Jordan Peterson a little shy on proof

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Mar 2017

For a sociologist to say that a psychologist is a little shy on proof is like a pot calling a kettle black.  Neither discipline is a true science, and the only sign that a conclusion from either discipline may be true is how well it comports with common sense.

For that reason, Jordan Peterson has the advantage.  Peterson reaches conclusions that are obvious to the common sense of steelworkers, but he does so by means of academic terminology and convoluted reasoning that makes him interesting to recent graduates of high school.  He can at times belabor the obvious.  Nevertheless, Peterson has an entertaining way of reaching sometimes interesting and satisfying conclusions, that he has parlayed into a career.

Patrick Watson’s criticism of Peterson betrays the tinge of jealousy.  Beyond holding a lectureship that enables him to pontificate on ‘identity theory and media’ and to be paid to research how ‘identity is used and managed in interaction’ Watson really hasn’t hit the mother lode style-wise as Peterson has.  Watson rather pathetically tries to blacken Peterson’s research and conclusions by accusing him of immoderate profiteering on the back of his own work.  Watson blows hard on a lot of left-wing dog-whistles in the course of doing so.

If Watson had more style, was more brilliant and less tedious, he might do better than a lectureship, as Peterson has.

I do think that Watson should be asking for his money back for the tuition he paid for the courses, if any, he took in philosophy and elementary logic.  Watson fails to detect the substitution by him of a new and unexamined metaphysics in his criticism, or of the illicit change in point of view he makes in the course of it.  That Watson could say, for example, that Peterson is lacking in proof of something, “except legislation such as Bill C-16 and the Ontario Human Rights Code,” you have to wonder if even a threatening email from Kathleen Wynne could be proof enough to satisfy Watson.

When Watson says that a Peterson assertion could be “easily dismantled by any first-year philosophy student,” I note that Watson himself never attempts to do so, as an example of his own brilliance.  He goes on to say that Peterson is an elite level scholar, yet he “makes arguments that would fail in an undergraduate term paper.”  I suppose that remark is supposed to undermine our respect for Peterson, but when I’m explaining something to a teenager I use terms and arguments they understand to get to the right conclusion - without all the philosophical caveats of a term paper in philosophy.  Besides, I’m not sure you could read a passage from Jacques Maritain aloud to an audience and have them understand the full import of it.  You would have to read it yourself, and read it again, and then maybe again to grasp it.

Remember, Watson is talking about conclusions that comport with common sense, and he is demanding of Peterson a university paper to explain and justify a common sense conclusion.  Watson is forgetting Occam’s Razor and the benefits of simplicity.

Watson’s criticism of Peterson is an expression of poverty, both intellectual and personal.  The fact that Watson would try to justify the violence used to disrupt Peterson’s lecture at McMaster on the grounds that Peterson is not just wrong but evil as well, is a blackening of his own academic reputation.