Levi-Strauss held ideas need structural reduction to become scientifically analyzable

Evidence

Men’s heads, too, were full of “ideas,” notions, secondary rationalizations, and “explanations” of their actions. These, too, constituted an endlessly open, variable, and infinite set of cultural lexicons. Here too, it was necessary to express the variety of observable ideas in terms of the limit of their underlying structures, in order to make them amenable to scientific analysis. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 358