Wednesday April 29, 10am-12pm, HIB 55
Bernhard Nickel (Harvard, Philosophy)
"True Ideological Beliefs?"
On a pejorative use of the term, ideological beliefs are mistaken or misguided in ways that help sustain unjust social and political arrangements. Some cases, such as beliefs that treat historically contingent facts as natural or inevitable, are easy to diagnose as simply false.
More recently, however, attention has turned to generic generalizations about social groups. They appear to go beyond mere statistical description in ways that can support policies, yet they also stop short of explicitly mentioning any causal basis. That combination makes them hard to evaluate as true or false, leading some theorists to propose new evaluative tools.
In this talk, I argue that no such tools are needed. Generic sentences encode commitments to causal bases, and I explain why their use can nonetheless create the appearance that speakers are not committed to such claims. This allows us to assess them as straightforwardly false.
All are welcome! Please RSVP here by April 22.
Contact Prof Kate Ritchie with questions (ritchiek@uci.edu)