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ABSTRACT
Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so that we perform local social practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Lauren Ashwell, Linda Barclay, Elizabeth Barnes, Ekaterina Botchkina, Ross Cameron, David Chalmers, David Estlund, Caitlin Fischer, Moira Gatens, Alexander Gourevitch, Clarissa Hayward, Samia Hesni, Jerome Hodges, Jakob Hohwy, Sophie Horowitz, Katrina Hutchison, Karen Jones, Justin Khoo, Christian List, Catriona Mackenzie, Rachel McKinney, José Medina, Michaelis Michael, Erica Preston-Roedder, Mark Richard, François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter, Darien Scott, Rob Sparrow, Kai Spiekermann, Daniel Stoljar, Deborah Tollefsen, Christopher Zurn, and those who participated in philosophy colloquia where I gave an earlier version of this paper at Rice University, University of Texas, Monash University, Australian National University, and the London School of Economics.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I will not offer an account of oppression in this paper. I endorse an account, such as Iris Young’s, according to which there are multiple irreducible forms of oppression [Young Citation1990], e.g., exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, systematic violence. See also Cudd [Citation2006]; Haslanger [Citation2012: ch.11].
2 The term ‘ideology’ can be used in a pejorative or non-pejorative sense [Geuss Citation1981]. In a non-pejorative sense, ideology guides our participation in social practices, whether just or unjust. In the pejorative sense, the term is used as part of an explanation of how unjust and oppressive social structures are stabilized and sustained. More specifically, the pejorative use of the term attempts to illuminate how agency is (or can be) colonized under conditions of injustice. Because my focus is on this colonization of consciousness, I choose to use the term in the pejorative sense. I use the term ‘cultural technē’ non-pejoratively for a satchel of cultural tools. Whether the tools in question constitute an ideology or not will depend on context.
3 I follow Anderson [Citation1993] in being a pluralist about value and grounding kinds of value in apt ways of valuing.
4 To my mind, work on justice has focused too much on distributive justice, as if the things of value are ‘given’ and the only issue is how we distribute them. An account of social justice must investigate the process by which some things rather than others are valued, produced, managed, and how things disvalued are also produced, managed, and distributed. See, e.g., Stanczyk [Citation2012].
5 There is considerable controversy over the extent to which human social cognition is managed by ‘innate modules’ and the extent to which innate capacities for social learning are responsive to and enable us to acquire locally specific information and skills. Nevertheless, it is clear that both innate capacities and social learning are required. Sterelny [Citation2012] discusses this at length, and although I am convinced by his arguments in favour of extensive social learning, the subject matter of my project is sufficiently high-level social coordination, that I can remain somewhat neutral on the detailed explanation of the basics of human social cognition. We are hard-wired to acquire information and skills specific to our environment and social context, and this learning shapes—not entirely, but in important ways—how we engage with the world and each other, both practically and epistemically.
6 I develop this account more fully in my ‘What is a Social Practice?’ [Haslanger Citation2018].
7 In the past I have used the term ‘schemas’ both for public cultural schemas and internalization of them as psychological schemas. (This is how Sewell [Citation1992], I believe, uses the term; see also Howard [Citation1994] and Hollandar and Howard [Citation2000]). This has caused confusion, so I will aim to use the term ‘social meaning,’ and for webs of meanings, ‘cultural technē,’ in place of ‘cultural schema’ going forward; though as I will indicate below, ‘social meanings’ include narratives, patterns of inference, and other cultural memes that one might not normally consider ‘meanings’ in a narrow sense. See also Balkin [Citation1998].
8 In Bourdieu’s [Citation1972/Citation1977: 72] terminology, ‘[t]he structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g., material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable, dispositions’. As I understand it, a habitus is a system of coordinated dispositions in a group of individuals which enables them to engage in the practice; individuals will have those particular dispositions that enable them to do their part. A habitus arises from the objective conditions that call for coordination, and also shape those conditions. This ‘looping’ or ‘interdependence’ between the social meanings, the dispositions, and the conditions is crucial to both Bourdieu’s view and mine.
9 I am assuming here, with Sterelny [Citation2012] and others, that there is some cross-generational transmission of information and skills in certain species of non-human animals. (See also Hearne [Citation1986]; Gruen [Citation2014]; Zawidzk [Citation2013: esp. ch. 1])
10 Primitive social practices can achieve coordination through rudimentary forms of signalling, e.g., I signal my strength by flexing my muscles, and even simply through ‘information leakage,’ e.g., if you scream and run when you see a snake, I run too, even if I don’t know what you are screaming about (Sterelny [Citation2012: ch. 3, ch. 6, esp. 125–6]). But more sophisticated practices depend on symbolic resources for communication and coordination.
11 Note that the term ‘attitude’ is used differently in philosophy and psychology. In psychology attitudes concern (+/-) evaluations; in philosophy they are states of mind that have propositions as their content; paradigms are belief and desire. Symbols are public vehicles for conveying what Grice would call ‘non-natural’ meaning: they aren’t simply a symptom of or evidence for the referent, e.g., smoke means fire.
12 See also Haslanger [Citation2017a: ch.2]. In previous work I have neglected to attend adequately to the bodily and agentic dispositions that come with enculturation. Thanks to Ángeles Eraña Lagos for calling my attention to this.
