The weakness of the evaluative conception becomes evident in the two dominant approaches to the study of the social determinants of ideology, which examine ideology’s social and psychological functions. This raises the question of how ideology can be an analytic tool in the social sciences when scientists exhibit bias in their arguments. For example, Werner Stark paints ideology as psychologically deformed by human emotion, while more sophisticated arguments also present ideology as “a form of radical intellectual depravity” (197). This evaluative conception produces what Geertz refers to as Mannheim’s paradox, whereby the term’s lack of neutrality limits scientific objectivity-in this case, much sociological theory considers the relation between science and ideology in simplistic, judgmental terms. Geertz argues that the social sciences have developed only an evaluative conception of ideology.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |