Ideology: the rejected true

ABSTRACT

Feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Sally Haslanger argue that the ruling class’s beliefs create reality. Once these beliefs have created reality, they correspond to it, which is to say, they are true. It is therefore unclear how they constitute an ideology and hence how ideology critique might proceed. Feminists have responded to this by trying to show that the ruling class’s beliefs are nevertheless an ideology in some sense. In this paper, I attempt to convince them otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideology
• social construction
• ideology critique
• imagination
• feminism

Acknowledgement

I thank Holly Lawford-Smith, Sun Liu, Caroline Norma, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Haslanger terms this ‘the problem of accuracy’ (2017a, 15).

2 Similarly, Miranda Fricker acknowledges that identity power may construct the subject (‘A final twist is that … the subject of the injustice … may be actually caused to resemble the prejudicial stereotype working against her … When … causal construction occurs, we have a case of identity power operating “productively”’) but insists that it nevertheless ‘distorts who the subject really is’ (2007, 55). So too Amia Srinivasan acknowledges that ‘[f]rom the male perspective, women are objects, and not only because they see them as objects, but because women have been made into objects,’ but says that ‘[t]his is not to deny that there is something contradictory or perverse in the ruling group’s worldview’ (2016, 376, emphasis in the original).

3 When I say that ‘this sense of the creation of reality renders the notion of ideology incoherent,’ I mean ideology in the pejorative sense, which I explain in the next section.

4 Ian Hacking refers to the process by which our beliefs create reality causally as a looping effect:

What was known about people of a kind may become false because people of that kind have changed in virtue of how they have been classified, what they believe about themselves, or because of how they have been treated as so classified. There is a looping effect. (1999, 104)

5 Geuss elaborates: genetic characteristics are ‘some facts about its origin, genesis, or history, about how it arises or comes to be acquired or held by agents, or … motives agents have for adopting and acting on it.’ But it is not clear what facts. Geuss provides Runciman’s account of Engels’ conception of ideology (‘for the later Engels a form of consciousness is ideologically false in virtue of the fact that the “beliefs and attitudes” which compose it are “related in a causal sense to the social situation and thereby to the interests of the believer”’) and Mannheim’s conception of ideology (‘forms of consciousness are ideological because they are “expressions” of the class position of those who hold them, that is, because their origin can be traced to the particular experiences of a particular class in society with its characteristic perceptions, interests, and values’) as examples of the view that a form of consciousness is an ideology in virtue of its genetic characteristics. These examples suggest that a form of consciousness is tainted at its origin just insofar as it arises from one’s class position and hence interest, regardless of what that position and interest is. This would mean that the form of consciousness arising from the workers’ position and interest is no less ideological (in the pejorative sense) than that arising from the capitalists’ position and interest, which seems wrong. Perhaps, then, a form of consciousness is tainted at its origin insofar as it arises specifically from the ruling class’s position and interest. Why might it be tainted at its origin insofar as it arises from the ruling class’s position and interest, but not the ruled class’s? Perhaps because the ruling class’s position affords an epistemically inferior standpoint to the ruled class’s. But then the form of consciousness is an ideology ultimately in virtue of its epistemic characteristics; its genetic characteristics simply explain why it has those epistemic characteristics. I therefore think Geuss is right to say that ‘[t]his genetic approach seems to pose more problems for the understanding than did the functional.’ (1981, 19, 20).

6 In other words, ‘ideologies purport to be forms of knowledge and thus cannot be rationally rejected or accepted without epistemic grounds for doing so’ (Shelby 2003, 165).

7 Haslanger says this explicitly in the passage that I quoted on p3.

8 As Derek Parfit says, ‘what is bad must be bad for someone’ (1984, 363).

9 Or, they can hear this suffering only as a symptom of illness or dysfunction (see Chesler [1972] 2005).

10 MacKinnon suggests this when she says that ‘women are human beings in truth but not in social reality’ (1987, 216).

11 See, for an argument that moral progress is achieved via experiments in living, Anderson (2014).

12 ‘It [the argument in defence of a paradigm] cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle. The premises and values shared by the two parties to a debate over paradigms are not sufficiently extensive for that’ (Kuhn [1962] 2012, 94).

13 MacKinnon says, ‘The early twentieth-century feminist movement may have run aground on its version of this rock’ (1989, 103).