Guest post: Seeking understanding as well as change
Originally a comment by Tim Harris on 408 times on Fox News.
I confess to finding, Nullius, little to grow exercised about in the link you provide to ‘Critical Theory’. It speaks of The Frankfurt School, Kant, and of a liberal thinker like Habermas. It also refers to Karl Marx’s polemical assertion in ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ I would say two things: first, thought about political and social structures has, pace Marx, never been a view taken studiously from the outside, as though thinkers about these matters were dispassionately studying, say, an ant colony. Read Plato, read Aristotle, Confucius, Lao-tse, Kautilya, Sir Thomas Moore, Locke, Hume, Burke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu (who had such an influence on the founding fathers of the USA), Karl Popper… Political thought is not a natural science, to be compared with physics or chemistry, and it never has been. This is not to say that techniques derived from the sciences and from mathematics (statistical analysis, say) are not useful in what are called the political & social sciences – Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ comes to mind, as does Mark Moffett’s ‘The Human Swarm’, in which some interesting and enlightening comparisons are made between animal (including insect) societies and human societies. Nor to say that political thinkers such as the ones you appear to dislike renounce objectivity. The fact is that when one is talking about politics or social structures one is necessarily implicated in them, which is not to say that all works of political thought are or should be mere calls to arms, nor to say that their calls for change or calls for maintaining the status quo are not grounded in an understanding of reality.
The second matter is that one can learn from works of political thought with which one profoundly disagrees. I disagree with Marx, while appreciating many of his insights, just as I disagree with Hegel, against whom Marx wrote, again while appreciating, and being stimulated by, some of his insights. I have also read works by that nasty old Nazi, Carl Schmitt, in which I find, though I loathe Schmitt’s politics, many things of interest (as did that very good liberal historian Reinhart Kosselleck); and so with Michael Oakeshott and other conservative thinkers whose work I have read with interest.
And a third thing is this: it seems to me to be a complete exaggeration to assert that thinkers like Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno et al were not seeking understanding as well as change. Had their calls for change not been grounded in some sort of understanding of what their societies and what the politics of their time were like, nobody would have listened to them and we should not bother to read them still now.
I took a few sociology courses, and in each one, the professors and instructors found it necessary (in North Dakota) to explain that Marx was important to read and that they themselves were not promoting communism by teaching his concepts on the evoluiton of society.
Personally, I think that if someone were to read or watch Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 the message that they would take from it will be dependent on their political perspective. Conservatives and “reasonable liberals” will take from it a message about wokism and cancel culture, while liberals will read it as reflective of the current call to ban CRT (whatever it is.) One of the curses of social media is that people have been conditioned to process the “quick take” on issues in order to garner approval or start pointless arguments, and so we have lost the ability to step outside of ourselves in order to analyze those works with a properly critical thought process.
We’ve learned to double down when challenged, rather than consider whether someone who disagrees with us may be correct while we’re wrong. We’ve learned to shortcut our analysis by referring to people we believe we can trust in order to shape our opinions; but this has not proved very helpful as we learned from the Science-Based Medicine fiasco with Harriet Hall’s review being suppressed. Even though Gorski may be a yeoman on vaccines, he uses motivated reasoning to accept transgender issues. And there are people who are helpful when it comes to transgender issues, but utterly swing and miss when it comes to the virus.
Propagandists such as Rufo knows this. It’s how the Republican Party will maintain power even though they have fucked up on Climate and fuel, the virus, and in supporting a very shitty president even beyond an election enough to storm the Capitol. They minimize the danger of the insurrection (meant to disrupt the officlal tally of the Electoral College and change the subject to show how the true danger to America is teaching about race and indoctrinating kids to hate themselves and their country.
Tim: I find myself bemused. We’ll start with agreement and continue from there.
Yes, there is multifaceted value in engaging with ideas with which you disagree and arguments in their favor, especially when presented expertly by a true believer. As John Stuart Mill wrote, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. … He must be able to hear [opposing reasons] from persons who actually believe them … he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” This seems obvious given the problem of epistemic closure under known entailment. As beings with finite mental processing power, we do not know all the entailments of our (meta)beliefs, nor do we know the entailments of the entailments of our (meta)beliefs. Interacting with those who challenge us can correct for our computational deficiency. When finding the most plausible and persuasive form, however, we must remember that there is a difference between the principle of charity and ignoring the occupied bailey.
Yes, the vast majority of anti-CRT polemics I’ve read are fascile and superficial. To complete my original analogy, if the author of this article is a “sophisticated” theologian, then someone like Andrew Sullivan is a high school atheist who wears black metal shirts and thinks he’s being profound when he says things like, “God didn’t create man. Man created God!”
As for disagreement, let’s begin with “critique”, because your treatment exemplifies our conversational difficulty.
I can certainly see interpretations under which it is true that one cannot criticize something without understanding some of it. Normative interpretations can easily be true. To wit, it is true when understood as meaning that one ought not critique without understanding, or as meaning that one cannot formulate a good critique without understanding. Whether a critique is good can even be taken in multiple directions: Is it good qua critique, composition, diagnosis, or catalyst? Is it good in one of many instrumental senses? (And so on.) Perhaps it would behoove us to add a qualification on understanding, as well, such that the capacity to critique depends on good understanding. This, too, is a normative judgement in want of explication. And we still have yet to consider questions of sufficiency and epistemic confounders. From all of this we can produce myriad distinct interpretations, any of which can determine the statement’s veridicality depending on one’s assignment of value and preferred ethical calculus.
