Setting the Stage for The Great Epistemic Swindle

Setting the Stage for The Great Epistemic Swindle

Chapter 1.2 of Counter Wokecraft describes the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) perspective and the main elements of its worldview, essentially its epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and political project. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with what we can know and how we can know it. This post is the first of two describing the Great Epistemic Swindle that I believe we’re living through, as well as the main causes of that crisis: the Critical Social Justice perspective; and the lack of political and ideological diversity in our universities and the media. In a third post I'll discuss what should be done to counter the swindle.

The Modern Epistemic Landscape

The epistemic crisis we’re living through is best described by contrasting our current epistemic landscape with the one that preceded it. We can broadly characterize our current era and epistemic landscape as postmodern, which implicitly contrasts with modernity. Modernity, epistemically (and enabled by liberal science (Rauch 2013)) was a period in which it was believed that the nature of reality could be known, or at least approximated and if not known perfectly or ultimately, that our understanding of reality could be improved over time. The method by which knowledge of reality could be attained was through the open presentation of ideas or hypotheses that could be evaluated based on evidence and in the case of science, experimentation. Importantly ideas and hypotheses, based on evidence and argumentation could be refuted. Given the complex nature of reality, economic specialization and development, there was also a specialization of expertise and structures in which expertise and knowledge were evaluated and established. The establishment of such expertise provided a structure upon which knowledge could be considered authoritative.

While religious structures continued to exist, the main authoritative sources of knowledge became the academy and the (mass) media. Another important although less formal source of knowledge was through invention and experimentation. Here, we focus on the two formalized structures and leave invention and experimentation to another, future discussion.

In the academy, many structures evolved by which ideas could be put forth, debated, evaluated and ultimately accepted or rejected as being legitimate or not, and thereby considered as “true” or not. The structure involved established experts, typically professors holding PhDs. The most authoritative structure for the establishment of knowledge was the peer-review process. During the peer review process, proposed ideas were submitted to journals in the form of articles. (The first scientific journal was Philosophical Transactions. It was established in 1665 in England.) Articles would be sent to reviewers “double-blindedly,” so that reviewers did not know who the author was and vice-versa. The process involved professor-reviewers evaluating the arguments and evidence supporting the ideas presented, challenging the proposed ideas and offering their thoughts on whether the ideas could be considered as valid or true (as well as whether or not they could be considered a contribution to existing knowledge). Hierarchies of editors of different complexities would then make the final decisions based on peer-review recommendations and decide whether or not to accept articles for publication. Once an article was accepted for publication, it joined the ranks of established knowledge. Academic book publishing, working on similar principles as the peer-review journal process, was another key aspect of this structure.

The mass media was the other important authoritative structure for knowledge determination, focusing primarily on current events and politics. While the qualifications for those engaged in knowledge production and determination were not as strict as in academia, there were professional ethics, codes of conduct and rules of thumb. One such rule of thumb was the need to have multiple independent sources corroborating evidence before it could be considered publishable, or true. In addition, there was a hierarchy of decision makers, such as editors (and of course lawyers!) who would evaluate the evidence presented in articles and decide whether not it could be published and thereby also join the ranks of established knowledge. Non-academic, non-fiction book publishing followed a similar process.

This, of course, is a stylized description of the “modern” epistemic environment. The existence (and importance) of editorial positions and stances was widely recognized, and the existence of controversy was commonplace and acknowledged. Apart from cynical actors, the modern view did however recognize that a truth existed even if our understanding of the truth was imperfect and could evolve. Also, it was taken for granted that the goal and responsibility of authoritative sources of knowledge and their participants was to try to provide a neutral and objective understanding the truth.

The Postmodern Epistemic Landscape

In contrast to the modern epistemic landscape is the postmodern that is increasingly dominant in both academia and the media. The postmodern epistemic landscape is characterized by the same principles as the CSJ perspective (Pluckrose & Lindsay 2020). The knowledge principle is that all knowledge is socially constructed. The political principle is that knowledge is constructed in such a way to advantage oppressor groups to the detriment of oppressed groups and is therefore inherently biased. Since different cultures have different understandings of reality, and since knowledge from any society is biased, no knowledge from one culture or worldview can be any more authoritative than any other. Finally, the subject principle (Counter Wokecraft Chapter 1.2) is that individuals are primarily defined by their identities, and their identities determine how they behave in the world. Importantly, individuals behave so as to perpetuate existing power structures according to their own identities.

The ethics that emerged from this worldview and its fundamental principles were simply that one must oppose oppression. In the context of the postmodern epistemic landscape, this has implied a necessity to oppose “modern” knowledge construction. This was considered necessary since the CSJ perspective sees “modern” knowledge as being derived from a knowledge construction system that does not actually allow us to get closer to the true nature of reality at all. Moreover, since the modern knowledge system was developed primarily by (white) European males, it was thereby also developed so as to benefit them at the expense of everyone else. The modern knowledge system is therefore considered not only invalid, but also inherently bigoted and oppressive. Unsurprisingly, believing that oppression must be opposed, and that the knowledge system we rely on to understand the world is misleading and oppressive itself, would lead proponents of this view to oppose such a knowledge system and try to replace it with another. That is exactly what’s happened in the social sciences and humanities in academia and this has spread to the majority of our legacy print and broadcast media as well.

This phenomenon is more commonly referred to as the “politicization” of academia and the media. The term politicization is imprecise, but ultimately refers to the phenomenon whereby the goal (in the postmodern epistemic landscape) for authoritative sources of knowledge is no longer to uncover and describe the truth, but rather to describe the world as adherents of the Critical Social Justice see it. As such, it can be seen as prioritizing the postmodern ought to the modern is. In the next post, I'll describe the Great Epistemic Swindle and how it led to the politicization of academia and the media.

References

Pincourt C. and J. Lindsay. Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond. New Discourses, Orlando, Florida, 2021.
Pluckrose, Helen and James A. Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Pitchstone Publishing, Durham, North Carolina, 2020.
Rauch J. Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought - Expanded Edition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

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