I've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.
Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.
This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account...
Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on.
I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time.
Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine.
But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others.
And now we're here.
There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease.
Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
I will definitely take a look at Stark's and Kaufmann's work.
Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them
The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.
Feyerabend's "Against Method" comes to mind here. I haven't touched his work in a long time. It seems I've some reading to do.
Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy? That tells us something about the culture we live in, and is worth thinking about it. Ironically, it's the concepts in Continental philosophy that allows us to talk about it the best, even if by doing so we end up disagreeing with its most notorious thinkers. Just my two cents.
I should point out that I did say (with added emphasis):
> Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush)
In other words, a lot of it really is that bad – but not all of it.
I myself have to admit I've always been rather fascinated by Foucault, and I think a lot of what he has to say is rather interesting and of contemporary relevance–especially his viewpoint that sexual orientation is a set of contingent cultural constructs, rather than some essential reality of persons
Žižek too – I've read some of his essays, sometimes he makes some insightful points (to me at least) – although I haven't read his philosophical works, and his essays I've read, I'm not sure if they should be classified as "philosophy" per se
> Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy?
How does it answer the classic objection that relativism is self-defeating?
I don't think "relativism" is the biggest complaint though. The biggest complaint is obscurantism–which risks dressing up the trivial as profound, and hiding falsehoods behind fancy language. And imprecision–analytic philosophy is very much about precise definitions and precise arguments, which makes it easier to judge whether an argument succeeds or fails, and to work out whether the parties to a dispute are actually arguing about the same thing or just talking past each other–Continental philosophy tends to be much more impressionistic in character, making it harder to work out what people are saying, and to judge the quality of their arguments
But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence. If we could, then and only then can we accuse thinkers of being fluffy and imprecise obscurantists. However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with! In other words, that is a feature, not a bug of the philosophical tradition.
Well, Nietzsche himself insists that his "perspectivism" isn't a mere "relativism" or "subjectivism". But, exactly what the difference between the the former and the latter is, is complicated and murky and debatable, and I don't think we should exclude the possibility that counterarguments against the latter may end up succeeding against the former as well.
> But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence.
I think it is hopeless to read Nietzsche, for example, as presenting some sort of ordered philosophical system, like Aquinas' Summa or Spinoza's Ethics. But, I think, Nietzsche is under-appreciated as a poet. And reading some of his works as poetry and fiction – you can extract some ideas from them which are very amenable to being put in a precise form. For example, eternal recurrence – he may well have not meant it so literally, but there certainly are cosmological theories in which eternal recurrence is entirely literal, and I think one could fruitfully work out the philosophical implications of such a theory using traditional analytic methods
> However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with!
For me, it really comes down to this – I've read some Nietzsche, and I enjoyed it – even when he's wrong, he's entertaining. I tried reading Derrida – and I gave up. Nietzsche convinced me he had something worthwhile to say; Derrida failed to do so before he ran out of my attention.
Personally, I find it extremely troubling to take sexual philosophy from someone who advocated for 12 year olds to be considered "of age" to have sex with anyone, and himself molested prepubescent children in Tunisia.
A philosopher’s personal misdeeds don’t-in general-count as evidence against their theories. If the theories directly serve to justify their misdeeds, that might be some reason to discount them-but Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation is a historically contingent social construct has no direct bearing on the issue of sexual abuse of minors, so allegations that he engaged in that aren’t relevant to them
“Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words [..]”
I had to look up ontological choreography and it‘s just a concept, not unlike the weird jargon in CS. Is there at least a tiny speck of a sliver of possibility that we lack actual perspective and competency in these fields?
The term "ontological choreography" comes across to me as something like an arrangement or dance of meanings and appears to have been coined by someone whose concern was normalization of LGBTQ families via surrogate parents and possibly other technology. I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
Reading "Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words" is something precise enough that I could probably make software to create an embedding and feed it to a neural net given time and a few more details. It sounds like it's not so distant from what I did more than 20 years ago making a simple Markov chain in a few lines of Perl. The only ambiguous part is what the neural networks actually do with the Markov chain of words, because that's not stated in your quote.
