这些是我在《犬儒理论》中所做的摘录,由于这本书涉及的内容很多,我将对它们进行分类呈现。在原文的下方是我的简要概括。

第一部分:”犬儒理论”对于科学和理性的敌视

1.后现代主义对知识的态度

For Foucault, a statement reveals not just information but also the rules and conditions of a discourse. These then determine the construction of truth claims and knowledge. Dominant discourses are extremely powerful because they determine what can be considered true, thus applicable, in a given time and place. Thus, sociopolitical power is the ultimate determiner of what is true in Foucault’s analysis, not correspondence with reality. Foucault was so interested in the concept of how power influences what is considered knowledge that in 1981 he coined the term “power-knowledge” to convey the inextricable link between powerful discourses and what is known. Foucault called a dominant set of ideas and values an episteme because it shapes how we identify and interact with knowledge.

In The Order of Things, Foucault argues against objective notions of truth and suggests we think instead in terms of “regimes of truth,” which change according to the specific episteme of each culture and time. As a result, Foucault adopted the position that there are no fundamental principles by which to discover truth and that all knowledge is “local” to the knower28—ideas which form the basis of the postmodern knowledge principle. Foucault didn’t deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.

The main takeaway from this is that postmodern skepticism is not garden-variety skepticism, which might also be called “reasonable doubt.” The kind of skepticism employed in the sciences and other rigorous means of producing knowledge asks, “How can I be sure this proposition is true?” and will only tentatively accept as a provisional truth that which survives repeated attempts to disprove it. These propositions are put forth in models, which are understood to be provisional conceptual constructs, which are used to explain and predict phenomena and are judged according to their ability to do so. The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as “radical skepticism.” It says, “All knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way.” Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment. The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn’t true.29 Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative—a sweeping explanation of how things work—and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.

This view is widely attributed to the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who critiqued science, the Enlightenment, and Marxism. Each of these projects was, for Lyotard, a prime example of a modernist or Enlightenment metanarrative. Ultimately, Lyotard feared that science and technology were just one “language game”—one way of legitimating truth claims—and that they were taking over all other language games. He mourned the demise of small local “knowledges” passed on in narrative form and viewed the loss of meaning-making intrinsic to scientific detachment as a loss of valuable narratives. Lyotard’s famous characterization of postmodernism as a “skepticism towards metanarratives” has been extremely influential on the development of postmodernism as a school of thought, analytical tool, and worldview.30

This was the great postmodernist contribution to knowledge and knowledge production. It did not invent the skeptical reevaluation of well-established beliefs. It did, however, fail to appreciate that scientific and other forms of liberal reasoning (such as arguments in favor of democracy and capitalism) are not so much metanarratives (though they can adopt these) as imperfect but self-correcting processes that apply a productive and actionable form of skepticism to everything, including themselves. This mistake led them into their equally misguided political project.

这里,作者举的是福柯和利奥塔的例子。福柯认为,”话语” 拥有巨大的权力,它建构了知识,决定了何为真假,因此,在福柯的分析中,决定事物真伪的不是它与现实的契合度,而且政治(和社会)权力。他为此特地发明了一个词叫”权力知识”,来体现强势话语与知识之间的联系。在《词与物》中,他反对真理的客观性,并主张把真理视为一种随着文化和时间改变的”体制”。福柯认为,不存在什么发现知识的基本原则,任何知识都局限于其拥有者。

作者认为,后现代主义的怀疑是极端怀疑,而不是合理怀疑。什么是合理怀疑?合理怀疑指的是,在下结论之前先问自己:”我怎么知道这个假设是正确的?”而且只有在假设经过多次实际的检验之后,才将其视为临时真理,科学研究采用的方法就是合理怀疑。后现代主义采用的极端怀疑则把一切知识都视为构建,只对构建的方式感兴趣。后现代主义错误地认为,科学并不比其它判断真伪的方式更可靠,更严谨,并且错误地把科学包装成了”元叙事”。对后现代主义而言,知识局限于文化的圈子,体现的是该文化圈子的权力体系。正因如此,后现代主义者认为知识是区域化的和政治化的。

