Epistemic grounding in critical theory
I'm a mathematician who has always been what you might call "critical theory curious" - in college and graduate school I was always kind of entranced by a feeling I can best describe as "vaguely gnostic". Like theoreticians were exploring radically outside-the-norm ways of learning and inquiry, and producing crazy ideas that sometimes blew my mind. Friends and I would try and read things like D&G, or Mark Fisher, and for someone who loves to see how ideas fit together (again: mathematician here), it was a ton of fun.
The problem though, to put it bluntly, was I have no idea why I am supposed to believe that any of this is real. The epistemic grounding seems to be little more than just "vibes." People like Deleuze and Guattari make tons of really strong claims and things like reality, systems, capitalism, perception...but based on (as far as I can tell) little more than just "isn't this a neat thought?" Ultimately, it reminds me a bit of how conspiracy theorists think: forming elaborate conceptual architectures, but the validity of a link between two ideas seems to boil down to "do I vibe with this idea?"
Other areas of inquiry have their own built-in epistemic grounding mechanisms. In mathematics, we have the structure of formalization and proof - in theory, I could write out all the details of a proof in something like Lean and I would know that it is internally consistent. "True" (for want of a better term, although truth in math is notoriously messy). A scientist can propose a hypothesis and test it against reality.
With all the critical theory stuff, it's fun to talk about, but I could never shake the idea that we're just...saying things. Like it's a kind of machine for producing ideas that make our brains fizz, and the ones that fizz the most get replicated - independent of whether they're aligned with anything outside of themselves. This is fine as a kind of intellectual masturbation, but a lot of people in Academia I know seem to think that these frameworks should be guiding policy? Which I just don't understand at all.