Critical theory reminds me of Henry Kissinger's famous line about academic politics: it's so vicious precisely because there's so little at stake. What possible difference does it make that we can't "know" the "truth." Is anyone here planning to reject heliocentrism on the grounds that it's part of how the cist-het-White patriarchy maintains its hegemony? Starting there, or from the oppressive notion that microbes cause disease or that babies do not grow from homunculi, just where do we start encountering "truth" that is not the be taken as such because it serves the powerful?

One is tempted to distinguish my cited "truths" as "science," but the notion of Jewish Physics suggests that the line is not so bright. Or, going in the other direction, a scientist might make the case that morality is just game theory- socially mediated coordination of a plus-sum opportunity (avoiding Hobbes's war of all against all), completely objective and varying only in that different environments create different opportunities for cooperation. The scientist may also have something to say about religion and the willing suspension of disbelief as adaptive traits enforced by natural selection.

Just as the post-modernist may argue that we cannot KNOW objective truth, the scientist may argue that we can suss out PROBABLE truths on which to base our real-world decisions, which, at the end of the day, is the purpose of all inquiry.