USE THE FORCE.

Yes, today is the day the Star Wars devotees disport themselves with memes and puns.  The Force I refer to, though, is stronger than the Dark Side or the Light Side.  It is the force of logic.  Let me commend Alan Sokal's recent "The Implicit Epistemology of White Fragility," a treatise on methodology structured as a book review, accepted for publication in Journal of Philosophy of Education, and currently available for general consumption.  I recommend reading the essay in full.  The methodological key is in footnote 4, referring to Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, a book I have read, recommend, and might get around to publishing a book review thereof.  Not today.  Let's get to work.

Pluckrose and Linsay extract from postmodernist writings - notably those of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and their followers - two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes. The two principles are the postmodern knowledge principle, which consists of a radical skepticism towards the possibility of objective knowledge (or even objective truth), along with a commitment to cultural constructivism; and the postmodern political principle, which asserts that society is structured by systems of power and hierarchy that unconsciously organize everyone's ways of thinking so as to reproduce this same system of domination. The four postmodern themes are the blurring of boundaries, the power of language, cultural relativism, and the loss of the individual and the universal.

I'm not happy about that "society is structured by systems of power," preferring to think of the power coming from adherence to emergent conventions that confer evolutionary advantage, but that's not central to today's meditation.  Professor Sokal gets to the same neighborhood in evaluating Robin DiAngelo's work as exhibiting "light" postmodernist tendencies.  "She does cast repeated aspersions on the possibility of objectivity, but mainly as a way of discrediting the claims to objectivity of her ideological opponents, not as a consistent philosophical principle."  Those consistent philosophical principles are hard, and they would get in the way of a good polemic.  Consider the following bundling: "Everyone's perspective is not equally valid when some are uninformed, unexamined, or uphold existing power inequities."  Professor Sokal notes, "Here 'uninformed' and 'unexamined' are epistemic defects, while 'uphold existing power inequities' is an assertion about the alleged real-life consequences of an idea."

That's not the only "light" postmodernist tendency. White Fragility and the like offer superficial versions of philosophical debates.  It's the academic version of Telephone: ideas pass from philosophy departments to sociologists to the colleges of education.  Professor Sokal takes pains to note that the pathway in no way "represents a hierarchy of knowledge or rigor."

Perhaps worse, though, than the drift of useful bits of thinking from discipline to discipline is the indiscipline of light postmodern thinking, such as the usefulness of empirical principles such as navigation, gravity, and central tendencies being conflated with "the sometimes-nefarious technological and ideological uses to which those theories were put by colonists."  Yes, it had to have come as a shock to people in Africa or the Americas when strangers with sailing ships and firearms showed up, but to suggest that the ability to understand how navigation or firearms works confers the "right to rule other people without their consent" is a stretch, yet that's the basis for all the talk of "decolonizing" curricula or cultures.  The extension to "hold advanced degrees from prestigious universities" is straightforward.

I could, I suppose, ask, where is the Critical Studies objection to "follow the science?" over the past two years, although the absence of any such objection merely confirms Professor Sokal's main point, which is that culture studies relies more on established rules of inference and evidence than its rhetoric suggests.

But the first step in critical analysis is learning to distinguish - by using case-by-case analysis of evidence and arguments - between the products of mainstream knowledge that masquerade as neutral, universal, and objective, and those that are in fact neutral, universal, and objective. If DiAngelo and Sensoy simply declare a priori that the latter are nonexistent - as they seem at times to be doing - then critical analysis is replaced by dogmatic cynicism.

If that.

The essay then turns to "flawed philosophy as a justification for flawed methodology."  Here, Professor Sokal offers a politer version of my complaint about a lot of writing in critical studies, "A 'narrative based article with evidence-based commentary' is a fancy way of saying it's an extended literature review with no data collection, only this one questions the prevailing invented reality in family studies."

The politer version?  "But the biggest drawback in her study, it seems to me, is methodological: precisely as promised, she interprets all interactions in her study through the lens of her chosen theoretical framework (Whiteness theory), and does not even consider alternate interpretations; what results is a 150-page exercise in confirmation bias."

Yes, and there are whole communities of scholars validating each other's writings and hustling over the little merit money there is these days, and seeing in the doubt they face from the Benighted, only reason to persist in their ways, confirming evidence notwithstanding.