Event Host: Mershon Center for International Security Studies
In order to address pressing issues of social justice, we need to better understand the social domain. There has been much work on how we might design just laws and institutions and distribute the products of our labor fairly. However, this is not enough, for coordination in social practices depends on there being social meanings that we rely on for communication and signaling. The social meanings are part of a system of power relations: Unjust practices rely on social meanings - an ideology - that are internalized as habits of mind that distort, obscure, and occlude important facts and result in a failure to recognize the interests of subordinated groups. In this talk, Sally Haslanger will argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.
Sally Haslanger is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has published on topics in metaphysics, epistemology and feminist theory, with a recent emphasis on accounts of the social construction of race and gender. For more information and to register, please click here.