‘Ideological’ fallacies¹

Ideological Strategy

Ideological parsimony

The theoretical virtue of parsimony values the minimizing of theoretical commitments, but theoretical commitments come in two kinds: ontological and ideological. While the ontological commitments of a theory are the entities it posits, a theory’s ideological commitments are the primitive concepts it employs. Here, I show how we can extend the distinction between quantitative and qualitative par...

Predicting Ideological Prejudice

A major shortcoming of current models of ideological prejudice is that although they can anticipate the direction of the association between participants' ideology and their prejudice against a range of target groups, they cannot predict the size of this association. I developed and tested models that can make specific size predictions for this association. A quantitative model that used the pe...

What Are Ideological Systems?

Ideology is a systemic property of cognition central to the transmission and actualization of beliefs. Ideologies take many forms including religious, philosophical, popular and scientific. They play a central role in both personal identity and in the way society holds itself together. Therefore, it is important to understand how to model identities. The article introduces ideologies as a funct...

Hierarchies Ontological and Ideological

Gödel claimed that Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is ‘what becomes of the theory of types if certain superfluous restrictions are removed’. The aim of this paper is to develop a clearer understanding of Gödel’s remark, and of the surrounding philosophical terrain. In connection with this, we discuss some technical issues concerning infinitary type theories and the programme of developing the seman...