Can you truly assure me that one cannot criticize something without understanding some of it, or is that exaggeration?
We might begin with a trivial counterexample. “Murakami’s most recent novel is terrible, poorly written trash.” With this utterance, I offer fallible criticism of something about which I have zero understanding. To be clever, I might hide the uncertain part of my criticism as the consequent of a material implication, with an antecedent crafted such that it’s only true when the criticism is. Doing this lets me appear to criticize in the particular while actually only doing so in the analytic or hypothetical. “If their government is fascist, then their government is oppressive.”
Less trivially, suppose I learn “some” about a subject and, understanding some of it, criticize it. Later, I discover that everything I learned was false, thus I didn’t understand any of the subject when I criticized it. Or suppose that everything I learn is true but selectively taught such that it leads to egregiously false inferences. I have knowledge and thus understanding, so I can criticize. However, my knowledge is poisoned, and any criticism I offer is guaranteed incorrect, so whether I can criticize supervenes on interpretation of “can criticize”.
What if the substance of my criticism is invariant with respect to my knowledge, because my method is faulty? I haven’t studied quantum chromodynamics, but because of critical postcolonial theory, I can tell you that it problematically reifies the structures of white male thought thereby perpetuating the suppression of marginalized cultures’ distinctive ways of knowing. Literally the only thing I know about chromodynamics is it has to with physics, yet my criticism is completely justified. Why?
Early on, critical theorists envisioned their project as integrating the theories of social sciences with emancipatory intentionality for the totality of society. However, as the SEP relates, “Critical Theory came gradually to reject the demand for a scientific or objective basis of criticism grounded in a grand theory.” In place of this theoretical epistemic ground, critical theorists have largely shifted to identifying some “practical” basis for the verification of criticism. The practical was adopted, in short, as a means to accomodate desiderata of pluralistic inquiry, including agent-relative correctness conditions for criticism, such as those in standpoint, coherentist, and constructivist theories of knowledge, ethics, and truth.
When you compare criticism in science to criticism in critical theory, you’re actually talking about two different modes of inquiry. “Critique” and “criticism” are terms of art for critical theory; they are not used in the everyday senses of criticizing or critiquing scientific theory or even art. They refer to a specific mode of analysis that explicitly seeks grounding in an epistemology lacking direct contact to the objective, external world, so as to allow a multiplicity of criticisms along with their attendent truths and theories to be directed at different audiences.
Good thing I didn’t say they weren’t seeking understanding, then, isn’t it?
(1) Critical theories’ purpose is change, not understanding. (2) In order to effect change, critical theories aim to expose faults, identify agents of change, and provide norms that motivate agents to change exposed faults. (3) This process is called criticism. (3.i) Critical theorists would potentially consider the production of correct criticism to be a form of understanding. (4) Acceptance or rejection of criticism into political or critical practice is constitutive of criticism’s correctness. (4.i) Criticism’s correctness does not supervene on the truth of its content in an objectively grounded theory of truth. (4.ii) Criticism supervenes on coherentist or constructivist truth. (4.iii) Criticism generates coherentist or constructivist knowledge. (5) Those things understand only themselves. (6) It is not the case that critical theory seeks understanding as normally construed. (7) Critical theorists can do as they please.
You’ll have to forgive the jump in 5, as a full introduction to and analysis of coherence and constructivism is way beyond the scope of a blog comment. Also, I get tired of enumerating their problems. Also, this thing is long, long, long enough already.
Nullius, in your original comment, you gave a link to an account of Critical Theory. And you stated ‘That means its purpose is, according to the founders of that school of thought, expressly not to understand but instead to critique and change.’ And now you write, ‘Good thing I didn’t say they weren’t seeking understanding, then, isn’t it?’ Well, what were you saying?
I do not propose to go into all you say, since much of it does not seem very relevant, and, in all honesty, comes across as a general sort of obfuscation. I shall simply ask how, if, as you say, the epistemology alleged to be espoused by these thinkers lacks ‘direct contact to the objective, external world’, these thinkers are able to ‘expose faults’ and ‘identify agents of change’? Do they or do they not expose faults and identify agents of change?
My nakiri‘s purpose is chopping vegetables. I am seeking dinner; my knife is not.
Critical Theory is the knife. Theorists are the cooks.
I don’t think you appreciate how complicated your questions are, but … Hm. I’ll try to be as brief. Under a sufficiency coherence theory of epistemic justification, justification consists in whether a belief coheres with an agent’s entire belief system. That is, whether a belief is logically consistent with the agent’s other cohering beliefs. Sufficiency coherence can justify true belief. It can also justify false belief. Both are easy to demonstrate.
In this case, our new belief coheres and is therefore justified. It is also true.
In this case, our new belief coheres and is therefore justified. It is also false. There’s also another problem here.
In this case, our new belief coheres and is therefore justified. We now have two coherent systems of justified belief that are mutually exclusive. In fact, we have an infinite number of such mutually exclusive systems, and all of them are equally coherent and so equally justified.
I do hope you see the problem here. Sufficiency coherentism marks justified entire networks of beliefs that most of us would not. Keeping this in mind, it is clear that critical theorists can have justified true beliefs, and they even do. However, this justification is subject to the problems demonstrated above (and more, of course).