这类思想很大程度上也受到了利奥塔的影响,利奥塔同时批判了科学、启蒙运动和马克思主义,在他看来,这些都是现代主义的”元叙事”。他把科学当作一种”文字游戏”,并且害怕它会取代其它的”文字游戏”,利奥塔认为,知识有很多种,科学只是其中的一种,科学的统治地位挤占了其它”知识”们的生存空间,后现代主义就是要怀疑”元叙事”。

作者总结到,对现有信念的怀疑并不是什么新鲜事物,不同的是,后现代主义并没有意识到,科学和归纳推理并不是元叙事(虽然采用了元叙事),它们虽不完美,却有着自我纠正的机制,它们怀疑世界万物(包括它们自已),然而这种怀疑(合理怀疑)是有益的,有可操作性的。

2.后现代主义对事实和逻辑的态度

Put more simply, one central belief in postmodern political thought is that powerful forces in society essentially order society into categories and hierarchies that are organized to serve their own interests. They effect this by dictating how society and its features can be spoken about and what can be accepted as true. For example, a demand that someone provide evidence and reasoning for their claims will be seen through a postmodernist Theoretical lens as a request to participate within a system of discourses and knowledge production that was built by powerful people who valued these approaches and designed them to exclude alternative means of communicating and producing “knowledge.” In other words, Theory views science as having been organized in a way that serves the interests of the powerful people who established it—white Western men—while setting up barriers against the participation of others. Thus, the cynicism at the heart of Theory is evident.

这里,作者认为,后现代主义的核心思想之一就是,权力通过话语控制社会,以谋取利益。假如一个人要求他人在提出观点时摆事实,讲逻辑,那么在后现代理论看来,这就是在参与那些注重事实和逻辑的人的话语系统,而创造这些话语系统(比如科学)的人就是西方的白人男性,因此,摆事实,讲逻辑就是在助长西方白人男性的权力。后现代主义的犬儒本质在此一览无遗。

3.立场认识论

This is a form of standpoint theory—the belief that knowledge comes from the lived experience of different identity groups, who are differently positioned in society and thus see different aspects of it.26 For decolonial scholars, both “Eurocentric forms of knowledge” and “the epistemological authority assigned uniquely to the Western university as the privileged site of knowledge production”27 are problems, and “the point is not simply to deconstruct such understandings, but to transform them.”28 In other words, by using activism to achieve a symbolic “textual” aim, affecting the statuary on campus, decolonization activists also attempted to bolster their ranks, while “reforming” education to rely more explicitly on their applications of Theory.

作者在这里初步介绍了在后现代主义中十分流行的”立场认识论”,这种理论认为,基于群体身份的生活经验是知识的来源,由于不同的群体在社会中处在不同的位置,于是他们便能看到社会的不同方面,对于主张”去殖民’‘的学者而言,”欧洲主心主义”的知识(科学)就是他们的敌人。

4.”学术正义”

Research justice acts upon a belief that science, reason, empiricism, objectivity, universality, and subjectivity have been overvalued as ways of obtaining knowledge while emotion, experience, traditional narratives and customs, and spiritual beliefs have been undervalued. Therefore, a more complete and just system of knowledge production would value the latter at least as much as the former—in fact, more, because of the long reign of science and reason in the West. The 2015 book, Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change, edited by Andrew Jolivette, is a key text here. Jolivette, professor and former department chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, defines the aims of this method in his introduction:

“[R]esearch justice” is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that aims to transform structural inequalities in research…. It is built around a vision of equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge, including the cultural, spiritual, and experiential, with the goal of greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change.38

