ido

[coberst]

Imagination and Ideology sent april 19

When I read page 12 of “Ideology and Discourse” I became convinced that the metaphor ‘Ideology is Paradigm’ might be a good learning tool. I quote “ideologies may have a schema-like nature, that is, consist of a number of conventional categories that allow social actors to rapidly understand or to build, reject or modify an ideology.”

What does it mean “to have a schema-like nature”?

Schemas are structured frameworks or plans. We are born with the ability to reason; the ability to reason includes imagination, which has the power to form mental images to facilitate our perception of sense data. We have various types of schemas and one type is the Outline. I guess all of us learned in English class during grade school how to outline an essay. We used Roman numerals (I,II,III,IV) as the primary components and then we organized sub-components alphabetically (I,A,B—II, A,B,--III,A,B, etc.).

The author of our article “Ideology and Discourse” says that the categories (the outline) that define the ideological schema are as follows:

I Membership criteria: Who does (not) belong.

II Typical activities: What do we do?

III Overall aims: What do we want? Why do we do it?

IV Norms and Values: What is good and bad for us?

V What are the relationships to others?

VI Who has access to our group resources?

The following are useful definitions for arriving at my conclusions.

Imagination—“the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.”

Reason is imaginative in that bodily constituted images and inference forms are unconsciously mapped from one mental space to another.

Definition in metaphor theory—“conceptual metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains that structure our reasoning, our experience, and our everyday language.”

“Reason is imaginative in that bodily inference forms are mapped onto abstract modes of inference by metaphor.” Quote from Lakoff and Johnson book on metaphor theory.