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.*
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*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.*
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*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.*
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*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*
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*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.*
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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。
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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。
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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"。
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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.*
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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.*
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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:*
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__*“[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*__
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*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,*
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__*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)*__
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*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.*
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"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。
## 《犬儒理论》摘录
## 第三部分：不许反对，只许同意
*Many people (especially academics) remain unaware of the depth of this problem, which presents as ideological closedness, unwillingness to accept any disagreement, and an authoritarian will to enforce a Social Justice conception of society and moral imperative on others.35 Caring about justice in society is not a problem—indeed, it’s necessary to a healthy society. It is also not inherently a problem if bad ideas enter the academy and gain popularity. This is how knowledge advances—by giving space to all kinds of ideas within our centers of learning, where they can be examined, tested, and criticized. (Some of the most well-established ideas of today—like the “Big Bang” theory of cosmology—were considered mad and unethical at one time.) A problem arises, however, when any school of thought refuses to submit its ideas to rigorous scrutiny, rejects that kind of examination on principle, and asserts that any attempts to subject it to thoughtful criticism are immoral, insincere, and proof of its thesis. To get a sense of the severity of this problem, let’s look at three examples from the 2010s.*
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任何一个社会都会存在坏思想，坏思想其存在本身并不是问题所在，真理就是在各种思想的碰撞中出现的。然而，当某种思想拒绝与外部接触，拒绝人们的审视，拒绝外界的检验，并且把一切对自己的批评都描绘成不道德，不真诚的攻讦时，问题就出现了。许多人对此尚未有清楚的认识，以下的一些例子可以让人们体会到问题严重性：
## 案例一：Applebaum与《白人共犯》
**Example 1: Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy**
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**by Barbara Applebaum- (2010)**
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*In this 2010 book, Social Justice educator Barbara Applebaum uses the postmodern knowledge and political principles to argue that all white people are complicit in racism, because of their automatic participation in the system of power and privilege described by critical race Theory. Though this book is not well-known among the general public, it is a landmark text in critical whiteness and critical education Theory circles, because it represents an advance on the idea that all white people have privilege (a concept that dates to 1989 and the applied postmodern turn) to insist that all white people are therefore actively complicit in racism. She writes,*
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__*White students often assume that responsibility begins and ends with the awareness of privilege. By admitting to or confessing privilege, however, white students are actually able to avoid owning up to their complicity in systemic racism.36*__
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*This really does say that confessing to white privilege is far from sufficient. White students must accept their ongoing complicity in perpetuating systemic racism simply by being white. It is assumed that they must have learned, internalized, and been perpetuating racism even if they do not know it. If this reminds you of Foucault’s notion of powerful discourses working through everyone in society—you’re right. “Integral to the understanding of how discourse works,” Applebaum informs us, “is the Foucaultian notion of power.”37 “Not only is discourse the prism through which reality is given meaning,” she tells us, “but also power works through discourse to constitute subjects.”38 Again, we get this image of power working as a grid, through the people positioned on it, each performing and speaking according to its directives—rather like (nerd alert!) a Borg hive.*
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Applebaum是"社会正义教员"(Social Justice educator)，在这本书里，Applebaum主张所有白人都是种族主义的共犯，因为他们自动参与了种族批判理论所描述的权力系统。她认为，白人拥有特权，因此必定在主动参与种族主义。她写道，
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"白人学生通常以为意识到自身的特权就够了，他们错了，白人学生通过坦白自身特权回避了更大的问题，那就是：他们参与着系统化的种族歧视。"
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这也就是说，光承认自己的特权还远远不够，白人学生还必须认为，因为他们是白人，他们就必然吸收和内化了种族主义，参与着系统化的种族歧视。
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*Applebaum demands people believe this paradigm—even though she is quick to point out that she is not technically forbidding disagreement. She writes,*
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__*One can disagree and remain engaged in the material, for example, by asking questions and searching for clarification and understanding. Denials, however, function as a way to distance oneself from the material and to dismiss without engagement.39*__
