A thread speculating about Twitter users’ ignorant fixation on ‘standpoint epistemology’ (SPE) : it’s really about counterproductive twitter etiquette and intellectual laziness (15 tweets)
First, I am *not* an expert on SPE. But I do work, professionally, in adjacent areas of epistemology and political theory. So I’ve picked up enough to know that most anti-SPE twittering is amazingly uninformed. How did it get that way? 1/15
Second, I’ve noticed that many opponents of SPE, when constructing examples of what they oppose, insert unnecessary insults in the mouths of their opponents. This has nothing to do with SPE, yet I’ve seen it repeatedly. Why? 2/15
Speculative hypothesis: for many non-philosopher twitterers, their first encounter with SPE comes from an angry interaction with some other twitterer who invokes SPE in defense of their own view. Several contingent features of this interaction ramify. 3/15
Inexactness: Like all academic theories, SPE gets twitter-invoked (even approvingly) mostly by people who don’t understand it very well. So they either misapply it, or at least don’t explain clearly. To a non-charitable reader, it looks like a bad argument. 4/15
Anger: The contexts where SPE gets invoked tend to involve contentious social/political issues, and anger is already close to the surface. The person invoking SPE might be angry – and also the person first hearing about it! That emotion imprints on their memory. 5/15
Intellectual laziness: No one bothers to look into their opponent’s view and see whether the theory might be more sophisticated than what their opponent appears to be saying. (This follows from a more general principle of twitter.) 6/15
Put these things together, and you get a lot of people whose only acquaintance with a complex academic theory is the anger-inflected 280 character capsule (mis)representation by some twitter enemy. Not a recipe for understanding. 7/15
From there, they might read a bit more. But it’s rarely the original academic work (mostly locked behind paywalls). Instead, they read free anti-SPE articles written by hucksters, which satisfyingly validate their initial negative emotional experience. 8/15
And then they go out and say nasty things about SPE to people like me, who get annoyed at the belligerent ignorance and unwisely react with eyerolling-for-an-eyerolling. And that starts a feedback cycle of misleading confirmation. 9/15
But why does all this happen to SPE and not other academic theories? I think part of the answer is that some internet proponents of SPE (not the theorists) are especially likely to get into fights (for complex reason at bottom of thread). 10/15
There’s an interesting parallel here: libertarianism. A lot of internet libertarians like to fight. So a lot of others think of libertarianism itself as angry nonsense. That’s unfair to libertarian political theory. 11/15
The same is true of SPE. If your go-to image of the theory involves internet anger, then you’re probably being over-influenced by personal memories of arguing with people who may or may not understand the theory themselves. 12/15
(An irony in that: many opponents of SPE are unwittingly assuming that their personal experience is more veridical than a carefully constructed theory! One of the many performative contradictions in this debate.) 13/15
One last wrinkle: the anger coming from some internet *proponents* of SPE may not be incidental. Remember, we’re talking about racism, sexism, etc. People on the receiving end are justly annoyed at casual twit debates over their experiences. 14/15
So the anger may be both reasonable and unavoidable. And it has bad consequences for how SPE gets picked up in public discourse. Another tragedy of oppression: it flings its own mud over the lenses we might use to understand it. 15/15
ADDENDUM: I regret the phrase 'intellectual laziness'. Wrong vice. It's not lazy to lack the time to deeply read up on a theory. The correct vice is intellectual ARROGANCE. It's arrogant to loudly mock a theory you haven't had time to read up on.
