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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Philosopher Sally Haslanger (MIT) on her sense of “ideology”

This interview gives a useful précis of Prof. Haslanger's distinctive sense of "ideology" that figures in her work about the social construction of race and gender (it also includes some interesting autobiographical details).  (I should say I found the interviewer a bit annoying at times:  he interjected too much I thought.)  From a Marxian point of view, it's an unusual conception (as I've noted before), in three respects in particular:   first, it doesn't necessarily involve beliefs which can be false, but seems to be centrally concerned with what Haslanger calls "practical consciousness" and "know-how"; second, its genesis does not matter (though it shares, loosely, with the Marxian sense the idea that an ideology has the functional property of supporting certain kinds of [oppressive] social relations); and third, there is no special explanatory role for economic relations in understanding ideology.   The first attribute is particularly connected, I take it, to Haslanger's emphasis on concrete, practical interventions to change our "ways of interacting" and to do so "together"  in particular communities (she even mentions academic disciplines as one locus for this activism).   I was surprised to learn from another interview that Prof. Haslanger was brought up as a Christian Scientist, though left that sect in high school.  That sect's emphasis on healing echoes, however, in some of her remarks later on the interview.

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