Towards Healthy Discource, Issues with Scientific Reduction
Jan 15, 2018 2:08:58 GMT
Post by Nøkken on Jan 15, 2018 2:08:58 GMT
Thesis:
Psychological and neuroscientific explanations of therianthropy/Otherkin are necessarily incomplete and cannot provide an adequate foundation for self-actualization.
Goal:
To influence others to consider looking into many fields of academia and knowledge for understanding the phenomenon of Otherkin/therians, and to avoid taking a narrow and exclusive view which they present as a representation of the community as a whole when it is not the case. I hope also that this may contribute to developing healthier discourse in the community that explores the phenomenon from all perspectives.
(To clarify initially, I am mainly talking about “scientific reductionism.” I address both psychology and neuroscience as I know some therians desire a neurological mechanism interpreted through psychology to explain their personal identities. The issue is, I don’t think identifying as nonhuman is a fundamentally scientific object. Some aspects of it can be examined through science, but it is well beyond the realm of scientific knowledge into the more general discipline of philosophy.)
Argument:
I do not understand the desire to have one’s identity explained away by science. In many respects, science is inherently inadequate for the issue of self-actualization because it is a merely descriptive field, not a prescriptive one. It cannot inform us of what we ought to do, who to be or become, how to realize our existence. It can only provide some accounts of facts about our existence, and these facts are primarily limited by what can be analyzed scientifically in the first place, what has achieved a discrete enough definition to be verified empirically.
More than this, however, a neurological mechanism and a complete psychological theory for therianthropy or Otherkinity is not even remotely probable. Whose, it is theoretically impossible due to problems emerging in the philosophy of science and the undefinable nature of the community. Questions of identity as a general concept are not scientific questions. They are philosophical ones. Neuroscientific discoveries and psychological theories can certainly shed some light upon aspects of identity whenever we can find related questions that are amenable to scientific data, but they are methodologically incapable of addressing the question of identity fully in a way that is salient for personal existence.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity/
plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
I agree that it is good for the community to understand psychology and how it might relate to their identities, but to understand identity as purely psychological or reductive to neuroscience is a mistake.
There is a wealth of philosophy for explaining animal-human and nonhuman-human identities that is completely ignored by the community. I have an entire library of philosophy texts just about the relation of human and nonhuman/animal in human identity.
You don't need brain scans. That isn't how neuroscience works. They can't even figure out how the brain forms memories, let alone anything remotely related to personal identity. They certainly cannot answer metaphysical questions about identity. Neuroscientists in professional practice consult philosophers for understanding/interpreting their results and what it means for the concepts of mind, consciousness, identity and personhood. There's an entire field of research called philosophy of science and mind dedicated to these issues. I even did graduate research in this field and worked with a professor on issues concerning imagination and what aspects of imagination are scientific and which are philosophical.
(In sort, we call things that can potentially be answered with science "a posteriori" and things that must be answered with philosophy "a priori". "A posteriori" loosely means to "knowledge from evidence/experience" while "a priori" loosely means "knowledge from logic and rational conceptualization".)
I understand that some believe neuroscience will come to save the day and have a kind of faith that it will unravel all mysteries, but I can tell you now that even theoretically it can't. Neuroscience's job is to explain cognitive mechanisms in the anatomy of the brain, not to explain away personal experiences, concepts, socio-political relations and the entire network of philosophical ideas. Likewise, psychology identifies trends in human behavior with a very low degree of predictability because of the complexity of people: it doesn’t tell you how you should live and understand yourself as X. In psychology, there is fundamental indeterminacy of human behavior.
In fact, the idea that we can reduce the concept of identity to neuroscience is a bad philosophical assumption that is criticized extensively in academic literature because rather than address significant questions about identity that are logical coherent, it generally proceeds as if such questions are meaningless, when they have been asked and analyzed for thousands of years.
