Of course, a lot, rather any one thing in particular, has gone off the rails within Western intelligentsia — which was once, a long time in the past now, the noble vanguard of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and the envy of the civilized world.
So this isn’t anything like a holistic autopsy of the institutionalized pursuit of knowledge, as that would fill volumes longer than the Bible.
But “epistemological violence,” a concept I only recently became familiar with by name but have long seen as an implicitly understood north star of leftist academics, seems as good a place to start as any, as it strikes at the heart of the fundamental claim that the expression of disfavored truths is immoral or violent.
In the storied decline of the West, the advent of “epistemological violence” as a concept — and all the self-loathing and censorship that it implies — is a significant plot point.
Via Social and Personality Psychology Compass (emphasis added):
“The subject of violence is the researcher, the object is the Other, and the action is the interpretation of data that is presented as knowledge. Using a hypothetical example, the problem of interpretation in empirical research on the Other is discussed. Epistemological violence refers to the interpretation of social-scientific data on the Other and is produced when empirical data are interpreted as showing the inferiority of or problematizes the Other, even when data allow for equally viable alternative interpretations. Interpretations of inferiority or problematizations are understood as actions that have a negative impact on the Other. Because the interpretations of data emerge from an academic context and thus are presented as knowledge, they are defined as epistemologically violent actions.”
– Thomas Teo, York University psychology professor
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
