The Necessity of Criticism

Personally, I tend to lean heavily towards skepticism, because of my reluctance to trust people’s analysis. I know that humanity is fallible, so I guard myself. Cynicism is a bit more extreme as it’s an outright rejection of the masses ability to know almost anything. But, if a fool has the potential to say something profoundly true, and if we can see that humanity does interpret reality correctly to some degree (how else could planes fly through the sky), then neither skepticism or cynicism is a helpful attitude to adopt. Any practicality these positions may seem to have lies in the fact that we mistake them for criticism.

Criticism is the means by which we point to how something could be untrue. And since nothing can be proven to be absolutely true we are only left with falsification, which is why criticism is necessary. Neither skepticism or cynicism have the ability to separate the baby from the bath water. They simply dismiss and discard leaving nothing in its place. Criticism is a tool that helps us separate the signal from the noise and gets us closer to understanding what’s going on around us.

Further, this is also why any theory that never has the potential to be falsified is a bad explanation. Two examples within mainstream thinking today is the concept of God and Marxism respectively. There is no situation that could ever arise that each belief couldn’t account for. Because of this, they are both epistemologically incoherent. The only way they can stay standing is through the protection of dogmatism. An area that’s devoid of criticism for the believer.