The idea is called logical positivism (or verificationism, as AJ Ayer coined it) and it has been disproven by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and others. Logical positivism still survives in fringe elements of the scientific community, but the academic community has largely moved on. It died as a serious scientific paradigm quite a long time ago, in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, many professional scientists are not actually aware of the methodological assumptions involved in science because this kind of understanding is not necessary to do science well. In other words, they do not understand that knowledge is a broader field than science, that science is only able to produce a certain kind of knowledge when the conditions are right. The more general field of the study of knowledge which includes science as a subset is called epistemology. (Episteme means “knowledge.”)
blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/what-is-philosophy-of-science-and-should-scientists-care/
My parents are PhD chemists, and they did not know about these issues until I informed them. It's because they are in different fields of academia, and chemists no more do work in philosophy of science or epistemology than they do work in cosmology. They rely upon results from these other fields where they are relevant.
Desiring a neuroscientific or a psychological reduction not healthy for the community. All it has gotten the transgender community, for instance, is dangerous and bad science that classifies healthy individuals as mentally ill on the basis of differences of self-image. Organizations with agendas intending to disprove the validity of transgender person’s identities pour millions and millions of dollars into bunk research to classify transgender as an illness, meaning any conclusions reached are automatically untenable because they are politically motivated, and the risk of bias is too high.
I'm not sure why some therians are wishing for the idea of therianthropy to be classified as a mental illness or a neurological atypicality. Certainly, some individuals understand their identity this way, but they ought to limit their discussion of therianthropy only to personal self-understanding and general discourse with others and not speak for the whole of which the majority are not.
But reducing everything that therian and Otherkin is to a scientific fact is something of a self-annihilating desire. I suppose the need for validation is so strong that people are willing to take it from even the absolute worst possible sources. It's like asking the schoolyard bully for confirmation that you're a nerd.
But moreover, it is disrespectful to people who have mental illness and have trouble coping with existence because of this. I don’t think that just having species dysphoric experiences, for instance, stacks up against having a neurodegenerative condition like schizophrenia, and if the species dysphoria is so bad that the individual is not able to function in a healthy capacity at all, then they already should be seeking help from professionals. In this case, it isn’t a larger truth about therianthropy or Otherkinity but rather an unfortunate condition of the individual.
There probably are no specific neural mechanisms for feeling you aren’t human. Almost all aspects of thought and neuroanatomy are holistic. The brain is an integrated process, and all thoughts and experiences engage multiple regions and neuropathways in ways that can only be identified in terms of macro function (such as a general hypothesis about a region of the brain responsible for associating memory with visual perception) but cannot identify particular beliefs and where they are located. Neuroscientists don’t believe they will understand how memory itself works for hundreds and hundreds of years, perhaps never. Some neuroscientists even argue that every attempt at this is actually based upon philosophical assumptions and metaphors which ultimately mean that neuroscience will never be able to produce objective knowledge about how the mind works:
aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
The idea of being nonhuman is such an incredible complex of different philosophies, spiritualities, cultures, and personal identities that there is already, built into the very idea of being nonhuman, an undefinable term. In other words, if we all believed the exact identical thing, and all had basically the same exact experiences, then there might be a possibility that “nonhumanity” and “therianthropy” could be definable enough to study scientifically. But this is as far from the case as possible, and therefore is beyond the realm of scientific analysis. Nonhuman identification is inherently a hypercomplex, interdisciplinary phenomenon, and I don’t see how it can ever be anything else.
It is logically impossible to create a discrete definition of nonhuman identification that includes all the people it is supposed to include. Without such a definition, science cannot proceed, meaning this will never be answered in science and, in fact, shouldn’t. Science cannot answer anything about undefinable cluster concepts like being nonhuman in a human body. If you could identify such a mechanism, you’d explain at most a handful of people and leave everyone else out to dry.
The answers and questions of therianthropy and Otherkin are all in philosophy, anthropology, spirituality, culture, sociology, etc. and many of them have already been explored very thoroughly. We must find our own answers. It is our responsibilities to our own existence.
There's a remarkable thing called self-understanding in which we actually get some say in how we are to understand ourselves and that this intersubjective knowledge is real knowledge. In many respects there is no such thing as objective knowledge to begin with, and the general consensus is that objectivity is actually impossible; knowledge is always produced relative to an “epistemic community” with a certain kind of methodology. (There’s actually a few different proofs that all knowledge is intersubjective in logic. One of them is called the Gettier problem. Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem is another proof that has implications for knowledge being intersubjective.)
