The Docsplainer

Critical Theory

Let’s talk about critical theory for a minute. Do you remember the scene in How to Train Your Dragon when Hiccup remarks to Toothless that “Everything we know about you guys is wrong”? Why were they wrong?

Understanding positionality

That’s what critical theory is about. A major tenet of the theory is that knowledge is socially constructed. I talked about this in an earlier lecture when I compared the entirely different view of the primate world generated by male and female ethnologists. The theory posits that there’s an interaction between knowledge and knower. There’s no pure objectivity any more than there can be pure subjectivity. The resulting product of this interaction, this relationship, which we call knowledge, is what a discourse community–like the framers of the Constitution, that’s a discourse community; a group of scientists examining agricultural practices, that’s a discourse community; an indigenous village teaching morality to its children, that’s a discourse community–agrees upon as knowledge.

Raise questions

So what does it mean to read a text, whether it’s the textbook I teach from or a scientific article or anything else critically? Well, critical theory says that you have to raise questions about this process of knowledge construction. Not only how is it discovered, like it was an asteroid out there somewhere that you just found, the sampling or the data-crunching and so forth–although of course all that’s important. But how and by whom is it constructed? It is different. Because knowledge construction is not a neutral process. The individuals involved carry into it their personal biases. So to understand the positionality of the knowledge, think about how objects literally look different depending on where you’re standing in relation to them. Like right as I was recording that lecture, it looked like I was sitting crooked in my desk chair because of the angle. I wasn’t. If you’d looked at me from a different angle, it could have looked like I was sitting crooked the other way, or like I was sitting straight.

Everything changes depending on where you’re standing.

And that’s not just a literal thing, but it’s also a figurative thing. It is essential to examine who belongs to that discourse community for just that reason. What’s their position in relation to this object? Because a discourse community cannot possibly encompass all perspectives, the production of knowledge is inevitably going to be influenced by omissions. There were no African Americans or women among the framers of the Constitution, for one example. No women. And it shows. Almost 250 years later, and we’re still trying to correct for those omissions.

When we cover life span development in my class, we include moral development. This was first researched by Lawrence Kohlberg. Because of Kohlberg’s position with relation to his subject, women were initially omitted from the discourse. He was a man and he taught at a boys’ school, so that’s where he got his initial samples. His position as a man teaching boys in relation to the subject of moral development meant that women weren’t considered at all. And because women tend to approach morality from a more relational standpoint, the end result of his work, his model, made women appear morally inferior to men. Everybody got measured against Kohlberg and his students as the yardstick.

Adam and Eve dressed up as “science”

This is as old as Adam and Eve, but now it’s all dressed up in science talk–as these things often are. So pay attention to who produced the various theories you’re reading about, whether it’s on human development or whatever. (And when knowledge was produced makes a difference too: There are people who came along after ol’ Larry, for example, whose work was way more inclusive and, therefore, more generalizable.) Whose story is not being told by each?

You will find that most theorists in the early days of psychology (by which I mainly mean right up until last week) are white males specifically of Western European extraction. Most are straight. A few are Jews. So, generally, what’s left out are women’s voices, genderqueer voices, racial, ethnic and cultural minority voices. Eastern voices. Other religious traditions. All that makes a difference, with expectable consequences to those groups.

That is why I ask students to think through the implications of the characteristics of our– psychology’s–knowledge community. What does it mean, for example, that historically it’s been straights studying gays from the point of view of “what makes a person gay?” Listen to that question. What are the implications? The effects in society? In government? In medicine?

To be clear, I’m not saying, as critics of higher education claim that professors do, that being white or a man, or western or straight or middle-class is a sin. What’s a sin is bad science, like taking samples that are not representative of the population then extrapolating to that population and assuming that somehow groups that don’t fit your model are inferior. What’s a sin is theorizing without thinking about the big picture, hypotheses that are setups for a certain result–those are sins. And that’s what happens in psych a lot.

If what you want to study is white, middle-class, straight males, great. Do that, but be clear about it. Don’t say “humans develop like this” or “people feel or think or act in thus and such a way” when what you mean is only that a specific subset of humans or people do. Make room for other voices, for various communities to study themselves and for their data to be considered as seriously as you would consider your own.

The trouble is that groups who hold power don’t want to do that. And that’s true of any group that holds power. And that’s where the sin is, in abusing your power, sometimes obliviously, sometimes with evil intent, but abusing it nonetheless.