Towards an artifactual account of social ideologies

FRANCISCO LAGES; EDUARDA CALADO BARBOSA

Florianópolis

Congreso; 12th Principia International Symposium; 2021

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Towards an artifactual account of social ideologiesFor the last two decades, debates over theories of fiction and the ontology of scientific models have been prolific. On the one hand, we have philosophers of language discussing whether Sherlock Holmes exists or not, the mechanics of language regarding this issue and the problem of truth in fiction; on the other, we saw the rise of different fictionalist approaches to scientific models, which also tackle problems concerning existence (of theoretical unobservable entities) and truth (of scientific laws). In this work, we discuss the possibility of using an artifactual theory of fiction to deal with the ontological status of flawed social ideologies and the truth-evaluation of statements that implicate them. We can start with the last issue: the truth-evaluation of statements such as,(1) John is a sissy.(2) Mary is a bitch.which implicate the flawed social ideology of sexism. According to the semantic theory called ?Combinatory Externalism?, pejorative concepts, like ?sissy? and ?bitch?, and fictional concepts, such as ?unicorn?, share the common feature of having null extensions (an assumption called: Null Extensionality or NE, for short). This thesis later motivated a fictionalist view of pejorative concepts according to which, though sexists speak as if (1) and (2) were true ? that is, in pretense ?, their statements are false because of NE. We will argue here that this claim may lead to an unwanted relativism concerning bigoted speech; one that potentially comprises the efficiency of attempts to denounce the harmful effects of bigoted speech to the construction of social life. We believe that an artifactual theory could avoid both problems. First, because it would allow us to approach the pejorative concepts that often constitute flawed social ideologies as referring to social artifacts, of which institutions and laws are examples. We will argue, however, that those concepts are not created in the same manner as the detailed contents of laws and institutions; ideologies, flawed or not, are not the result of one single event in space and time that can be pointed out. Rather, they are ongoing social objects, organic entities that are constantly being actualized through social practices. Note that institutions and laws can and often are actualized. The difference, as we will suggest, is that the latter is created in a synthetic fashion, whereas the former has a process-like development.Hence, an artifactual view will enable us to talk about non-null extensions that contain social artifacts. Ultimately, flawed social ideologies and their conceptual apparatus so to speak will be viewed as anchored in linguistic practices, as predicted by another long-studied mechanism of the social sciences, reification. About this last point, in a nutshell, we will assume that pejorative concepts, such as sissy and bitch, are reified into social roles through a process of normalization. We believe these moves will allow us to eliminate any possibility of talking about bigoted speech as true in pretense, while highlighting the dynamics behind the construction of roles that shape structural aspects of our social reality.