And these methodologies of knowledge actually cannot reduce to each other: the methods of sociology produce knowledge in a certain mode that cannot be reduced to, let’s say, biology. This can be true at the same time we can also make a claim within physics that everything ultimately reduces to physics. The reason why this works without contradiction is because these are different frameworks of thought, different kinds, and they are sui generis. A physicist can claim that the universe is determinate while a psychologist can claim that human beings are fundamentally indeterminate. And we have ideas that are functionally true within the frameworks of the different methods used by physicists and psychologists. There are, perhaps, fundamental realities behind our perception and thought, but that these realities are always filtered through a mind, and therefore direct access to reality is not possible. The philosopher of science who principally wrote on this topic was Richard Rorty, and his work has been very influential in the past 50 years.
What does this mean for Therians and Otherkin? Well, this means that the only way to ever approach the objects of “therianthropy” or “otherkinity” with the desire to produce knowledge fairly is to analyze them from many different disciplines.
One of the areas that is severely neglected in our exploration is that of identity-as-prescriptive rather than descriptive. So many therians/Otherkin focus upon what they are rather than what they ought to do or be. And these questions cannot be answered by science; they properly belong to the realm of philosophy, ethics, politics, metaphysics, spirituality and so on.
Therians and Otherkin need to do critical research and introspection and come up with their own positive identity signifiers and understandings like other marginal communities. Problem is, no one wants to take responsibility for understanding themselves, so therians and Otherkin are constantly deferring their responsibilities to other fields that will never ever yield any of the results they are looking for.
This is worrisome because it is ultimately the undoing of a marginal community.
There's nothing special about therianthropy, no more than, let's say happening to be born as an African American in a mainly white city. Just like the therian, the African American is going to be thrown into complex identity relations, possibly inherit some cultural ideas from their families and the systems that typically oppress them, and they're going to have to navigate and produce an understanding of themselves from this sea of misinformation, lack of information, conflicting ideas and people actively trying to hurt them and keep them down. It would be ****ing daft for the individual to dream that the function of blackness in their identity in society is somehow going to be explained by neuroscience. Not gonna happen. They're going to have to look to philosophy, theory and sociology, to look to black icons and theorists, and take responsibility for their self-understanding. They will have to attack the notion of race, undermine it, demonstrate it is problematic and how it is a construct used to keep them down.
The same kind of question arises if one is born female in a fundamentally unequal society. What does it mean to be a woman? It’s a question of identity. The experiences of women in society and through biological particulars are fundamentally distinct from men. In fact, there’s a book on this very topic by called “Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.” Another book by Simone de Beauvoir is called “The Second Sex.” The entire field of feminism, when it is not militant, is about understanding these questions. These are books on philosophy, and they are generally considered some of the staple literature for women in working on self-understanding. What it means to be a woman certainly can be informed by scientific knowledge. But that ultimately does not answer the really pressing questions of identity if you happen to be born as a woman. What are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to understand your relation to other people? What kind of unique problems do you face because of the inequalities present in civilization? Again, what does it mean to be woman in this particular world at this particular time in this particular culture in this particular body? Not the kind of question that science is going to be able to answer. Women must answer these questions.
These are all extremely important for the community of women, and if they are left unanswered because they demand unscientific answers, how is a woman supposed to self-actualize and understand themselves?
Likewise, what does it mean to be Otherkin/therian? This is a question that no one member or group of members can answer. It must be answered by all of us, through a process of dialectic, through debate, presenting cases, disagreements. No one person ever has the answer, but the answer becomes the entire activity of people debating and engaging each other. The dialectic becomes the answer itself, providing a stable environment to build self-understanding and self-actualization.
Therians and Otherkin, if they want to be an intellectually mature community, like other marginal communities, are going to have to step up and take responsibility for self-understanding through a critical and continuous study of literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, spirituality, science, and so on and especially personal introspection and open social discourse that is tolerant of differences. It cannot be deferred to outside academia, even if outside academia can be useful at times for understanding. There is no one, reducable method for understanding therianthropy/otherkinity. It is fundamentally multidisciplinary, comprised of a sea of perspectives, differences of opinion, belief, ideology, worldview, philosophy.