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*So, one can ask questions about Applebaum’s thesis and try to understand it, but denial of “The Truth” (what we usually think of as disagreement) can only mean one has not engaged with the material enough or in the right way. In other words, Applebaum proceeds upon an assumption that her thesis is true. She is certain that she is in possession of The Truth (According to Social Justice)—and scolds those who disagree: “[T] he mere fact that they can question the existence of systemic oppression is a function of their privilege to choose to ignore discussions of systemic oppression or not.”40 One might be forgiven for thinking that Applebaum is not really open to the possibility that people might disagree with her. Her students certainly appear to think so:*
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__**[S]tudents in courses that make systemic injustice explicit often complain in teacher evaluations that they have not been allowed to disagree in the course. Students often maintain that such courses indoctrinate a particular view about racism that they are not willing to accept.41**_
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*Applebaum advocates shutting down such student disagreement. She gives the example of a male student, who questioned the gender wage gap,*
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__*Allowing him to express his disagreement and spending time trying to challenge his beliefs often comes at a cost to marginalized students whose experiences are (even if indirectly) dismissed by his claims.42*__
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*Critical education Theory holds that it is dangerous to allow students to express such disagreement. This is because of its reliance on the postmodern knowledge principle—social reality and what is accepted as true are constructed by language. Disagreement would allow dominant discourses to be reasserted, voiced, and heard, which Theory sees as not safe. As Applebaum explains, “language constitutes our reality by providing the conceptual framework from which meaning is given.”43 She adds, “Even if one retreats to the position where one only speaks for oneself, one’s speech is still not neutral and still reinforces the continuance of dominant discourses by omission.”44 Given this understanding of the power of language (a postmodern theme) and its impacts on social justice (through the postmodern political principle), it is essential to control what may and may not be said. This imperative permeates Social Justice scholarship.*
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*Having already defined the only legitimate form of “disagreement” as putting in more effort to understand (read: agree) and dismissed actual disagreement as refusal to engage with The Truth, Applebaum continues,*
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__*Resistance will not be allowed to derail the class discussions! Of course, those who refuse to engage might mistakenly perceive this as a declaration that they will not be allowed to express their disagreement but that is only precisely because they are resisting engagement.45 (emphasis in original)*__
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*Resistance is indeed futile.*
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Applebaum要求所有学生都接受这些标准，她指出，自己不禁止反对意见，
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"你可以在表达反对的同时保持参与，比方说，你可以问一些问题，以求进一步的阐述。但是否认就不行，否认是一种无参与的反对，它使你疏远材料。"
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所以，为了理解Applebaum的论点，学生可以提问，但是"否认"就不行，"否认"Applebaum的基本论点，就是在"否认真相"，说明学生参与的还不够。换句话说，Applebaum认为自己已经掌握了真理，否认她就是否认真理，因此她斥责一切反对意见，她写道："反对意见的存在本身就是特权者否认系统化种族歧视的证明。"显然，她说自己不禁止反对意见，这是假的，她的学生就这么认为，她写道，
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"参与课程的学生总是抱怨教员不允许他们有反对意见，认为教员是在灌输某种特定的种族主义观"
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Applebaum主张封杀这样的学生，她举了一个质疑性别收入差异的男生的例子，
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"要是让他有了发言的权利，属于弱势群体的那部分学生就会受到伤害"
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教育批评理论认为，认学生拥有反对意见的做法是危险的，因为教育批评理论依赖于后现代主义的知识论——语言构建了社会现实和人们眼中的真相，允许反对意见，就是在允许强势话语的回归，因此是危险的。考虑到后现代主义对语言的魔力有着这种理解，而社会正义(Social Justice)又深受后现代主义的影响，就不难理解这些人为什么想方设法地控制言论表达了。
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Applebaum先是重新定义了"反对意见"(更加努力地去理解，即彻底同意"，然后把真正的反对的意见描述成"拒绝参与真相"，接着，她继续道，
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"课堂不允许出现任何抵抗！那些拒绝参与的学生会将其理解为这是在压制他们的表达权利，但这恰恰证明了他们是在拒绝参与。"
## 案例二：Alison Bailey与《追溯特权》
**Example 2: “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes”**
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**by Alison Bailey (2017)**
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*In this essay, Bailey argues that anyone who disagrees with Social Justice scholarship is insincere and simply trying to preserve unjust power structures, in the service of a knowledge-producing system that privileges straight white men and prevents Social Justice. She defines it thus: “Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that dominant groups habitually deploy during conversations that are trying to make social injustices visible.”46 She assumes that criticisms of Social Justice scholarship are simply attempts to deliberately ignore The Truth According to Social Justice. Furthermore, criticism of Social Justice work is immoral and harmful, Bailey tells us:*
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_**I focus on these ground-holding responses because they are pervasive, tenacious, and bear a strong resemblance to critical-thinking practices, and because I believe that their uninterrupted circulation does psychological and epistemic harm to members of marginalized groups.47**_
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*Since Social Justice scholars like Bailey assume that disagreement with their work must be a result of intellectual and moral failings, no such disagreement can ever be brooked:*
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_**Treating privilege-preserving epistemic pushback as a form of critical engagement validates it and allows it to circulate more freely; this, as I’ll argue later, can do epistemic violence to oppressed groups.48**_