> I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
The word "I" is important here. I could not do anything with this either: "Let X be a compact connected Riemann surface of genus g, equipped with a holomorphic differential ω having a non-zero integral over X [..]"
I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
Some topics just cannot be grasped with tweezers. You just have to try to be precise with the fuzziness and that's not easy.
Compare that to the following sentence taken from the field of "feminist technoscience": "Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET..." [0] Even if we can provide some kind of meaningful definition of "masculine-coded technology" such that ARPANET counts as one – is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate than the equivalent questions for "word embeddings" and "neural networks". And that's why it isn't really fair to compare machine learning, as a discipline, to feminist technoscience – the truth and usefulness of the former is rather beyond dispute, the same things are much much more open to question for the latter.
> I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
There are some approaches to social studies, which while they might not be "reproducible in Perl", seem on a much firmer footing – I mentioned before the rational choice theory of religion, advocated by the late sociologist Rodney Stark. It is far easier to derive testable hypotheses from it, for one thing. People write whole books attacking it (whether successfully or not) – like Steve Bruce's Choice and Religion – precisely because it makes claims which are firm enough to be attacked.
> Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute;
That's what I call things that can be picked up by tweezers, concrete issues that have clear and unambigious manifestations that we all - or virtuall all - agree on.
Those are the easy things. It's very comfortable to pick them up and turn them around and analyze them. There is no ambiguity, no pesky fuzziness. I understand why certain personality types gravitate towards it and I belief myself to be such one, but I'd say be careful about proclaiming them the only things worth studying.
Sometimes things are not that clearly demarcated and even in a rigorous field such a abstract mathematics the concept of "usefulness" is not of primary concern. Also sometimes the reality of a thing itself is not obvious and needs to be studied. Sometimes it's not even clear what we are looking at - try reading anything by Heidegger. Philosophy is a field riddles with those kind of studies.
> is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate
Throw me a bone here, but is the fact that it's not yet clear if it is true or useful, but cannot be ruled out immediately a signal that there's more to it than we currently know? Again, not saying "biomedical homological technofeministic cyborgism wrt ecosystemical unidirectionalism" (me having fun now) is equivalent to studying the properties of neural networks, but just pointing out that reality is multifaceted and that you cannot just skip entire domains of reality just because you cannot replicate it in, again, perl (or math). It's uncomfortable, it lacks precision, but we have to start somewhere and math ain't cutting it.
The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research.
I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code.
It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration.
Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing.
"Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmothers, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?
It might be a value driven claim, but it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter. At least assuming social justice issues aren't severe enough to cause a civil war to be fought or some such.
It is also easy to imagine otherwise, eg. murderous AIs killing off humanity and other AI dystopia that many people are concerned about these days. I don't think they're likely, but as far as imagination goes, it's possible. And if that actually happens, it's arguable that wasting time over "useless" concepts in the humanities is a better survival strategy for societies.
Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.
I absolutely don’t think the humanities and social sciences are useless-I think they have a lot of value.
But nowadays there seem to be two main approaches to them: (1) the modernist traditional social sciences approach, which tries to approximate the rigour of the natural sciences, to as great an extent as the subject matter will permit; (2) the postmodernist critical theory approach-which is inclined to denounce that rigour as harmful/oppressive/etc. Big fan of (1), absolutely see its value; very sceptical of (2).
So I end up working in $BigTech and making half-serious jokes about how capitalism is the cause of modern woes on Facebook...
If I wanted to normalize LGTBQ families with "ontological choreography" I can't get enough meaning out of that to even know where to begin to help.
This is a lump of mostly unrelated things, to the point where people who are likely to religiously embrace some of them would be just as likely to be horrified by the others. And don't even get me started on the "rejection of the divine" - what passes for rigor in religious apologetics can easily rival the worst of modern social studies.
