The Division of Ideological Labor

SPeaker

Bernhard Nickel, Harvard University, Department of Philosophy

Comment

Frédérick Guillaume Dufour, UQAM, Department of Sociology

ORGANIZATION

The event is organized by the Montréal Philosophy of Science Network, the Canada Research Chair in Applied Epistemology and the Centre de recherche interuniversaire sur la science et la technologie (CIRST).

ABSTRACT

The concept of ideology poses the micro-macro problem particularly acutely. An ideology at least contains a set of propositions that concern a group of people and which includes stereotypes, archetypical narratives, statistics, and clichés, but also more general principles that purport to explain and ground the relatively more surface-level purported facts.

Because ideologies are macro-level phenomena that help us understand the persistence of social structures and, depending on the case, unjust distributions of resources and opportunities, they raise the question of how the psychology of individual agents—a micro-phenomenon—is related to an ideology. Ideologies pose this micro-macro problem in a particularly acute way because they can operate without the conscious awareness of the people whose thought and action we understand by invoking them. In such cases, standard pictures of how social-level cognitive elements can be related to individual-level ones, e.g., via the notion of common belief, are inapplicable.

This paper proposes a new model for how the psychology of individual agents is related to a social-level construct like an ideology, inspired by the paradigm of semantic externalism about reference. Because semantic deference generally operates below the level of individual consciousness, it’s a promising model for understanding how ideologies function. The paper goes beyond these more familiar forms of deference in arguing that speakers can defer about the explanatory resources they deploy. The paper makes this case by using generic generalizations as a case study.

**The talk will be in English

Poster

This content has been updated on March 21st, 2018 at 8 h 17 min.