It isn't sufficient to sit around waiting for someone outside the community in academia to come along and shed some light on what we are. That is, in my opinion, a very bad idea. It defers who gets to say what we are to people outside of ourselves that do not have to live with being what we are.
To do so generally signals the death of marginal communities. If other marginal communities did this, they'd either be slaves or self-destruct.
What this means, however, is that informed members need to begin having more open discourse, produce literature, art and culture, to help build the discourse of identity that keeps the community protected. Members who aren’t informed need to become informed, they need to have humility to acknowledge that they know very little about the idea and about different fields of knowledge that are relevant to the idea. They must be willing to learn and apply themselves.
At the same time, informed members must be respectful, not elitist. They should be willing to help those who are uninformed through producing a lot of material from which to learn as well as assist in dialogue and answering questions.
If you are under the age of, let’s say 18, the overwhelming likelihood is that you simply do not have the basis of knowledge of both the community and other academic fields to be able to consider yourself well-informed. I certainly wasn’t, and I had already been in the community for many years by the age of 18. That doesn’t mean that someone under that age cannot contribute. Children tend to raise interesting questions about assumptions if they are inquisitive. But unless you are, lets say, Saul Kripke, and have published a groundbreaking paper in modal logic by the age of 17, chances are you don't have any answers...yet. Be open and take it in, but most importantly, seek out those who have knowledge and be respectful to the work they have had to put into it get there. Sure, sometimes there are exceptions if a child is extremely gifted. But that is very rare. If you’re under that age, your primary job is to learn and not to take learning personally.
On the flipside, simply being older than that does not imply one is informed at all. Adults need to take a real critical look at what they actually know and have the humility to admit their failings. Too much stigma is attached to admitting one’s lack of knowledge, when actually this is an extremely honorable and wise thing to do. Socrates, for instance, considered it the greatest mark of wisdom which eventually begets knowledge if one chooses to work at it. Be humble, admit your perspective is only your own and not the universal truth of the community, and always try to be as charitable to your opponents views as possible.
I highly recommend reading about "The Principle of Charity" in debate. It is considered the foundation of intellectual debate in academia, but very few people actually engage it, even among professional academics.
philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html
Psychological and neuroscientific explanations of therianthropy/Otherkin are necessarily incomplete and cannot provide an adequate foundation for self-actualization.
Goal:
To influence others to consider looking into many fields of academia and knowledge for understanding the phenomenon of Otherkin/therians, and to avoid taking a narrow and exclusive view which they present as a representation of the community as a whole when it is not the case. I hope also that this may contribute to developing healthier discourse in the community that explores the phenomenon from all perspectives.
(To clarify initially, I am mainly talking about “scientific reductionism.” I address both psychology and neuroscience as I know some therians desire a neurological mechanism interpreted through psychology to explain their personal identities. The issue is, I don’t think identifying as nonhuman is a fundamentally scientific object. Some aspects of it can be examined through science, but it is well beyond the realm of scientific knowledge into the more general discipline of philosophy.)
Argument:
I do not understand the desire to have one’s identity explained away by science. In many respects, science is inherently inadequate for the issue of self-actualization because it is a merely descriptive field, not a prescriptive one. It cannot inform us of what we ought to do, who to be or become, how to realize our existence. It can only provide some accounts of facts about our existence, and these facts are primarily limited by what can be analyzed scientifically in the first place, what has achieved a discrete enough definition to be verified empirically.
More than this, however, a neurological mechanism and a complete psychological theory for therianthropy or Otherkinity is not even remotely probable. Whose, it is theoretically impossible due to problems emerging in the philosophy of science and the undefinable nature of the community. Questions of identity as a general concept are not scientific questions. They are philosophical ones. Neuroscientific discoveries and psychological theories can certainly shed some light upon aspects of identity whenever we can find related questions that are amenable to scientific data, but they are methodologically incapable of addressing the question of identity fully in a way that is salient for personal existence.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity/
plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
I agree that it is good for the community to understand psychology and how it might relate to their identities, but to understand identity as purely psychological or reductive to neuroscience is a mistake.