Indeed, isn't it very much the opposite - that, after a period of rationalism promoted as a virtue, we have entered a period of new dogmatic spiritualism?
Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts.
For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics...
The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy.
The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM.
That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.
But here's the thing. How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?
Here's a topical example:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-...
When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
Here's what I see is the difference between humanities critical thinking, and STEM critical thinking. In STEM, if you design an airplane, and the airplane doesn't fly, no amount of wishful thinking and rhetorical reframing is going to make it fly. The humanities have no such constraint.
For another example, Seattle recently completed a $1 Billion new terminal at Seatac to accommodate new larger planes. After it was finished, they discovered that the airplanes did not fit in the slots for them. There's just no way to spin that one into a success.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
That does not mean that every person in those departments is a communist. Marx simply did a lot of early table-setting for critiquing capitalism. Later thinkers did a lot to extend and refute him, so I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that critical theorists are trying to make “Marxism work”. To my knowledge, orthodox Marxists hate a lot of critical theory. Foucault, for example, is widely read in these circles, but as much as he criticized capitalism and society, he was ultimately a neoliberal. Politics is messy and critical theory is not a monolith.
The wishful thinking part cuts both ways. Leftists members of the academy would probably criticize liberals for wishful thinking that say, the capitalist status quo with some modifications could actually save us from climate catastrophe, or that the most sensitive and important parts of being human are not lost when we live under what they consider a structurally unjust system. Or the blind optimism that the “moral arc of history bends towards justice”.
Given that Marxist-Leninism has failed (although MLs would argue otherwise), I agree with the sentiment that it would be unwise to “try it again”. But an honest and charitable engagement with Marx would show that the claims he makes are rather minimal and broad. His relevance is tied to the fact that he can be reinterpreted, and it would be wrongheaded to see it as any more dogmatic than run of the mill non-leftist, folk politics. The guy simply had a lot to say about the industrial revolution.
Whereas we built an airport and the plane doesn't fit is something not something anyone can argue about. Either the planes fit or they don't. Humanities academia devolves into Marxism so fast exactly because it's not pinned down by reality in that way, which is why it should just be abolished. Why should the rest of us be forced to pay for gibberish like "cyborg techno-feminism"?
Naomi Wu is an excellent engineer and a luminary for the DIY space.
First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.
Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.
Frankly this way of talking about humanities as a whole does betray lack of critical thinking on itself. For start, back in real world and in real actual universities, critical thinking does not mean Marxism.
> When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
If you mean this as a statement about actual universities, this is a lie. I mean, so much that it seems more like talking point from TV designed to make people agree with actual legislature banning actual books.
I didn't say it did. I said that there's something wrong with the critical thinking that goes on in the humanities department when they wind up advocating Marxism, despite Marxism having a dismal historical record of relentless failure.
In an ideal sense, Marxist theory should be capable of updating itself to match actual conditions. In a degenerated dogmatic sense, it can be used to force actual conditions to fit within a narrow and false theory.
There is no end to the different interpretations of Marxism and the arguments and debates between them, because there's only so many real world examples that could be tested and examined.
Compared to an engineering problem, Marxist theory ends up touching so many fields and variables on a global scale that the problem space ends up being orders of magnitude greater. There's too much to examine and make sense of, so interpretations end up being strategies on how to navigate through this problem space and how to achieve Marxist theories and goals, either orthodixcally or heterodoxically.
In the example of that anthropologist, it does not go into detail with what the Marxists disagreed with. However, I think a Marxist argument could be made for the wars over women in that their society is of a more primitive stage where stealing women was a part of their socioeconomics. Their system works out so that a population equilbirum is achieved.
In works like Engel's On the Origin of the Family..., there is a Marxist interpretation of how humans orient themselves accordingly to the Marxist theory that the base economics form the superstructure of the culture and society. In more advanced societies, they went through agricultural revolutions that vastly increased the population and reshaped how societies must function to keep order.