13 Sterelny and Zawidzki also discuss Mameli’s idea of social niche construction, as an important factor in the development of human social cognition. In niche construction, generally, an arbitrary ‘mistake’ in behavior turns out to be fruitful and is passed down to future generations; in short,
Imprinting is a form of nongenetic trait inheritance that can alter a species’ niche in ways that feed back into genetic inheritance. Mameli’s idea is that mindshaping via the mechanism of social expectancies is a human form of niche construction. We alter the selectional environment of subsequent generations by shaping their minds in ways that affect the social niche in which they find themselves. [Zawidzki Citation2013: 18]
14 I interpret Bourdieu’s use of ‘misrecognizable’ here to reflect the fact that, as he says shortly after, ‘Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness’ [Citation1972: 164]. This will become relevant later (see especially fn. 17.)
15 There are many texts that argue for and elaborate this claim. In addition to Hayward [Citation2004], I recommend Silbey [Citation1998].
16 For a helpful discussion of the different traditions in thinking about ideology, see Eagleton [Citation2007, esp. ch. 1]).
17 One advantage to taking ideology to be orthodoxy is that it is easier to capture what is way in which ideology is ‘illusory.’ Orthodoxy is illusory because it doesn’t capture social reality, but provides a kind of public rationalization of that reality that masks what is really at issue. (Thanks to Christopher Zurn for pointing this out.) I don’t deny that a useful way to think about ‘ideology’ is to locate it in orthodoxy (if one opts for the pejorative sense then orthodoxy that masks injustice, or in the non-pejorative sense, for orthodoxy generally). On the account I favour, however, ideology resides in the doxa, so where is the illusion? Doxa, as social meanings, are not necessarily propositional, and shape social reality. This, in fact, I take to be a benefit of viewing ideology this way. (The slogan is: ideology (sometimes) makes itself true.) On this account, the notion of illusion cannot simply be a matter of falsehood. MacKinnon reaches for the idea by saying,
This epistemology does not at all deny that a relation exists between thought and some reality other than thought, or between human activity (mental or otherwise) and the products of that activity. Rather, it redefines the epistemological issue from being the scientific one, the relation between knowledge and objective reality, to the problem of the relation of consciousness to social being [MacKinnon Citation1989: 98–99].
18 At other points, Bourdieu seems to acknowledge that doxa is not unanimous, otherwise resistance would be impossible: ‘Politics begins, strictly speaking, with the denunciation of this tacit contract of adherence to the established order which defines the original doxa; in other words, political subversion presupposes cognitive subversion, a conversion of the vision of the world’ [Citation1982: 127–8].
19 Thanks to Rachel McKinney for suggesting this.
20 Scott [Citation1990: 188] is clear that issues of domination and resistance are not just ‘in the head,’ or in symbols; they have a material reality:
it is impossible to separate the ideas and symbolism of subordination from a process of material exploitation. In exactly the same fashion, it is impossible to separate veiled symbolic resistance to the ideas of domination from the practical struggles to thwart or mitigate exploitation … The hidden transcript is not just behind-the-scenes griping and grumbling; it is enacted in a host of down-to-earth, low-profile strategems designed to minimize appropriation. In the case of slaves, for example, these strategems have typically included theft, pilfering, feigned ignorance, shirking or careless labor, footdragging, secret trade and production for sale, sabotage of crops, livestock, and machinery, arson, flight, and so on.
21 In characterizing the hidden transcripts of the dominant group, Scott suggests that they represent ‘the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed’ (xii, quoted above). Thus, it would seem that a hidden transcript of the dominant, e.g., mainstream White Supremacy, would only consist of what supports the dominant structure, such as explicitly racist claims that can only be uttered in private settings and other private practices that uphold the racial power structure. To capture the full power of Scott’s insights, I think we need to allow that there is covert resistance as well as public resistance to both the dominant frame of meaning and the frame of meaning that becomes dominant in the resistance.
22 I admit that the machinery here may be getting too complicated and it isn’t clear how the pieces fit together. I am drawing on Sewell’s [Citation1992] notion of practices, Balkin’s [Citation1998] notion of ‘cultural software,’ Hall’s [Citation1996] conception of ideology, McGeer’s [Citation2007] and Zawidzki’s [Citation2013] notion of mindshaping, Bourdieu’s [Citation1972] notion of doxa, and Scott’s [Citation1990] notion of ‘hidden transcript.’ I do believe that all of these texts are pointing to a complex social process, but I’m having trouble articulating it. What we call the various parts is far less important to me than finding ways to illuminate it and capture how it works.
23 As Ortner [Citation1995: 174–5] suggests, what counts as ‘resistance’ is complicated, and ‘there is never a single, unitary, subordinate’ [Citationibid.:175].
24 For a useful chart of different forms of material, status, and ideological domination, and different forms of public and hidden resistance, see Scott [Citation1990: 198].
25 I use ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the diagram as suggestive distinguishing markers. Of course, it is not necessary that the alternative forms of resistance are aptly considered ‘left’ and ‘right,’ or even what counts as ‘left’ and ‘right’ in a given context.
26 Medina [Citation2013] and Fricker [Citation2007] both discuss the conviction of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird [Lee Citation1960] as an example.
27 Compare: The handlebars of a bike can be removed and considered on their own, but to understand what handlebars are, you must understand their function in riding a bike. Handlebars are not just an aggregation of metal particles in a certain shape.
28 In this, I agree with Thomas Kuhn’s [Citation1970: 145] idea of what is required to change paradigms: ‘In science, the testing situation never consists … simply in the comparison of a single paradigm with nature. Instead, testing occurs as part of the competition between two rival paradigms for the allegiance of the scientific community.’