This is activism. It seeks not only to revolutionize understandings of knowledge and rigor in university curricula—not necessarily to improve them—but also to influence public policies away from evidenced and reasoned work and towards the emotional, religious, cultural, and traditional, with an emphasis on lived experience. It seeks to challenge the core understanding of “scholarly research” as the gathering of empirical data for analysis, in order to better understand social issues. This theme comes across most strongly in the 2004 book, Decolonizing Research in Cross-Cultural Contexts: Critical Personal Narratives,39 which focuses on indigenous studies and is edited by Kagendo Mutua, professor of special education at the University of Alabama, and Beth Blue Swadener, Professor of Culture, Society and Education / Justice and Social Inquiry at the University of Arizona. Citing Homi Bhabha, the editors introduce the essays by claiming,

These works stand at the center of the “beginning of the presencing” of a disharmonious, restive, unharnessable (hence unessentializable) knowledge that is produced at the ex-centric site of neo/post/colonial resistance, “which can never allow the national (read: colonial/western) history to look itself narcissistically in the eye.”40 (emphasis in original)

This means that the authors of the essays within this volume are not obliged to make sense, produce reasoned arguments, avoid logical contradiction, or provide any evidence for their claims. The normal expectations of scholarly “research” do not apply when pursuing research justice. This is alarming, and it is justified Theoretically.

“学术正义”是另一个来自于后现代衍生理论的概念,”学术正义”认为传统的学术界过于注重科学、理性和经验主义的作用,而忽视了主观情绪、个人经历、传统习俗、巫术和玄学的作用,为了实现”学术正义”,就应该把情绪,感觉和经历置于科学和理性之上。换句话说,根据”学术正义”的标准,做学术不需要搜集客观的数据,不需要做实证研究,只需要依照个人的主观情感,主观好恶就可以了。学术研究可以自相矛盾,可以毫无根据,不需要遵照什么客观标准。这是一种十分危险的做法,而且这种做法被理论化了。

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5.把科学理解为压迫

This understanding of the oppressive role of science can be largely traced back to Michel Foucault. Foucault studied the production of “power-knowledge”—how knowledge is socially constructed by discourses, in the service of power—and was particularly concerned with “biopower”—how the biological sciences legitimize the knowledge that the powerful use to maintain their dominance. In his four-volume study, The History of Sexuality,14 Foucault argues that, since the late seventeenth century, far from suppressing speech about sex (as neo-Marxist thinkers like Marcuse had argued), there has been an explosion of talk about sex—both the act and the biological concept. As scientists began to study and categorize sexuality, Foucault claims, they simultaneously constructed it and created the sexual identities and categories that accompany these constructions.

“The society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will—did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it.15”

Foucault’s view was that the discourses produced by this “machinery” gained social legitimacy as “truth” and then permeated all levels of society. This is a process of power but not, as the Marxist philosophers had claimed, one in which religious or secular authorities enforce an ideology on the common people. In Marxist thought, power is like a weight, pressing down on the proletariat. For Foucault, power operated more like a grid, running through all layers of society and determining what people held to be true and, consequently, how they spoke about it. The view from Foucault, thus Theory, is that power is a system we’re all constantly participating in by how we talk about things and what ideas we’re willing to consider legitimate, a system into which we are socialized. The prime culprit for legitimizing knowledge—and thus power—in Foucault’s view was science, which held prestige in society for exactly that purpose. This is what Foucault referred to as “biopower,” claiming that scientific discourse “set itself up as the supreme authority in matters of hygienic necessity,” and “in the name of biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state” because “[i]t grounded them in ‘truth.’”16 Foucault argues that power runs through the whole system of society, perpetuating itself through powerful discourses. He called this the “omnipresence of power.”

