#problematize

https://twitter.com/Ayishat_Akanbi/status/1297299091945390090

How you perceive something and whether it’s true or not are completely independent matters. Humans aren’t that reliable on their own - we evolved imperfectly and have only average senses, paired with perceptual flaws such as cognitive dissonance, pattern seeking and confirmation bias. We’re also extremely self-interested. We know we’re unreliable. We know people have agendas, we know people make mistakes. That’s why we don’t blindly trust everything everyone ever says, even when it’s said sincerely. This isn’t a bug. It’s an important part of our social cohesion.

These flaws helped us survive as a species not because of their accuracy but because of their effectiveness at perpetuating our survival. Reacting to a non-threat is better for our survival than non-reaction to an actual threat.

We live in an objective reality. We experience it subjectively. It may be that you perceive green as what I would call red and red as what I would call green. But we can agree that a particular tree is green. We can agree that “down” is the direction things fall when dropped. Starting with the most basic of concepts, like “down”, we can go from there. We can invite as many people as we want, they can perform the same verifications and come to the same conclusion. Anyone on the planet can perform the Cavendish experiment to calculate the gravitational constant, and get the same result every time.

It may even be that we live in the Matrix or a video game, that the world we’re presented with is a myth. But it’s still consistent and objective within that world. There are (descriptive, not prescriptive) laws that describe how that world works.

Just because it’s objective doesn’t mean that we already know the answers, or even that we ever can know them for everything. But we don’t proceed with the assumption that everything is mere opinion. That gravity is just an opinion, that 2+2 is just an opinion, that electricity is just an opinion.

In comparison to this, “Lived Experience” is essentially incoherent. Nobody has any independent access to the events of your life, nor any way of investigating which details you may have missed or edited out. Which elements you may have put undue focus or attention on, which ones are affected by your imperfect perceptions.

What’s worse is that a valid “Lived Experience” in the woke sense, requires evaluating it through the lens of Critical Theory. Simply saying what you experienced is not actually “Lived Experience” in the woke definition. You have to filter it through the paranoia, cynicism and postmodern power dynamics mindset of Critical Theory and Intersectionality in order to find and problematize all the slights against you. Whether they were there or not. Whether you felt them at the time or not. And regardless of intent; they literally say “intentions don’t matter”, thereby assuming bad intentions. Not even “bad intentions by default.” Since Critical Theory takes a social constructivist approach, even a lack of conscious intent can still be countered by insisting on a socialized unconscious intent. You can never win, there’s no falsifiability of any of its hypotheses. There’s no avenue in Critical Theory to even consider, let alone come to, any other conclusion.

“Lived Experience” therefore denies any and all other explanations, as fervently as a Xtian denying any possibility other than their god creating everything (the entire apologetics industry is fixated on propping up this delusion, no matter how fallaciously). Not to mention the experiences of anyone outside protected classes, or those who within those classes who are dissenters. It’s woke presupposition. A Xtian might evaluate an experience and see if it aligns with the bible. If it does, that was “god” speaking to them. It it isn’t, it was the “devil’ trying to influence them. They will also deny that a non-believer can experience similar events or feelings through non-supernatural means. It’s the same thing. You look up the table of acceptable answers, and find the one that fits. Then deny all other possibilities. Particularly the more charitable ones. And especially the ones offered by a heretic that contradict your ideology.

As with religious conclusions, we should simply ignore them; being unfalsifiable not only makes them not-false, it makes them not-true.

You have a lived experience. Great. So do I. So do UFO abductees. They may be “valid” in that they feel real to us, or that we believe we experienced them. But “valid” is not the same as “true.” (In the realm of deductive logic, an argument can be valid without being sound.) None of us is a perfect creature. Before we make truth claims about them, we need to evaluate them with as little bias as possible, making as few unjustified assumptions as possible.

We’re as entitled to ask for evidence and to consider other possibilities - including multivariate possibilities - with woke assertions as much as we do so for theistic ones or any other claim. We don’t have to surrender our intellectual integrity to social or political pressure, or ad hominems, appeals to emotions and kafkatraps. I think typically you’ll find behind them is less a desire to find and uncover truth, and more an intent to extract compliance and assert control.

There's a large chasm that needs to be crossed between “valid” and “true.”

https://iep.utm.edu/val-snd/

verb

verb:

problematise