Am I reading Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay's recent book, Cynical Theories? Yes.

Is it bad? Of course.

Am I wasting my time? Naturally.

If I understand this correctly, Pluckrose and Lindsay assert the American pragmatist tradition is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment and anti-science because Peirce, James, Dewey and Rorty rejected the correspondence theory of truth.

Between you and me, I don't think deflationists or coherentists qua deflationists and coherentists reject Enlightenment thinking and are anti-science. I'm also a bit uncomfortable calling Rorty a postmodernist. That's tarring with a broad brush.

Pluckrose and Lindsay object to Foucault et al.'s examination of power dynamics on the grounds that it is a political project that sets aside the truth-aptness of claims... yet reduce philosophical analysis of concepts to a political project that sets aside the truth-aptness of c

Pack it up, philosophers! You're engaged in the timeworn habit of ideologues. Because you're engaged in conceptual analysis and the relationship between identity and knowledge.

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here!

Now on to a section on Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice. I want to flag here that I'm not an expert in Fricker's work. She's outside my AOE, even though I do epistemology. It's a big field. This section seems more or less adequate, but don't take my word for it.

This section is also outside my AOE, so I don't see any obvious issues here. Their summary of Fricker's work: there's an imbalance in credibility and understanding between people, and Fricker highlights this rather than focusing on whether one group is more reliable than other.

What of Pluckrose and Lindsay's criticism of Fricker? I see five major criticisms: [1] science has more 'rigorous methods'; [2] science is 'objective and universal'; [3] science denies 'everything is socially constructed'; [4] 'many philosophers, scientists, and other scholars...

... have offered reasoned arguments that identify flaws'; [5] since science is 'universal', it violates 'entering group identity'.

Pluckrose and Lindsay then assert the 'postmodern' retort is [6] the institution of science has perpetuated epistemic injustice.

Sorry, stepped out for a bit. Where was I? Pluckrose and Lindsay claim [7] 'science has discovered things' that contradict 'social-constructivist ideas'; [8] 'alleged discrimination' is 'complaints' that are 'often vague' and are actually due to what 'science' has discovered.

In short, Pluckrose and Lindsay assert Fricker et al. make claims that are (a) in different ways in tension with an unspecified 'science' [1-5, 7-8]; (b) are criticised by unnamed 'philosophers, scientists, and other scholars' [4]; (c) systemic discrimination does not exist[8].

In response to (a), (b), and (c): these claims are entirely unsupported in the section by any argument or evidence, and can be (provisionally) dismissed on these grounds as little more than unfounded assertion, not considered scholarship.

Disappointing.

Their use of sources is also highly questionable, cf. their use of Stephen Hicks' book, Understanding Postmodernism (2004), which blames Immanuel Kant for destroying the Enlightenment. It's a well-known Randian tract without any intellectual merit.

I'd like to thank @deonteleologist for letting me know about his review of Cynical Theories, which was coincidentally published around the same time as the above thread. I was happy to see Sam provided his own in-depth analysis of the same section. https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-cynical-theorists-behind-cynical-theories/

Their concluding 'principled opposition' examples include the claim that Pyrrhonian or Academic skepticism lacks worth and assert it 'is ideological bias, rather than scholarship'.

Sorry, historians of philosophy. :'(