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*It should therefore be shut down and replaced with Social Justice scholarship. In fact, for Bailey, critical thinking itself is a problem: it needs replacing with “critical pedagogy” (in which the word “critical” means something different). She explains:*
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_**The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied…. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step toward resisting and transforming social injustices.49**_
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*This is an explicit admission that Bailey’s aim is not to seek truth, but to teach a specific understanding of Social Justice, for the purposes of activism. Although this essay has not been very influential, it is worth looking at because it is a very clear example of how philosophy classes can be used to instruct students in The Truth According to Social Justice. That this paper was published in Hypatia, the leading feminist philosophy journal, gives us an alarming indication of what is considered acceptable in the fields of Social Justice scholarship, how it can influence education, and how confident and clear this current manifestation of reified postmodernism is.50*
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*Bailey refers to disagreements with Social Justice approaches as “shadow texts,” to suggest that written criticisms of Social Justice are neither sincere nor helpful, and should not be regarded as genuine scholarship. The image of shadow texts, she tells us, comes from the idea of an investigator shadowing her mark: “The word ‘shadow’ calls to mind the image of something walking closely alongside another thing without engaging it.”51 The two examples of shadow texts she gives involve a male student pointing out that men can be victims of domestic violence too, and a female student arguing that one can mention a racist slur in order to discuss it, without using it as a slur. Bailey responds,*
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_**We are discussing institutional racism. Jennifer, a white philosophy major, shares a story about racist graffiti that uses the “n” word. She says the word, animating it with that two-fingered scare-quote gesture to signal that she is mentioning it. I ask her to consider the history of the word and how it might mean something different coming from white mouths. I ask her not to use it. She gives the class a mini lecture on the use–mention distinction, reminding me that it “is a foundational concept in analytic philosophy” and that it’s “perfectly acceptable to mention, but not to use the word in philosophical discussions.”52 … If Jennifer continues to press philosophical concepts into the service of a broader refusal to understand the dehumanizing history of the n-word, then “I mentioned but didn’t use the word ‘n-----’” is a shadow text.53**_
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*Students in Bailey’s philosophy classes are taught to immediately identify counterviews as resistance to Social Justice’s take on The Truth and as a kind of “ignorance.” She thinks that, when people disagree, it’s because something “triggered the resistance.”55 She writes,*
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_**I ask our class to consider how identifying shadow texts might help track the production of ignorance…. It’s essential for them to understand that tracking ignorance requires that our attention be focused not on a few problem individuals, but on learning to identify patterns of resistance and tying ignorance-producing habits to a strategic refusal to understand.56**_
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*It is hard to miss the militant activist tone here. Like Applebaum, Bailey has a priestlike certainty of her own rightness and the concomitant need to reeducate and shut down anyone who disagrees. This marks a significant change from the earliest postmodernists’ radical skepticism, but it is in keeping with how the postmodern principles and their application have evolved over the last half-century.*
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在这篇文章中，Bailey认为，任何反对"社会正义学术"(Social Justice scholarship)的人都是不真诚的，他们希望维护不正义的特权，在她看来，批评"社会正义学术"就是在有意无视"真相"(社会正义学者眼中的真相)，而且是不道德的，有害的。Bailey这么说道，
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"我之所以关注反对者的回应，是因为它们顽固不化，无所不在，而且与批判性思维十分类似，要是听之任之，就会对弱势群体造成心理伤害"
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Bailey这样的学者把一切反对意见都视为智力与道德的失败，因此这些意见都不被允许：
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"若是将守旧派(依然坚持逻辑和理性的人)的意见当作合理批评并且认真对待，就会显得守旧派的意见好像是对的，帮助其传播，这么做是在对被压迫群体施加认识论暴力"
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因此，就要将这些意见封杀，并代之以社会正义学术。事实上，对Bailey而言，批判性思维本身就是问题：必须以"批判教学"取代批判性思维。("批判教学"中"批判"的意思已经改变了).她解释道：
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"批判性思维主要关注的是知识上的合理性，批判性指的就是能出色地判断哪些观点是错的，哪些论断是无依据的，哪些主张引用了不可靠的信息源，哪些观念经不起推敲……"批判教学"关注的不是主张本身是否符合事实，而是这些主张体现了什么样的权力，这些权力又怎么维护了社会不公。它的目的是教学生发现权力如何塑造了人们对世界的理解。这是反抗和改变社会不公的第一步"
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这等于是在明确地承认，Bailey的目的不是追求真相，而是教授一种对社会正义的特殊理解，好为社会活动服务。这篇文章影响虽不大，却明显地展示了哲学课程可以成为灌输意识形态的工具。该文章发布于女权主义哲学的前沿杂志《Hypatia》上，这更让人担忧。令人担忧的不仅是"社会正义教育"的质量，还有"社会正义教育"对教育的影响，以及实用后现代主义自信的展现。
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Bailey认为，反对意见本身是什么都不重要，重要的是意见背后的"影子文本"，反对社会正义学术的人都不怀好意，毫无帮助。Bailey给出了"影子文本"两个例子，第一个例子里，一个男学生指出男人也可能遭受家暴，第二个例子里，一个女学生认为，在讨论种族主义脏话(nigger)时，可以提到种族主义脏话，但不把它当脏话用。对此，Bailey认为，很多人不愿去理解"nigger"一词的非人化历史，该女生是则在服务于这些人的不情愿，如果该女生继续这样做的话，"我提到了nigger但没使用它"就是"影子文本"。
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在哲学课上，Bailey教学生把所有对社会正义学术的批评都视为"拒绝真相"和"无知"，她认为，如果有人不同意社会正义学术，这是因为某些事物"刺激到了反抗的神经"，她写道，
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"我让课上的学生学习如何通过"影子文本"发现无知的根源，他们要知道，要追溯无知的源头，不能只盯着少数个体，而要发现反对意见的规律，并将他们无知与策略性的拒绝理解联系到一起"
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和早期后现代主义者的极端怀疑主义不同，Applebaum、Bailey这样的学者对自己信奉的意识形态体现了宗教徒般的狂热信仰。