作者认为,把科学视为一种压迫的这种想法很大程度上可以追溯到米切尔·福柯,福柯发明了”权力知识”这种说法,认为权力通过话语建构了知识,使其为自己服务,他尤其关注”生物权力”对知识的建构,认为生物学通过生物知识维持了自身的统治地位。在《性史》一书中,福柯认为,自17世纪晚期以来,人们就对于性展开了非常多的讨论,并与此同时建构了性和性别身份。

福柯的看法是,”机制”建构了话语,话语又借此成为了”真相”,并渗透了社会。这和马克思主义者的看法很不相同,马克思主义者认为,权力是自上而下强加与无产阶级的,福柯则认为,权力类似于一种网格,存在于社会的各个层面,权力建构了合法知识,影响着人们的说话方式,并借此巩固自身地位。科学就是这样一种权力,这种权力使科学知识合法化,并且使种族主义合理化。

6.把科学视为一种特权

Social Justice scholars attempt to justify this with an attitude that sees science and reason as unjustly privileged—regardless of their ability to accurately describe reality and make predictions about it—over the wide variety of identity-based “ways of knowing.” The problem, for them, is that scientific forms of knowledge production aim to be objective and universal, and (at least in most people’s view) frequently succeed at that aim. Because there are evidence-based scientific explanations for some of the social issues that impact identity groups, science often finds itself in direct contravention of the postmodern principles, especially the belief that everything important is socially constructed. In addition, many philosophers, scientists, and other scholars have offered reasoned arguments that identify flaws in Theory and in Social Justice scholarship’s assumptions, methods, and conclusions. This type of criticism does not tend to go down well with the postmodernism at the heart of Social Justice scholarship and activism, so Social Justice–based attacks on science and reason are usually open and direct. This is not only because science and reason have an irritating habit of revealing the flaws in Theoretical approaches; it is also because they are universal and thus violate the postmodern knowledge principle and the postmodern theme of centering group identity, around which Social Justice scholarship is organized.

This violation is dealt with through the postmodern political principle. Because science has such a high prestige as a reliable producer of knowledge—and because postmodernists from Lyotard to Foucault have disparaged it as a discourse of power for the last fifty years—it is commonly regarded with deep suspicion by Social Justice scholars and activists. Often, this is rationalized by pointing to the fact that people have sometimes attempted to use science and reason to prop up injustices—especially if you read the history as cynically as possible.16 Claims like this often refer to much earlier periods of science—citing, for example, nineteenth-century arguments in support of colonialism that would now be dismissed as pseudoscience. At other times, the suspicions result from the fact that science has discovered things that do not conform to social-constructivist ideas, such as that differences between the sexes exist. And sometimes these objections are based on alleged discrimination: “formal and informal barriers to the participation of women and racial minorities in scientific enterprises [that] have had the effect of disproportionately favoring white males’ presence and influence in science.”17 These complaints, however, are often vague, begin with the cultural constructivist assumption that all inequalities must be the result of oppression rather than, say, men and women having different interests on average, and are typically accompanied by appeals to attitudes and problems that have not been much in evidence for decades.

社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)认为,科学和理性拥有着与之不相称的威望和特权,相反,那些基于群体身份的知识体系则受到了不公正待遇。他们之所以会这么认为,一方面是因为科学有着令理论家恼人的习惯:它总是会揭示那些抽象理论的谬误,而且它的结论总是与后现代主义的信条,例如社会建构论直接冲突。另一方面,科学提供的是客观,普世的解释,这又是与后现代主义的知识原则相冲突。因此,毫不奇怪,后现代主义者,以及社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)十分敌视科学。

面对科学与后现代理论的冲突,社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)的做法是以一种十分犬儒主义的态度阅读历史,使科学显得不正义:通常,他们会指出,科学在早期的发展阶段,例如在19世纪,曾经被用来替殖民主义辩护(即便这些说法现在已被视为伪科学)。因此,如果科学与后现代理论相冲突,社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)就会将这科学视为一种歧视,认为它代表了白人男性的霸权。

6以玄学代替科学

Instead of science, Social Justice scholarship advocates for “other ways of knowing,” derived from Theoretical interpretations of deeply felt lived experience. It argues that reason and evidence-based knowledge are unfairly favored over tradition, folklore, interpretation, and emotion because of the power imbalances baked into them. Without the slightest awareness of the racist and sexist implications, Theory views evidence and reason to be the cultural property of white Western men.

