...from philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex):
In my own discipline, philosophy, there is still - thank God – encouragement to treat every new theory you encounter with an attitude of grumpy suspicion. You have to test it for structural weaknesses, improbable consequences, inconsistencies, and other problems before you endorse it. Negative criticism is far more common than positive endorsement. To take a pertinent example I know very few people in my side of professional philosophy who treats Judith Butler as a serious intellectual figure. That is, her totalising version of social construction is thought of as naïve and simplistic as a metaphysical view. But in other areas like Gender Studies and some part of English, Art History, Sociology, and so on, Butler’s views, and those of others in the same vein, are treated as basically right, and then “applied” to some particular issue: queering the fruit fly in the laboratory, or queering Hildegard of Bingen, or whatever. In data science they say “rubbish in, rubbish out” but you could just as easily say that if you put in a junk philosophical view like Butler’s into a discussion of something else, you will get out exactly what you put in.
A by-product of academics treating theories like Butler’s as starting points of inquiry, rather than as end points, is that those who do so are – quite literally - unable to defend their starting points intellectually. If you ask them why we should accept that there is no material reality outside linguistic constructions, or what they mean by material reality, they have nothing to say. This means they tend to resort to defensive dogmatism and aggressive insult when questioned by philosophers like me. They start to treat their preferred theoretician as a quasi-religious figure whose pronouncements cannot be questioned. And, perhaps in order to escape tricky questions about their own theoretical starting points, they try to position themselves as heroic activists achieving “social justice” by writing impenetrable prose in academic journals, despite the fact their articles are read by an average of about 6 people and possibly understood by fewer. Over time, this makes some academics operate more like cult-leaders than intellectuals: where a cult is defined as “an authoritarian organisation centred around a belief, that has rules and dogma and encourages its members to isolate themselves from those who would test their faith.”
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