That's pretty hard to distinguish from "just" literature; of course not all literature is fictional or journalistic. But neither criticism nor aesthetics are particularly bounded in their ability to make negative or positive claims due to the flexibility of interpretation of background assumptions that both pancritical + justificationist disciplines rely on. It's inherently subversive of any central and stabilizing intellectual tendency and I think most critical theorists admit their goals as being such.
This is why I doubt the claim that there is a central truth that critical theorists are attempting to discover when their methods are designed to be as disputative or ambiguating as possible. Even if we're in a position where no assumption can be taken for granted in the end, productive operational work (in science in policy or otherwise) always has to maintain some initial set of working goals and assumptions to guide and rationalize action, and perform interventions which can maximally orient the institution towards further action. Subversiveness stalls except in how it wants to prevent such institutions from prolonging themselves.
> Critical theorists are studied and used by philosophers, legal scholars, and sociologists
Are they all trained out of the Frankfurt school by any chance? Yes they're sometimes worth responding to, no they're not worth taking seriously except as a means to an end.
> They wouldn't, because critical theorists can recognize the truth and falsity of claims. Your criticism would be better aimed at the so-called postmodernists (and it'd still be wrong).
I am earnestly interested in learning more about non-postmodern critical theorists. The pragmatists of the freshwater school (Sellars and Brandom mainly) are the only people on the top of my head that sing that note due to the way they deal seriously with the problem of interpretation in foundations and the way they want to internalize Hegel, while still having the aims of scientific inquiry in mind. But that's analytic philosophy assimilating continental philosophy rather than the other way around, which I'm more sympathetic to precisely because analytics tend to want to bound critique rather than produce more critique for its own sake (i.e. subversion as an ends).