Examples of this are common. Dotson famously called the dominance of reason and science a “culture of justification” in 2012 and argued instead for a “culture of praxis,” which would incorporate multiple ways of knowing in order to include more diverse groups of people in philosophy.18 Other scholars have argued that rational and scientific approaches limit Anglo-American epistemologists from accepting broader and multiple ways of knowing.19 Still others recommend emotion, as an unjustly neglected means of arriving at reliable knowledge. Allison Wolf calls this the “reason/emotion divide” and describes it as a construct of the Western philosophical tradition. She advocates foregrounding feelings as a way of knowing.20

This approach is alarming, patronizing, and potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, the underlying concept of experiential knowledge is not entirely without merit. Quite often, it is more important to know how things are experienced than what the facts of the matter are. For example, if a friend’s father has died of a heart attack, we generally want to know how she is feeling and how we can help her through her grief. Factual information about myocardial infarctions is probably of less importance at that time. Nevertheless, there are facts that can be known about heart attacks, and it is important that these facts be accurate. Such knowledge cannot be gleaned simply by the experience of a heart attack or of losing a loved one to a heart attack. Sometimes we need to empathize with the person who has lost her loved one to a heart attack and sometimes we need to consult a cardiologist.

社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)主张以其它知识体系取代科学,例如传统习俗,神话故事和个人情感。他们认为,这些非科学的知识体系之所以没有科学受欢迎,是因为科学代表了西方白人男性的强势权力。

这种说法实际上就是在把科学视为西方白人的独有资产,然而鼓吹这种说法的社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)却丝毫没有意识到这种说法本身就是种族主义和性别主义的体现

作者在这里给了三个例子,第一个例子是Dotson在2012年呼吁要打破科学和理性的统治地位,以便于增加知识多元性和种族多元性,第二个例子是一批学者宣称科学和理性限制了盎格鲁美国人的认识,要把主观情绪当作知识的来源,第三个例子是Allison Wolf认为理性和情绪的区别是一种”建构”,要重视基于情绪的知识。

18.Kristie Dotson, “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2012).
19.Code, “Epistemic Responsibility.”
20.Allison B. Wolf, “‘Tell Me How That Makes You Feel’: Philosophys Reason/Emotion Divide and Epistemic Pushback in Philosophy Classrooms,” Hypatia 32, no. 4 (2017): 893–910, doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12378.

7.立场认识论(2)

Standpoint theory operates on two assumptions. One is that people occupying the same social positions, that is, identities—race, gender, sex, sexuality, ability status, and so on—will have the same experiences of dominance and oppression and will, assuming they understand their own experiences correctly, interpret them in the same ways. From this follows the assumption that these experiences will provide them with a more authoritative and fuller picture. The other is that one’s relative position within a social power dynamic dictates what one can and cannot know: thus the privileged are blinded by their privilege and the oppressed possess a kind of double sight, in that they understand both the dominant position and the experience of being oppressed by it. As the feminist epistemologist Nancy Tuana puts it:

Standpoint theory was designed to be a method that would render transparent the values and interests, such as androcentrism, heteronormativity, and Eurocentrism, that underlie allegedly neutral methods in science and epistemology, and clarify their impact. Such attention to the subject of knowledge illuminated the various means by which oppressive practices can result in or reinforce epistemic inequalities, exclusions, and marginalizations. In this way, feminist and other liberatory epistemologists aimed to transform the subject of knowledge in the sense of focusing on knowledge obscured by dominant interests and values and thereby to identify and provide tools for undermining the knowledges and practices implicated in oppression.24

Standpoint theory often finds itself criticized for essentialism—for thinking something like “all black people feel like this.”27 This isn’t quite wrong because it rests, in a way, on a concept we’ve encountered before: strategic essentialism, wherein members of an oppressed group can essentialize themselves (or, here, the authenticity of their lived experience in relationship to power) as a means of achieving group political action. Its advocates don’t defend it that way, however. They generally get around this accusation by arguing that the theory does not assume all members of the same group have the same nature but that they experience the same problems in an unjust society, although they can choose which discourses they wish to contribute to. Members of these groups who disagree with standpoint theory—or even deny that they are oppressed—are explained away as having internalized their oppression (false consciousness) or as pandering in order to gain favor or reward from the dominant system (“Uncle Toms” and “native informants”) by amplifying Theoretically dominant discourses.