Another example of Marxist theory gone wrong could be the USSR, and you have Marxists either defending or condemning it for various reasons. It could then be said that the Chinese Marxists learned from the USSR to create their own branched off lineage to prevent similar collapse and to forge their own path towards the Marxist stages of socialism and communism. (And of course you have Marxists condemning China too. Tl;Dr: the arguments are largely either China must develop before being advanced enough for socialism or China must advance to a socialist stage or else it will gravitate back towards complete capitalist control.)
Edit: That being said, while STEM has rigorous methodologies to verify truths, the fields can also be swept up by orthodoxies and heterodoxies and different interpretations. There's always been the derisive websh*t meme for fads on Hacker News. Or there's the unsolved problems in physics with different interpretations to resolve them. The scientific process did have its roots in philosophical developments after all.
STEM has had many false theories (like the sun revolves around the earth). The virtue of STEM is when the facts contradict the theories, the theories get revised, even if the old guard has to die off before the corrected theory replaces it. With Marxism, however, the facts get re-written to conform to Marxism, rather than the other way around.
One of the beauties of the scientific method is it tests the predictions a theory makes. If the predictions come true, the theory is validated. If the predictions don't pan out, the theory is false.
A famous example is Einstein's Relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light. Einstein became world famous when decades later, this bending was observed.
Marxist theory also makes predictions, but none of those predictions pan out. This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
1) it’s contentious in Popper’s field itself on whether this criterion is right (it is generally accepted today that he is wrong) and
2) it’s contentious on whether Popper even understands Marx’s theory of history, which is where his criticism comes from, and
3) even if we decide by fiat that the predictions made by Marxism are unscientific, that does not preclude it from being a source of knowledge, or prevent Marxism from being imported as a normative political or ethical framework.
The whole “not true Marxism” thing usually comes from the mouths of people who’ve never read Marx, let alone explicitly non-Marxist thinkers who were influenced by Marx. In other words, the kinds of people who have never given this serious thought at all, but have likely watched some YouTube videos or read a couple articles. There is really no such thing as “true Marxism”. Marxism in practice has ranged from the USSR to Zapatista, which are very different from one another, but they are both no more “truly Marxist” than the other. The only person who could decide that is probably the guy himself, who is long dead.
>This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
If nuance and actual engagement with primary source material (as opposed to whatever it is you’re doing) does not count as “critical thinking”, then I strongly believe we cannot have any further discussion here.
To some extent also AANES (Rojava). Although that one is a hybrid economy where co-ops and wage labor small businesses coexist, it's roughly a 80/20 split in favor of the former, although there's no clear line there as some co-ops use wage labor as well. For the most part, this happens because the local councils actively support co-ops with loans, so organizing as one gives you an initial advantage.
But I don't think Walter had that degree of precision in mind when he said "Marxist". It sounded more like a generic label for anti-capitalist left to me, so I went with the broad definition to match that.
I always felt that just means it's poorly defined. If you can't precisely define what exactly it is you are arguing about and what are the premises in play then we are just wasting everyone's time.
> It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok.
But that's just learning the domain.
I'm under the impression that humanities people claim that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't.
Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
No, it just means that it’s qualitative. Why would qualitative descriptions of entities mean it’s poorly defined? Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. In this example, having a qualitative description of the colour red, or a qualitative description of what qualia is (if it were to exist) is actually necessary in order to engage with the problem.
> Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
What do you mean by processed?
There’s a difference between whether propositions can be expressed in first order logic vs. whether the argumentation itself is derived from first order logic. People did not sit down with a table of axioms to figure out all of aerodynamics by decree. Like many fields of inquiry, it took deduction, induction, abduction, and the scientific method. Writing things down via first order logic came after.
Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic. But I can assure you that modal arguments regarding, say, philosophy of mind, are conceived and argued in prose, with symbolic modal logic being used to aid the reader. What does that tell you about “processing via first order logic”?
How is it more relevant? Is there some property of the color red that physics doesn't cover?
> Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic.
So can mathematicians and most engineers. So we are on the same level.
So what is it that students of humanities supposedly can do that STEM can't?
