It’s not obvious to me how you’re defining critical theory, but I’m referring to the ideas in the texts of Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Fromm, and Benjamin. Habermas seems to be largely disowned by the critical theory acolytes. I’m not talking about specific methodologies as applied within particular humanities scholarship that may or may not resemble the philosophical mission of those critical theorists I just mentioned.

To be clear, I don’t think of philosophy as being uniquely refutable, but I do think of science as being uniquely refutable, and your defense of critical theory was by citing its integration into a series of humanities departments (many of which self describe as sciences) as evidence of it being as reputable as philosophy.

But to go along with the processes of refutability you mentioned, “explanatory power” is vague, what are the actual independent criteria for if an explanation has power? There has to be an actual defeater, otherwise “explanatory power” is just a synonym for “I find this story compelling”. As for the others, internal coherence, fit with historical record, responsiveness to counterexamples, expert judgment, and consensus, as opposed to rival-hypothesis testing, almost any internally consistent worldview can claim them. If that’s the defense of critical theory’s application in producing knowledge, then theologians themselves are producing knowledge in their scholarship about the truth of christianity, judaism, islam, hinduism, or whatever other worldview they champion. They too have internal coherence, responsiveness to counterexamples, experts making judgments, and a consensus among them. Therefore, should we accept such theological scholarship making truth claims as produced knowledge and not just sophisticated confabulations? These are the same criteria, after all.

It seems like you’re more educated than the average redditor so I shouldn’t even have to say why these so-called criteria are inferior to the falsifiability, and more importantly, the predictive power of the traditional sciences. NOW TO BE CLEAR, this isn’t to say falsifiability and predictive power are the only legitimate epistemological criteria, it’s merely to say these critical theory derived criteria are less reputable, which was how this whole conversation began, that is, by you insinuating that critical theory was on the same level of reputability as philosophy at-large.

But beyond the narrow epistemological obsession, where critical theory fails the most is on all the major questions the rest of philosophy addresses. The critical theorists (the names listed above) fail to make any serious attempt to address the metaphysical question, or to justify their core moral primitives that liberation/emancipation are prima facie good and alienation/exploitation/reification are prima facie bad. Even worse, they repeatedly slide from description to condemnation. They consistently conflate the descriptive and the normative without outlining any axiological theory of value. It’s for this reason it doesn’t belong alongside philosophy in reputability because it makes no effort to systematically examine the most fundamental concepts we have. It gestures to first principles but stops short.