Abstract
I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct (“PC”) ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beliefs from the PC worldview taken to be of core importance, the theory of social oppression and the thesis of anthropological mental egalitarianism. Then, aided by discussions from contemporary epistemology on epistemic values, I model the problem of epistemic appraisal using the frameworks of multi-objective optimization theory and multi-criteria decision analysis and apply it to politically correct philosophy. I conclude that philosophy guided by politically correct values is bound to produce constructs that are less truth-conducive and that spurious values which are ideologically motivated should be abandoned. Objections to my framework stemming from contextual empiricism, the feminine voice in ethics and political philosophy are considered. I conclude by prescribing the epistemic value of epistemic adequacy, the contextual value of political diversity and the moral virtue of moral courage to reverse unwarranted trends in academic philosophy due to PC ideology.
Highlights
We find the claim that socioeconomic potential, as it is constrained by mental ability, is about the same for every human group
Contemporary cognitive psychology is consistent with the fact that one can sport a very cunning and logical mind when dealing with certain matters while being the subject of incapacitating “blind spots" in other areas
The referents of terms denoting particular social groups are taken to be real human superorganisms of sorts, aggregates of individual human beings that function as willful agents of their own and which are of fundamental explanatory relevance for social theory
Summary
Robust empirical results in behavioral economics and cognitive and social psychology over the last four decades have consistently shown that human beings are less the creatures of deliberate rational inquiry we’d wish them to be as they are of instinctive bias, confabulation, and groupthink [2,3,4] This ideology, unlike other ancient institutional enemies of philosophy, is not overtly homicidal 2, I claim that it is promoting the assassination of character, deterring the publication of quality research papers, inhibiting the participation of researchers that defend politically unwelcome theses in the academic arena and hindering epistemic progress on critical issues of our times such as the metaphysics of race and sex and the intellectual legitimacy of divergent political beliefs and values. The contents of an ideology I are by default processed without major willful deliberation in the minds of the adherents A This postulate assumes a theoretical endorsement of so-called “dual-processes” theories of reasoning or cognition (for contemporary reviews, see [21,22]). The thresholds of confirmation for antagonistic hypothesis may be subjected to unrelenting “goalpost-turning”, accumulating ad hoc explanations just like a scientific research program facing an experimental anomaly
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