Or if no one can define or agree on the definition those subjects should just be ignored by everyone?
In economics for instance if you try to achieve this you can often end with an oversimplified model which mostly pointless and not particularly useful unless you're writing a schoolbook for undergraduates.
In a way it might be closer to medicine than to more exact sciences (just with no way to directly test your hypothesis...). You're analyzing a very complex dynamic system with many unknown or not easily definable or measurable variables. Even if you manage to come up with a model which makes sense it might be suddenly become nearly useless when something unpredicted in that system changes.
> that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't
Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
Don't see why we can't have multiple mutually exclusive definitions, as long as they are clearly defined, then we can have different lines of argument - kind of like with geometry and the parallel postulate; and which one reality matches is a separate issue we can independently investigate.
> Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
I'm curious as to exactly how the thinking is different. An example would be nice.
What is the purpose of philosophy? In its most basic sense to teach one how to live a good life. Abstract concepts like justice, fairness, ideal social structures, social values flow from this basic question.
Any precise definition of any of the above concepts is open to question, and societies and institutions to some extent embody sets of answers to them. The domain evolves over time, ideas change, pressures brought about by various outside phenomena change.
After all, we are simply a collection of organisms evolving in an environment that we don't understand, according to rules we dimly discern.
This is not to contribute to any STEM vs the humanities fight: it's fundamentally an arbitrary division of knowledge, and neither side benefits from the division. The STEM side is prone to a naive scientism and an amorality that is much to the detriment of the species. On the other hand, the humanities has unfortunately largely devolved into a sort of philosophical rag and bone yard.
Frankly, both sides should get together and have sex for a while. Something might come out of it.
As near as I can tell, when they say "critical thinking" they really mean "persuasive thinking". Humanities, given its lack of rigor (or ability to have rigor) compared to STEM, often falls back on persuasive arguments, and so studying them requires you to become persuasive if you want to excel. This is why they can often come into conflict with STEM "arguments" - STEM isn't about persuasion, but about proof and testing and evidence and ... math! You can't persuade the laws of the universe, they are just something that exists. That's why they consider scientists so pedantic.
Anyway, that's the theory I've developed, I hope it has persuaded you some, but if not, it is likely that I trained as an engineer and am rather tepid with my persuasive skills ;)
So, the caricature of a STEM student will make theory in his mind and then ignored pretty much all nuance in the article the theory is based on.
Another example would be bias. The history students are specifically trained to deal with bias in source material and accept that every single historical source is biased by own point of view. The amount of STEM graduates who split world into two neat categories "biased" and "non-biased" is staggering.
All of these are elements of critical thinking.
That's not the world of engineering - the "E" in STEM - though.
Logical thinking is the precursor to proper critical thinking.
Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
It could also be that folks that dislike nuance and ambiguity self-select to go into STEM fields because the problems and answers/solutions are more clear-cut and 'concrete'.
Also:
Its also very different from what STEM majors do. In life there are no specific right answers just ones that aren't wrong. STEM majors dont live in a world of binary right/wrong problems any more than anyone else does.
If anything, i think it applies to the m more than the ste.
Engineers deal with ambiguity all the time. They do so in a logical and systematic fashion using statistics and probability. Noise is an unfortunate fact of life.
A lot of engineers I’ve encountered who have little social science or humanities experience seem to not be well equipped to critically evaluate works in those disciplines when they do encounter them. Which makes them vulnerable to crackpot ideology, or just latching onto the first thing they encounter that makes sense to them.
It works both ways though. Many a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software over the objections of their IT department.
"correctly conclude", huh. You're basically saying "people with similar backgrounds as mine reject the theories proposed by people with very different backgrounds, and I think they're quite right".
I probably have a similar background as you do compared with a professor in social science, so I might agree with your conclusion (that a lot of theories in humanities are flimsy), but I see nothing to indicate (except your assertion) that those engineers you know actually evaluate work in social sciences and the humanities critically. Maybe they reject them because they sound so alien and unfamiliar?