There is a wealth of philosophy for explaining animal-human and nonhuman-human identities that is completely ignored by the community. I have an entire library of philosophy texts just about the relation of human and nonhuman/animal in human identity.
You don't need brain scans. That isn't how neuroscience works. They can't even figure out how the brain forms memories, let alone anything remotely related to personal identity. They certainly cannot answer metaphysical questions about identity. Neuroscientists in professional practice consult philosophers for understanding/interpreting their results and what it means for the concepts of mind, consciousness, identity and personhood. There's an entire field of research called philosophy of science and mind dedicated to these issues. I even did graduate research in this field and worked with a professor on issues concerning imagination and what aspects of imagination are scientific and which are philosophical.
(In sort, we call things that can potentially be answered with science "a posteriori" and things that must be answered with philosophy "a priori". "A posteriori" loosely means to "knowledge from evidence/experience" while "a priori" loosely means "knowledge from logic and rational conceptualization".)
I understand that some believe neuroscience will come to save the day and have a kind of faith that it will unravel all mysteries, but I can tell you now that even theoretically it can't. Neuroscience's job is to explain cognitive mechanisms in the anatomy of the brain, not to explain away personal experiences, concepts, socio-political relations and the entire network of philosophical ideas. Likewise, psychology identifies trends in human behavior with a very low degree of predictability because of the complexity of people: it doesn’t tell you how you should live and understand yourself as X. In psychology, there is fundamental indeterminacy of human behavior.
In fact, the idea that we can reduce the concept of identity to neuroscience is a bad philosophical assumption that is criticized extensively in academic literature because rather than address significant questions about identity that are logical coherent, it generally proceeds as if such questions are meaningless, when they have been asked and analyzed for thousands of years.
The idea is called logical positivism (or verificationism, as AJ Ayer coined it) and it has been disproven by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and others. Logical positivism still survives in fringe elements of the scientific community, but the academic community has largely moved on. It died as a serious scientific paradigm quite a long time ago, in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, many professional scientists are not actually aware of the methodological assumptions involved in science because this kind of understanding is not necessary to do science well. In other words, they do not understand that knowledge is a broader field than science, that science is only able to produce a certain kind of knowledge when the conditions are right. The more general field of the study of knowledge which includes science as a subset is called epistemology. (Episteme means “knowledge.”)
blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/what-is-philosophy-of-science-and-should-scientists-care/
My parents are PhD chemists, and they did not know about these issues until I informed them. It's because they are in different fields of academia, and chemists no more do work in philosophy of science or epistemology than they do work in cosmology. They rely upon results from these other fields where they are relevant.
Desiring a neuroscientific or a psychological reduction not healthy for the community. All it has gotten the transgender community, for instance, is dangerous and bad science that classifies healthy individuals as mentally ill on the basis of differences of self-image. Organizations with agendas intending to disprove the validity of transgender person’s identities pour millions and millions of dollars into bunk research to classify transgender as an illness, meaning any conclusions reached are automatically untenable because they are politically motivated, and the risk of bias is too high.
I'm not sure why some therians are wishing for the idea of therianthropy to be classified as a mental illness or a neurological atypicality. Certainly, some individuals understand their identity this way, but they ought to limit their discussion of therianthropy only to personal self-understanding and general discourse with others and not speak for the whole of which the majority are not.
But reducing everything that therian and Otherkin is to a scientific fact is something of a self-annihilating desire. I suppose the need for validation is so strong that people are willing to take it from even the absolute worst possible sources. It's like asking the schoolyard bully for confirmation that you're a nerd.
But moreover, it is disrespectful to people who have mental illness and have trouble coping with existence because of this. I don’t think that just having species dysphoric experiences, for instance, stacks up against having a neurodegenerative condition like schizophrenia, and if the species dysphoria is so bad that the individual is not able to function in a healthy capacity at all, then they already should be seeking help from professionals. In this case, it isn’t a larger truth about therianthropy or Otherkinity but rather an unfortunate condition of the individual.
