When I read certain conservative blogs, I get the impression that their rejection of things is based on a peculiar notion of critical thinking. The axiom seems to be when confronted with anything widely accepted– climate change, the existence of wide economic, gender, and racial inequalities, evolution, fluoride being good for teeth, and so on –we should immediately doubt it as a mystification. Part of the allure of Rush Limbaugh, for example, seems to be the idea of hearing a “truth” that no one else knows and that everyone else rejects.
This seems like critical thinking run amok. Conspiracy theory is another good example. The conspiracy theorist seems to assume that if something is widely accepted and uncontroversial– say Adam Lanza having shot all those children at Sandy Hook Elementary –it must be a cover up on behalf of the powerful. These things vaguely resemble “critical thinking” because they don’t take things at face value, but question them; but, in fact, they’re forms of uncritical dogmatism because they work from the rule that if something is widely accepted, it must be false.
I worry about this with the humanities classroom. Is there a chance that we might be creating “dogmatists of suspicion”? That is, are their pedagogical strategies that risk turning suspicion into an axiom, such that our students become critically immune to any facts or evidence?
February 26, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Poincaré observed absolutisms of doubt or faith could equally stifle reflection. Fortunately, that was not my experience in the humanities.
February 26, 2013 at 9:43 pm
I think the world needs a proper concept of evidentialism — knowledge grounded in neither reason nor experience per se but rather evidence. The whole never-ending palaver over rationalism and empiricism makes the question of knowledge far too abstract when it is, as sociologists of science have amply demonstrated, the most concrete of things.
Evidentialism is not contrary to critique — in fact, critique is its condition of possibility since what constitutes evidence in any given situation must be open to question. But evidentialism cannot be reduced to critique since it must, by definition, bring more to the table than argument itself — it must bring something of the world with it.
David Campbell wrote this blog post recently in which he raised similar concerns to yours, Levi:
http://www.david-campbell.org/2013/01/22/contemporary-politics-and-the-retreat-from-reality/
As I understood it he was basically calling for an evidentialist epistemology, but he didn’t see it that way. As a poststructuralist he doesn’t like the very notion of epistemology and thinks social theory can do without it. He believes that a basically Foucauldian/Derridean relational social ontology founded on ethics can do the job but I really disagree. I think he’s assuming and hence imposing epistemological standards without recognising them or even accepting that they’re there.
Regardless, there is a difference, I believe, between sharp, acute critical-mindedness and plain, old, nasty cynicism. I think Latour is right in that in the age of ‘cynical reason’ (Sloterdijk) or after the ‘miniaturisation of critique’ (Latour) we need to find a way to trust and build institutions again.
I think that one of the institutions we need to build is a reformed, evidentialist epistemology.
February 26, 2013 at 10:09 pm
“Dubitio ergo sum.”—What Descartes meant to say.
Systematic doubt and an overarching hermeneutic of suspicion (e.g. Marx, Foucault, most feminists) has a place and can be truth discovering. It can also be cancerous. What we choose to doubt and what we assume is true prior to any doubt (the new “a priori”?) are products of our temperament, conditioning and training. Once trained to look for economic oppression, I see it everywhere. I’ve always been prone, by temperament, to look for and notice injustices. Once trained to look for gender inequality, I see it everywhere. Once trained to look for hyper-modernism disguised as post-modernism, I see it everywhere. Because of this last fact, I have come to doubt the universal usefulness (or the necessary necessity) of systematic doubt.
Doubt has its place, but it is not the place to build an entire self-identity, a culture or a science. We know this because of how testimony works in science and the academy in general. We do a process of peer-review, then we trust. I don’t review every article I read. Most, I just read and integrate what is interesting into my own work. What makes something interesting? The very unscientific and (to me) very interesting move to temperament. My temperament is prone to question the wisdom of mobs, but not that of academies. I’m not instantly distrustful of governments, but I am of thugs and hooligans. The question I am interested in is is how do we educate temperaments?
February 27, 2013 at 1:22 am
Honestly conspiracy IS taking things at face value. It took critical thinking to put something as “semiotic”, you would say, as gender or class there.
February 27, 2013 at 1:34 am
Conspiracy theories have a tendency to reject any evidence that contradicts their theory. There’s quite a difference between the conspiracy theorist that holds HIV is harmless and that it’s the drug treatments that cause AIDS (based on the premise that pharmaceutical companies are just seeking profits) and examining systematic racism in a society.
February 27, 2013 at 3:06 am
Conspiracy theories are a way of massaging one’s helplessness — they provide absolutely no way out of the web they weave, and “only a fool would think otherwise.” So I would wonder first whether there’s a connection between suspicion and helplessness — whether that connection applies in other contexts. But also suspicion can arise from distrust of oneself, like the drunk who trips into someone and thinks that other person threw the first punch.
February 27, 2013 at 10:47 pm
[...] Levi Bryant recently worried about teaching suspicion in critical thinking: [...]
March 1, 2013 at 11:38 pm
Yes, AIDS denialism is a strange sub-stratrum of ‘left and right’ paranoia; would like to hear your thoughts on this phenomenon as I have been looking into it deeply and know some of the leading AIDS denialists (who I consider very dangerous in terms of public health and personal suffering)
Warmly, Eilif