Standpoint theory is at the root of identity politics and it is the main thing that fundamentally differentiates it from the liberal civil rights movements. For influential black feminist Patricia Hill Collins, the relationship between standpoint theory and identity politics was explicit and represented a crucial element of progress.28 Similarly, but perhaps more profoundly, Kristie Dotson, arguably the most influential black feminist Theorist of knowledge, argues that it is almost impossible for dominant social groups to see outside of their own system of knowledge, which is simply considered knowledge per se by mainstream society. In her 2014 paper “Tracking Epistemic Oppression,” she sets out orders of oppression. The first two are Fricker’s two forms of epistemic injustice. The third and most profound order is “irreducible.” By this, she means it is an epistemic injustice that cannot simply be attributed to an unjust social system but that exists within the system of knowledge itself. Hence, changing it from within is almost—if not entirely—impossible.29 For Dotson, the systems of knowledge—“schemata”—have been specifically set up to work for dominant groups and exclude others, but, because they work for the dominant groups so smoothly, they do not even realize that there are things they don’t know, things that can only be known from within the knowledge systems that they oppress.30

Dotson ultimately asserts that knowledge is inadequate unless it includes the experiential knowledge of minority groups. This knowledge is assumed to be consistently different from that of dominant groups because of the power dynamics between the groups. Furthermore, the knowledge produced by dominant groups—including science and reason—is also merely the product of their cultural traditions and is not superior to the knowledge produced by other cultural traditions. Dotson explicitly proceeds from the two postmodern principles. Her argument, which is central to standpoint theory, denies that science and reason belong to all humans and are the same for all humans and, in effect, assigns them to white Western men.

Dotson goes further than this. The logical implication of her third-order oppression is that if someone from a dominant group does not agree that her knowledge-producing systems are limited by their failure to include experiential knowledge from outside them, that is because she is unable to step outside of her own culture. In other words, legitimate disagreement is not an option.

立场认识论有两个基本前提,第一个前提就是,群体身份相同的人,经历也都相同,对经历的理解也都相同。第二个前提则是,在权力系统中的相对位置决定了此人的认知,也就是说:拥有特权的人群因为特权而被蒙蔽了两眼,相反,被压迫的人群因为被压迫而拥有双倍的洞察力。

立场认识论因此被指责为本质论,以为所有的黑人经历都一样,面对这种指责,立场认识论者会辩称:虽然经历未必一样,但他们面临的压迫是一样的,至于他们希望参加哪些话语,那是他们自己的选择。说是这么说,可是,一当这些群体内部真的有人不同意立场认识论,或者不认为他们受压迫,立场论者就认为他们”将压迫内化了”,产生了”错误觉悟”,或者在同压迫者”串通一气”

立场认识论可以说是身份政治的核心,也是身份政治与民权运动最本质的区别,Patricia Hill Collins,Kristie Dotson这些影响最深远的黑人女权主义者都把立场认识论视为身份政治的”伟大成就”,Dotson更极端,她认为那些占优势地位的身份群体(白人男性)无法看到他们知识体系以外的任何事物。她认为,优势群体(白人男性)的知识体系(包括科学和理性),仅仅是他们文化的产物,因此相比其它文化的产物没什么优越的地方。她否认科学和理性属于全人类,否认科学和理性的普世性,认为它们只属于西方白人男性。

