Critical Theory and Quantification: Toward a Rethinking of "Error" in Instrumental Reasoning

• In Event: 67.027 - Science in Post-Truth Times: Rethinking Research Distinctions and Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives

If post-truth political discourse might be characterized by a play on affective predispositions and bodily responses of old beliefs that re-appear as new, that is particularly of our condition of computational culture (Parisi, 2017), then we might understand post-truth as a play on the ‘error’ of quantitative instrumental reason. Instrumental reason is a concept, developed by Horkheimer and Adorno (2002/1944) from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, that is attributed to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment postulated that reality and truth should come from human reasoning and that emancipation comes from the reasoning and consciousness of the human subject. For Horkheimer and Adorno (2002/1944), the Enlightenment also advanced instrumental reason as a move of capitalism to replace or displace the reasoning of the human subject into other valued (even deified) social mechanisms and practices such as number, science, positivism, technology, or the market. While the Enlightenment aimed to dispel myths via the pursuit of truth through reason, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that because instrumental reason did not account for social and cultural-historical context or its inability to capture everything of nature and as such distorting the real, instrumental reason produced more myths in place of myths. This paper will rethink the instrumental reasoning of quantitative social science via the reconceptualizing of ‘error’, the stochastic term, and the randomness of quantitative modeling.


Theoretical Framework


This paper will employ new materialist thought (Barad, 2007; Dixon-Román, 2017; Kirby, 2011; Parisi, 2017) that reconceptualizes number, measurement, probability, and indeterminacy in order to rethink the instrumental reasoning of quantitative social science. This includes both a rethinking on ‘how to think’ (Parisi, 2017) as well as an interrogation of what the ‘error’ or stochastic term of quantitative modeling is/does. Theorists of measurement and statistics used probability theory in order to developed the ‘error’ term to estimate an inference on the extent to which models capture Modernist ‘truth’. This is a ‘truth’ that the Enlightenment believed could be ascertained via instrumental reasoning. This paper will ontologically rethink the Modernist assumptions of the ‘error’ term, invariably interrogating (post-)‘truth’, from an onto-epistemology of performativity.


Modes of Inquiry


This paper uses the above theories to closely re-read Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason in order to rethink how to conceptualize the ‘thinking’ of quantitative social science via the ‘error’ of probabilistic models.


Results and Significance


The re-reading and rethinking of the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002/1944), particularly for quantitative social science, is a necessary move in order to more fully recuperate quantification for critical theory. Scholarship on “critical quantitative methods” or “QuantCrit” are moving in important directions but are doing what Wyly (2009) calls strategic positivism. To push this scholarship beyond positivist determinism, this paper will offer a way to rethink the instrumentality of quantitative social science reasoning via a new materialist reconceptualizing of ‘error’. Not only is this necessary for developing a critical theory of quantification but also to move toward a sharper understanding and critique of the affective play of post-truth political discourse.

Author

• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, The University of Pennsylvania