There probably are no specific neural mechanisms for feeling you aren’t human. Almost all aspects of thought and neuroanatomy are holistic. The brain is an integrated process, and all thoughts and experiences engage multiple regions and neuropathways in ways that can only be identified in terms of macro function (such as a general hypothesis about a region of the brain responsible for associating memory with visual perception) but cannot identify particular beliefs and where they are located. Neuroscientists don’t believe they will understand how memory itself works for hundreds and hundreds of years, perhaps never. Some neuroscientists even argue that every attempt at this is actually based upon philosophical assumptions and metaphors which ultimately mean that neuroscience will never be able to produce objective knowledge about how the mind works:
aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
The idea of being nonhuman is such an incredible complex of different philosophies, spiritualities, cultures, and personal identities that there is already, built into the very idea of being nonhuman, an undefinable term. In other words, if we all believed the exact identical thing, and all had basically the same exact experiences, then there might be a possibility that “nonhumanity” and “therianthropy” could be definable enough to study scientifically. But this is as far from the case as possible, and therefore is beyond the realm of scientific analysis. Nonhuman identification is inherently a hypercomplex, interdisciplinary phenomenon, and I don’t see how it can ever be anything else.
It is logically impossible to create a discrete definition of nonhuman identification that includes all the people it is supposed to include. Without such a definition, science cannot proceed, meaning this will never be answered in science and, in fact, shouldn’t. Science cannot answer anything about undefinable cluster concepts like being nonhuman in a human body. If you could identify such a mechanism, you’d explain at most a handful of people and leave everyone else out to dry.
The answers and questions of therianthropy and Otherkin are all in philosophy, anthropology, spirituality, culture, sociology, etc. and many of them have already been explored very thoroughly. We must find our own answers. It is our responsibilities to our own existence.
There's a remarkable thing called self-understanding in which we actually get some say in how we are to understand ourselves and that this intersubjective knowledge is real knowledge. In many respects there is no such thing as objective knowledge to begin with, and the general consensus is that objectivity is actually impossible; knowledge is always produced relative to an “epistemic community” with a certain kind of methodology. (There’s actually a few different proofs that all knowledge is intersubjective in logic. One of them is called the Gettier problem. Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem is another proof that has implications for knowledge being intersubjective.)
And these methodologies of knowledge actually cannot reduce to each other: the methods of sociology produce knowledge in a certain mode that cannot be reduced to, let’s say, biology. This can be true at the same time we can also make a claim within physics that everything ultimately reduces to physics. The reason why this works without contradiction is because these are different frameworks of thought, different kinds, and they are sui generis. A physicist can claim that the universe is determinate while a psychologist can claim that human beings are fundamentally indeterminate. And we have ideas that are functionally true within the frameworks of the different methods used by physicists and psychologists. There are, perhaps, fundamental realities behind our perception and thought, but that these realities are always filtered through a mind, and therefore direct access to reality is not possible. The philosopher of science who principally wrote on this topic was Richard Rorty, and his work has been very influential in the past 50 years.
What does this mean for Therians and Otherkin? Well, this means that the only way to ever approach the objects of “therianthropy” or “otherkinity” with the desire to produce knowledge fairly is to analyze them from many different disciplines.
One of the areas that is severely neglected in our exploration is that of identity-as-prescriptive rather than descriptive. So many therians/Otherkin focus upon what they are rather than what they ought to do or be. And these questions cannot be answered by science; they properly belong to the realm of philosophy, ethics, politics, metaphysics, spirituality and so on.
Therians and Otherkin need to do critical research and introspection and come up with their own positive identity signifiers and understandings like other marginal communities. Problem is, no one wants to take responsibility for understanding themselves, so therians and Otherkin are constantly deferring their responsibilities to other fields that will never ever yield any of the results they are looking for.
This is worrisome because it is ultimately the undoing of a marginal community.
There's nothing special about therianthropy, no more than, let's say happening to be born as an African American in a mainly white city. Just like the therian, the African American is going to be thrown into complex identity relations, possibly inherit some cultural ideas from their families and the systems that typically oppress them, and they're going to have to navigate and produce an understanding of themselves from this sea of misinformation, lack of information, conflicting ideas and people actively trying to hurt them and keep them down. It would be ****ing daft for the individual to dream that the function of blackness in their identity in society is somehow going to be explained by neuroscience. Not gonna happen. They're going to have to look to philosophy, theory and sociology, to look to black icons and theorists, and take responsibility for their self-understanding. They will have to attack the notion of race, undermine it, demonstrate it is problematic and how it is a construct used to keep them down.
