Ideology is a social imagination of world's truth that can be shaped and eventually corrected before it becomes historically dangerous. The methodology of linguistic analysis offers the essential approach to a positive resolution of this problem because it suggests how to prevent risky ideologies, or how to change them once they are established. The suggested linguistic strategies refer, particularly, to the textual analysis of meaning as the key to discover the imaginative value of words in a culture from which the people's mentality derives. Cultural interventions in this field of social life are, obviously, very important to foster mutual understanding, welfare, and world peace.
TopIntroduction
Ideology is a word derived from the ancient Greek ἱδεῖν (idèin) whose meaning is “to see”, and λογία (loghìa), whose meaning, broadly, is “science” (Beekes, 2010). Ideology is, therefore, the “science of vision” and belongs to the imaginative process, which is a structural feature of the human mind and its behaviour. Its domain is the individual sphere and the social environment. In the individual sphere, the ideology is called mentality, and depends on the dynamics of human knowledge of the world and on their preservation and transmission. Indeed, the human experience of the world is allowed by the perception of material things and the conceptualization of this perception. Through senses we perceive the experienced reality, and through concepts we know such reality. Therefore, knowledge of reality depends on conceptualization and its quality.
TopIdeology
The sum of ideal parameters of judgement about world and life shared by a society – that is the inalienable cultural heritage, which accompanies the existence of each individual – represents an intellectual paradigm, whose principles determine individual viewpoints and opinions. It is a code of thought (Boudon, 1995) – an ideology2, indeed, consisting of truth-values (Zalta, 2010) – which functions like a cognitive map from which all human knowledge takes shape, structure and substance (Freeden, 2003; Martin, 2015).
What is, for example, the value of honour in the ancient world, where the mythical figure was the warrior hero, supreme symbol of honour and glory, and what is the value of the same word in the contemporary world inspired by other conceptions of social life and human relations that suggest our ideas and feelings about it and, consequently, direct our behaviours in this regard? What is the true value of the concept? Evidently, it resides in the cultural context that enables our way of thinking about the world giving us the intellectual points of view from which to observe it. The framework where the cognitive dynamic – from which the human imaginary of the world arises – is placed and acts.