not have enough physical information to calculate the trajectory of a cricket ball, and therefore pragmatically approximates it, so we do not have anything like enough information to confidently predict the scientific performance of the universe and therefore we pragmatically approximate it. | ||
Pragmatic approximations comma being provisional, contingent, and subject to revision at any time | Pragmatic approximations comma being provisional, contingent, and subject to revision at any time I’m are are more tolerant, plural and liberal than concrete scientific calculations. | ||
The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know comma to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective. | The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know comma to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective. | ||
===Power structures are all around us=== | ===Power structures are all around us=== | ||