The uses and utility of ideology

Without wishing to commit the etymological fallacy in the understanding of a word's meaning, I would like first to comment on the traditions of usage of the term ideoloqv, a theme elegantly announced in Woolard's introductory discussion of "issues and approaches." As is well known, it was Antoine Louis Claude Comte Destutt de Tiacy (1754-1836) who invented the term, in that naturalizing move of the French Enlightenment rendition of l,ocke (or, to be sure, Condillocke) that sought to understand human "nature." Ideology was proposed as that special branch of zoology that recognizes the condition of humans, we animals who have ideas as the content of what we should call our minds. Central here is the fact that any ideas more developed than physiological sensations are dependent on such ideas'being clothed in signs, the organization of which by some systematic grammar allows the discursive xpression of a logical faculty of mind. Hence, for Destutt de Tiacy, there is the general scientific field of ideology proper, the science of ideas, of which the subfield of grammar studies the signiffing externalizations, as it were, in structured systems of articulated signs, and the subfield of logic the modes of rationality oriented to truth and certitude of inferential states of mind (i.e., formation and combinatorics of ideas). Such a science would, for its propounder, also allow us to diagnose and understand "the causes of incertitude and flogical] error," thus presumably leading to an amelioration of the human condition vis-d-vis its natural mental faculties. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to see the fate of this term, proposed as a formation parallel to any of the other "-ologies" of a systematic scientific outlook. It has obviously become a word that now denotes a part or aspect of Destutt de Tiacy's very object of investigation, and in many appearances has the specifically "pejorative" use to pick up on Jane Hill's invocation of Raymond Geuss (1981: 12-22) that presupposes we know certain ideas to be dubious, in error, and