The same kind of question arises if one is born female in a fundamentally unequal society. What does it mean to be a woman? It’s a question of identity. The experiences of women in society and through biological particulars are fundamentally distinct from men. In fact, there’s a book on this very topic by called “Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.” Another book by Simone de Beauvoir is called “The Second Sex.” The entire field of feminism, when it is not militant, is about understanding these questions. These are books on philosophy, and they are generally considered some of the staple literature for women in working on self-understanding. What it means to be a woman certainly can be informed by scientific knowledge. But that ultimately does not answer the really pressing questions of identity if you happen to be born as a woman. What are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to understand your relation to other people? What kind of unique problems do you face because of the inequalities present in civilization? Again, what does it mean to be woman in this particular world at this particular time in this particular culture in this particular body? Not the kind of question that science is going to be able to answer. Women must answer these questions.
These are all extremely important for the community of women, and if they are left unanswered because they demand unscientific answers, how is a woman supposed to self-actualize and understand themselves?
Likewise, what does it mean to be Otherkin/therian? This is a question that no one member or group of members can answer. It must be answered by all of us, through a process of dialectic, through debate, presenting cases, disagreements. No one person ever has the answer, but the answer becomes the entire activity of people debating and engaging each other. The dialectic becomes the answer itself, providing a stable environment to build self-understanding and self-actualization.
Therians and Otherkin, if they want to be an intellectually mature community, like other marginal communities, are going to have to step up and take responsibility for self-understanding through a critical and continuous study of literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, spirituality, science, and so on and especially personal introspection and open social discourse that is tolerant of differences. It cannot be deferred to outside academia, even if outside academia can be useful at times for understanding. There is no one, reducable method for understanding therianthropy/otherkinity. It is fundamentally multidisciplinary, comprised of a sea of perspectives, differences of opinion, belief, ideology, worldview, philosophy.
It isn't sufficient to sit around waiting for someone outside the community in academia to come along and shed some light on what we are. That is, in my opinion, a very bad idea. It defers who gets to say what we are to people outside of ourselves that do not have to live with being what we are.
To do so generally signals the death of marginal communities. If other marginal communities did this, they'd either be slaves or self-destruct.
What this means, however, is that informed members need to begin having more open discourse, produce literature, art and culture, to help build the discourse of identity that keeps the community protected. Members who aren’t informed need to become informed, they need to have humility to acknowledge that they know very little about the idea and about different fields of knowledge that are relevant to the idea. They must be willing to learn and apply themselves.
At the same time, informed members must be respectful, not elitist. They should be willing to help those who are uninformed through producing a lot of material from which to learn as well as assist in dialogue and answering questions.
If you are under the age of, let’s say 18, the overwhelming likelihood is that you simply do not have the basis of knowledge of both the community and other academic fields to be able to consider yourself well-informed. I certainly wasn’t, and I had already been in the community for many years by the age of 18. That doesn’t mean that someone under that age cannot contribute. Children tend to raise interesting questions about assumptions if they are inquisitive. But unless you are, lets say, Saul Kripke, and have published a groundbreaking paper in modal logic by the age of 17, chances are you don't have any answers...yet. Be open and take it in, but most importantly, seek out those who have knowledge and be respectful to the work they have had to put into it get there. Sure, sometimes there are exceptions if a child is extremely gifted. But that is very rare. If you’re under that age, your primary job is to learn and not to take learning personally.
On the flipside, simply being older than that does not imply one is informed at all. Adults need to take a real critical look at what they actually know and have the humility to admit their failings. Too much stigma is attached to admitting one’s lack of knowledge, when actually this is an extremely honorable and wise thing to do. Socrates, for instance, considered it the greatest mark of wisdom which eventually begets knowledge if one chooses to work at it. Be humble, admit your perspective is only your own and not the universal truth of the community, and always try to be as charitable to your opponents views as possible.
I highly recommend reading about "The Principle of Charity" in debate. It is considered the foundation of intellectual debate in academia, but very few people actually engage it, even among professional academics.
philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html