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Situated Ideological Systems: A Formal Concept, a Computational Notation, some Applications

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Abstract

This paper introduces a formal concept of ideology and ideological system. The formalization takes ideologies and ideological systems to be situated in agent societies. An ideological system is defined as a system of operations able to create, maintain, and extinguish the ideologies adopted by the social groups of agent societies. The concepts of group ideology, ideological contradiction, ideological dominance, and dominant ideology of an agent society, are defined. An ideology-based concept of social group is introduced. Relations between the proposed formal concept of ideology and the classical concepts of ideology elaborated in social sciences are examined. A computational notation is presented, to support the realization of ideological systems in computationally implemented agent societies. The adequacy of the approach for the formal modeling and analysis of ideological issues is illustrated through three case studies.

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Notes

  1. See Sect. 5 for the precise concept of agent society.

  2. See e.g., McCarthy (1960), where the dynamical nature of the computational semantical structures is clearly exposed.

  3. With the evaluative approach often taking a depreciatory character, in view of the confrontation of ideologies with the “objective truths” of science.

  4. My translation.

  5. In fact, ideologies may be directed either to the effective transformation of social situations into new ones or to the conservation of social situations as they currently are.

  6. I.e., between the processes performed by single agents and processes performed by groups of agents.

  7. For the sake of space, it is not possible to present here the formal details of Definition 1. See e.g., Costa and Dimuro (2009), Costa (2014a, b) for additional information.

  8. Additional types of ideological envisagements may be defined, if need in an application. See, e.g., Case Study III, in Sect. 17. Notice, however, that the introduction of a complete type system for ideological envisagements is out of the scope of the present paper. In particular, we introduce in the case studies just some basic types, but no type constructor.

  9. Notice that in the marxian tradition the adoption of a particular ideological envisagement by an agent or set of agents is seen as determined by the position occupied by that agent or set of agents in the socio-economical organization of the society. Here, however, the notion of ideological envisagement is taken in a generalized sense, so that the reasons for the adoption of any particular ideological envisagement are abstracted away.

  10. The choice of these four core types of ideological envisagements was motivated by the consideration of the conducts of social groups in multicultural social contexts, given by Rattansi (2007, 2011).

  11. The computational notation introduced here is an ad-hoc notation, very loosely modeled on the phrase structure of the Python language (see http://www.python.org). As explained above, the formal definition of its syntax and semantics is out of the scope of the present paper, but it should show no difficulty to be intuitively read.

  12. \(\wp (X)\) is the powerset of the set X.

  13. A number of social situations discussed in Rattansi (2007, 2011) may well be understood in terms of the way the normative envisagements relate to the core operational structures of the societies where they are adopted by one or more sets of agents.

  14. Here, we give no definite semantics for the normative operators we adopt. See Kelsen (1991) for the meanings that we would choose for them.

  15. In the general case, normative envisagements should have norms that target whole sets of agents, not individual agents. In such case, the normative operator (\(oblig , prohib , permit\), or \(auth\)) of each such norm applies in parallel to all the individuals of the set of agents that is the target of the norm. That is, each normative operator applies to each agent, separately, regarding the part that concerns it in the collective conduct of the set.

  16. In Rattansi (2007, 2011), a series of examples of functional (dis)qualifications, of both individuals and social groups, are analyzed. The details of the analyses make clear that the examples can be understood in terms of the adoption of ideological qualifying envisagements.

  17. An analysis of the schooling effects of the holding of such envisagement is also given in Rattansi (2007).

  18. But, notice that one should expect cases of strong adoptions to be exceptional, the normal cases being of weak adoption.

  19. Which is a fact relevant regarding the notions of dominant ideology and ideological dominance, see Sect. 14.

  20. Such influence may happen, for instance, by the agent (set of agents) using the ideological envisagement or framework as a criterion for taking decisions about which conducts to perform.

  21. Again, we avoid here the examination of the mental aspects that may be involved in the issue (in this case, the possibility of non-conformance).

  22. See in Sect. 18, the discussion about the issue of “objectivity”.

  23. See Costa et al. (2009) for a formal notion of expectation about organizational conducts.

  24. So that \(Ag\) envisages itself as one of the primary sets of agents constituting the population of the society.

  25. Notice that, as is the case with ideological envisagements and frameworks, group ideologies are not required to be true, consistent, coherent, or complete, neither with respect to the “real” way the society is, nor with respect to the “real” way the social group itself is.

