You could try to see what you can learn from the class. Take the lecturer’s arguments seriously, try to translate them from the confused form in which he puts them into the strongest, most plausible version of those arguments that you can create, and see if there are any useful insights in there.
In the quote you gave, you can ignore the nonsense about physics (which isn’t really essential to his argument), look past the massive affront to the map/territory distinction in his use of the word “reality,” and turn the quote into something like:
When considering the views of different cultures or social groups, students often make judgments about which group is right, which undermines their ability to understand the groups’ viewpoints and the processes by which they formed those views. Instead of taking every group’s views seriously and looking at the social processes, the goal becomes to explain how their favored group was able to get it right and what is wrong with the other groups who got it wrong. This habit is often problematic even when students’ judgment of what social groups got right or wrong is basically correct, and it becomes especially mistaken when they are mistaken about who got it right and are merely aligning themselves with their own cultural group or the dominant culture. In this class we will set aside questions of who is right and wrong in order to avoid these distortions and better understand these processes by which groups develop a framework for viewing the world.
Which sounds pretty reasonable, and similar to what Robin said in his recent podcast about how Democrats misunderstand American politics because they try to explain how Republicans got things wrong instead of trying to understand how these two competing political coalitions arose.
You can still note the problems with his versions of the argument, and with the improved version. For instance, if you set aside right and wrong, it becomes difficult to notice differences between groups in how sensitive they are to external evidence and you’re liable to misunderstand social changes which are based on the accumulation of evidence about reality (like the belief in evolution). And it’s fine to provide an occasional dose of sanity to class discussions, but you should try to do it tactfully without being a jerk or dominating class time.
I agree with this comment strongly enough that I’m unsatisified with merely upvoting it. I think the lecturer was making a valid point extremely poorly, and the above rewording is a great improvement. If you agree with the lecturer, arguing about word choice is probably a waste of time. If you don’t, then frame your disagreement as if it were with the above paraphrase, because that’s how it will seem to the lecturer, who (I expect) intended to convey something very like it.
You could try to see what you can learn from the class. Take the lecturer’s arguments seriously, try to translate them from the confused form in which he puts them into the strongest, most plausible version of those arguments that you can create, and see if there are any useful insights in there.
In the quote you gave, you can ignore the nonsense about physics (which isn’t really essential to his argument), look past the massive affront to the map/territory distinction in his use of the word “reality,” and turn the quote into something like:
Which sounds pretty reasonable, and similar to what Robin said in his recent podcast about how Democrats misunderstand American politics because they try to explain how Republicans got things wrong instead of trying to understand how these two competing political coalitions arose.
You can still note the problems with his versions of the argument, and with the improved version. For instance, if you set aside right and wrong, it becomes difficult to notice differences between groups in how sensitive they are to external evidence and you’re liable to misunderstand social changes which are based on the accumulation of evidence about reality (like the belief in evolution). And it’s fine to provide an occasional dose of sanity to class discussions, but you should try to do it tactfully without being a jerk or dominating class time.
I agree with this comment strongly enough that I’m unsatisified with merely upvoting it. I think the lecturer was making a valid point extremely poorly, and the above rewording is a great improvement. If you agree with the lecturer, arguing about word choice is probably a waste of time. If you don’t, then frame your disagreement as if it were with the above paraphrase, because that’s how it will seem to the lecturer, who (I expect) intended to convey something very like it.