In virtually every class, I was told that all scientific knowledge, and even science itself was founded on Western cultural constructions and was to be regarded as hegemonic. And since each of the world’s various cultural viewpoints were enmeshed in their own historicity, each respective one (especially the Western one) could only be understood in terms relative to all the others. Accordingly, objective truths did not exist. We were all taught that “reality” was the exact equivalent of how you perceive it.

…We also read Maurice Melreau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception, which is a crowning achievement in raising subjectivity to the status of godhead. We were immersed in mock group therapy sessions structured on the postmodernist view that if one believes something, it is as every bit real as a chair that one sits on. We were told that one’s feelings about something, one’s subjective experience (of say, the likelihood of a building collapsing on top of someone), ought to be the only thing considered in understanding a person’s experience. To them, the mind could not know itself, and therefore all empirical evidence was to be completely disregarded (a` la Kurt Lewin).

Reza Ziai, “My Apostasy From the Church of Critical Theory.”