CMV:Everyone outside of the hard sciences needs a massive slice of humble pie
People get whipped up into such a storm about who is 'right' or 'wrong' in fields like lit crit,cultural studies,sociology,anthropology,continental philosophy etc despite the fact that the arguments being mostly so speculative and abstract it is hard to know by what universally agreed criterion anyone could be adjudged to be 'right' or 'wrong'...actually we see this effect in psychodynamic theory..a thousand successors to frreud most with similar (in some ways) but also radically different explanations of the same freaking behaviour.
Everyone is almost certainly wrong about everything in most of philosophy.The reason structuralism is taken seriously everywhere except linguistics is because unfalsifiable theories (the entire canon of psychodynamic theory) are 'interesting' outside of science..in let's say cultural studies or lit crit or arthouse cinema but anyone getting on their high horse about 'being right' in anything as squishy as anthropology or sociology or continental philosophy is rushing in where angels fear to tread.Admittedly that does not get you anywhere and for fields to develop paradigms and dialectics are just going to happen..I just think people need to come back down to earth occasionally...but we also need to be careful not to over-do it, trying to humble alternative or critical views can sometimes embolden lazily commonplace ones.
Posted Jun 26, 2017, 8:06 PM UTC