If you mean they're "critical" because they don't easily buy into those crackpot theories, perhaps consider the crackpot theories in the software engineering profession -- Agile methodology? Test driven development? Best way to interview programmers? Benefits of using $fad_framework? These are actually questions that could in theory be answered using social science methodologies. Yet what we do as a profession is simply cargo cult what the big names do. IMHO a tech CEO being sold on useless "Agile" methodologies is basically the equivalent of "a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software".
Or they may be an idiot. That happens, too.
Social sciences aren't criticized for being crackpot anyway, that's a strawman, it's more for the standard reasons that they produce a lot of claims but the evidential basis is weak. If social science was riven with internal debate in which these weak claims were constantly and publicly attacked, then we could compare it to the software world, but in practice we don't see that and dubious claims that come from one or two people often persist for decades before anyone decides to take a second look.
That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school.
Sadly, I know some highly educated STEM professionals who rigorously use the scientific method to separate truth from crap in their field. Outside their field, the scientific method goes right out the window and they rely on emotional arguments and wishful thinking.
Indeed, but I would say the high school "system" as a whole, burdened by pressure from parents. And pressure from the state, which was rewarding and punishing schools for test scores and other metrics.
Middle class parents were just gaa-gaa over pushing their kids into STEM programs at top colleges, to the point where it was kind of overbearing. I might have been one of those parents, but my neighbor, a high school math and physics teacher, talked me out of it when my kids were younger.
At the same time, some of the non-STEM classes were pretty hard nosed, like the one were they took apart media and advertising.
Fortunately my kids learned the scientific method at home, same place they learned to read. But it was for the love of knowledge and learning, not to get ahead. That's also how I learned it.
Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue
No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?
I'm not sure if the irony here was intended or not. But it is poignant.
I have watched very smart physics majors struggle mightily (with success, in the end!) in a philosophy of science class because (a) they've implicitly absorbed an extremely naive epistemology, usually some Popperian but simplified thing, (b) they don't have a lot of practice reading and writing prose, and (c) their main coursework has focused on using existing models and methodologies to the near total exclusion of evaluating, analyzing, or comparing them.
Incidentally, that was in a class taught by someone with a graduate degree in STEM himself, who collaborates with working scientists on some of his work as a philosopher— this was an instructor who could very much speak the language of undergrad STEM students.
Critical thinking is also a matter of habit and temperament as much as it is being able to identify (un)sound reasoning itself. If you're not accustomed to seriously examining the structure and functioning of institutions, processes, and social practices, you ain't got it— even if you're extremely sharp with your logical and mathematical intuitions and skills.
That said, widespread innumeracy seems to me much more widely condoned socially than STEMlord parochialism, and is just as detrimental. Especially at an undergraduate level, I think we would benefit from rolling back our increasing specialization a bit. Everyone should have some experience with the work of mathematicians— writing proofs— and everyone should have some engagement with the history-of and philosophy-of some of the STEM disciplines, imo.
This is probably a good time to remind everyone that the empirical sciences are facing an extremely widespread methodological crisis right now¹. I point that out not to say that scientists are stupid or that the problems that add up to the replication crisis are easy to solve, but because critical thinking is exactly what scientists need to do and are doing when they work to address the replication crisis! It's not wrong to push for more emphasis on developing critical thinking skills and habits in science education.
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And as computer people, our house is not clean either, despite the formal character of computer science. Empirical results in computer science, demos and benchmarking done in the field, and more, also matter and are often non-reproducible just a few years after publication— if source code is provided with the paper at all, which it often has not been.
Science is amazing, both for its processes and achievements. But there's lots of important work being done and yet-to-be-done on science itself. Critical thinking is essential to that work, and it goes beyond formal reasoning or puzzle-solving in the small.
Critical thinking skills are conferred to children in a much earlier age than the decision whether to pursue humanities/STEM or even go to college at all.
I've certainly met people for whom having a PhD would be like putting lipstick on a pig.