CEPPA Talk (online only) – Sally Haslanger (MIT)

Location: Teams (online only)

Title: Ideology, Culture, and Social Meaning

Abstract: My aim in this paper is to sketch a conception of ideology that draws on the critical theory tradition. This conception of ideology is a response to a particular challenge for those working on social justice: Why is it that most of us, most of the time, act in ways that perpetuate injustice? To begin to answer this question, I will develop an account, inspired by Althusser among others, that embeds ideology in social practices. Social practices enable both human and non-human animals to coordinate fluently and flexibly in response to each other and our environment; and they depend on something like a “language” – a system of signs and signals – that makes socially intelligible agency possible. I call such a framework of meaning and its material apparatus a cultural technē. I go on to argue that Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning is too coarse to provide us an account of social meaning, and drawing on Skyrms and others working on signals, I propose that a cultural technē is a framework or system of signs. I then consider how we might capture the publicity of social meanings in terms that don’t require complex metacognition. I conclude that account of ideology as a cultural technē “gone wrong” provides us the basics of a critical account of ideology.

You can read the full paper, but attendees are not expected to have read the paper in advance.
Co-hosted with ECT.