Dotson甚至更进一步地说道:如果来自优势群体的人(白人)不同意她的认识论,而坚持逻辑和理性,这将是因为他局限于自身所属的文化,无法接受其它文化的知识体系,换句话说,他不被允许拥有合理的反对意见。

8.不可证伪性

The radically relativist answer—that two or more contradictory statements can be simultaneously true—is sometimes attempted, but it does not, after all, make much sense. Instead, what Social Justice scholars seem in practice to do is to select certain favored interpretations of marginalized people’s experience (those consistent with Theory) and anoint these as the “authentic” ones; all others are explained away as an unfortunate internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest. In this way the logical contradiction between radical relativism and dogmatic absolutism is resolved, but at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: no matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social) or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away. In this sense, we are not so far, in fact, from the apocalyptic cults who predicted that the world would end on a specific day, but reaffirmed their beliefs with added fervor when that day passed uneventfully. (The spaceship coming to destroy the earth really did come, but the extraterrestrials changed their minds when they saw the cult members’ devotion.)

社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)把弱势群体的经历捧得很高,然而在实际上,社会正义学者(Social Justice scholars)只把赞同自己理论的经历视为真实的,而把不赞同自身理论的经历视为”压迫的内化”或是”利益的驱使”。

这就使得社会正义理论(Social Justice Theory)成为了一种不可证伪的学学,不论对方提供了多少证据,社会正义理论(Social Justice Theory)都将其解释为压迫的内化和利益的驱使。从这层含义上看,社会正义理论(Social Justice Theory)与那些预言世界将在某日终结的末日邪教几乎没有什么区别。这类邪教无视反面证据,事实上,预言与事实的冲突恰恰加深了末日教徒的信仰,他们会解释道:”世界之所以没有毁灭,正是因为教徒们信仰虔诚。”

9.理工科亦未幸免

Even science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects have been affected. Since 2010, there have been an increasing number of proposals from within engineering, arguing for the use of Social Justice concepts in that profession. One 2015 paper proposes that an engineer should “demonstrate competence in the provision of sociotechnological services that are sensitive to dynamics of difference, power, and privilege among people and cultural groups.”24 In the book Engineering and Social Justice, published by Purdue University Press, we read many variations on the same theme and a worrisome recommendation: “getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need in engineering education.”25 Meanwhile, arguments have been made that mathematics is intrinsically sexist and racist because of its focus on objectivity and proof and because of disparate outcomes in mathematics education across racial groups

Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge towards a way of being in the world that is guided by first principles—mathematx. This shift from thinking of mathematics as a noun to mathematx as a verb holds potential for honouring our connections with each other as human and other-than-human persons, for balancing problem solving with joy, and for maintaining critical bifocality at the local and global level.26

It is unclear how this could improve mathematics, but the political agenda here is obvious—and alarming. Similar curricula are under serious consideration for implementation in public schools at all levels in the Seattle area.2

24.Ben Cohen, “The Rise of Engineering’s Social Justice Warriors,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, January 3, 2019, www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/11/the-rise-of-engineerings-social-justice-warriors/.
25.Donna Riley, Engineering and Social Justice (San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2008), 109.
26.Enrique Galindo and Jill Newton, eds. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Indianapolis, IN: Hoosier Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2017).
27.Catherine Gewertz, “Seattle Schools Lead Controversial Push to ‘Rehumanize’ Math,” Education Week, October 22, 2019, www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/10/11/seattle-schools-lead-controversial-push-to-rehumanize.html.


社会正义理论(Social Justice Theory)的影响不仅局限与人文学科,传统的理工科(STEM)也受其影响。例如在2015年,工程学的一篇论文就写道:一位工程师应当具有社会技术上的资质,要能敏感地发现不同群体中存在的权力与特权差异。由普渡大学(Purdue University)出版的《工程学与社会正义》则建议道:”工程学需要超越客观真理这一陈旧概念”。还有的说法认为数学是种族主义的体现,因为数学注重客观证据,而且不种族族的人数学成绩不一样。

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