  26. See e.g., Kelsen (1991), for a comparison of the constitutions of moral and legal systems.

  27. For the analysis of an example, see Case Study III, in Sect. 17.

  28. As implied even by Schaff’s functional concept of ideology (1967).

  29. See in Sect. 13 the discussion about this methodological choice of representing the identities of social groups by their group ideologies. See next section, for the operation of public recognition of group ideologies.

  30. The difficulty of the problem arises from the semantical overloading to which the concept of group identity has been submitted by the political and ideological struggles about it (Somers and Gibson 1994).

  31. Such historical developments of group identities may, e.g., be modelled through simple processes of inclusion, exclusion and substitution of the ideological frameworks in/from the aggregate ideologies that determine the structure of the recognized group ideologies. For instance, this substitutive approach to group identities seems well suited to support what Margaret Somers calls “narrative identities” (Somers 1994; Somers and Gibson 1994).

  32. In the marxian tradition, social dominance is defined on the basis of certain socio-organizational criteria: ownership of the means of production, etc.

  33. The operation of “intersection”, in this definition, is used in a loose, intuitive sense. For the sake of space, we do not elaborate its formal definition here.

  34. Which, in accordance with what was remarked before, does not imply that the group also be socially dominant in that society, whatever concept of social dominance one adopts.

  35. This generalization of the concept of dominant ideology, is in consonance with the tendency toward more generalized concepts of ideology, in works that concentrate on the problems of the recognition of the identity of social groups, and the correlate problem of the politics of difference (or politics of identities). In such works, it is often found that the concept of ideology defined within the marxian tradition, with its strict dependence of the socio-economical concept of social dominance, is too specific for their purposes (see e.g., Calhoun 1994).

  36. But, not necessarily the group ideologies of the social groups that are not publicly recognized at that time.

  37. That, however, is not necessarily in accordance with the “objective” functional interests that \(sg\) may happen to have in the society. Which is why traditional marxian ideological analyses usually state that the dominant ideology of a society tends to be deceiving for the social groups that adopt it, when such groups are not a ideologically dominant in the society.

  38. See a more complete presentation of the computational notation in the summary of the Case Study II, in Sect. 16.

  39. Meaning, here, characters representative of social groups existent in the society.

  40. It is precisely the moral standard that the play wants to convey to its audience. In fact, in no occasion the Devil and the Angel argued about the veredicts they jointly stated (except perhaps in the cases of the Fool and the Knights): they were mostly in full agreement concerning moral issues!

  41. Meaning: whenever some objective inevitable condition imposes a conduct (either against an obligation or against a prohibition), which is thus executed not on the basis of a free decision, the person should be spared from any moral sanction for that conduct.

  42. The obligation of, having received some benefit from somebody, returning him a benefit.

  43. See Case Study III, in Sect. 17, for a way to formally capture the notion of political power.

  44. Sicart called “experiments” the realization of such creations and analysis of avatars.

  45. E.g., overlooking the roughness of the social dominance revealed by \(RS\).

  46. Economy, government, and religious structure may be understood as types of social systems, in the sense of the architectural style of agent societies discussed in Sect. 5.

  47. Denoted by \(IPF {^{ IPPE _ PolitUnits }}{\,\gtrless\, _{ UPPE _ PolitUnits }} UPF\) in the set-theoretic notation, see Sect. 15.

  48. See e.g., Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) for an approach to the process of “social reproduction” that gives emphasis to its ideological aspects.

  49. The ideological frameworks that we have been considering up to now should, then, be called first-order ideological frameworks. We note that, at the present stage of development of the work, it is not clear if it would be useful to consider ideological frameworks of higher levels, hierarchically organized, or if one should consider the alternative possibility, based on the concept of amalgamation between object and meta levels, in the spirit of Bowen and Kowalski (1982).

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Helder Coelho, Agemir Bavaresco and the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. CAPES, FAPERGS and CNPq (Grant No. 310423/2014-7) contributed partial financial support.

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Correspondence to Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa.

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da Rocha Costa, A.C. Situated Ideological Systems: A Formal Concept, a Computational Notation, some Applications. Axiomathes 27, 15–78 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-016-9293-3

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