Structuralism introduced a new kind of non-reflective causality between social and mental categories.

Evidence

I have given an argument that shows that what we thought were issues crucial to legitimacy were not so; and that the objection itself, insofar as it implicates legitimacy, can, I think, be decisively answered. My answer does not require one to count up, as it were, the many reasons for and against judicial review. Instead, it asks that we stick to the actual ‘question being asked. Like Albert, Mark Tushnet is distressed by this and wants to re-orient the question so that it fits the calculations that make the problem so bedeviling in the first place. This is, I believe, the crucial move of the map of explanations. It changes ground, and then claims for itself the primacy of the original discussion. In such maps, one invariably encounters such phrases as, “What we’re really talking about here is … ” or “What the writer was really doing was…,” or “What really motivated him was …” And that is why it is so mortifying when it turns out that the casual causalist has got the facts wrong. … But is that the trouble with such “explanations”? I doubt it. I think, instead, that they are vulnerable to an irremediable flaw. If, as is asserted, the causalist can discern, beneath the surface, an otherwise hidden mechanics, how can we know that he, too, is not motivated by something as obscure to himself as he believes the true motives of others are to them? When, exactly, is Freud’s cigar not just a cigar? — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 666 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ideology theory claims that non-ideas determine the content of ideas. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 324; Structuralism inverts culturalism’s claim by making experience an effect of categories; Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them (+12 more)

Related

• Causalist explanations are vulnerable to an irremediable self-reference flaw (similarity 0.83)
• Structuralism decentered individual agency that culturalism treated as authentic (similarity 0.79)
• Social and cultural structures overdetermine our natural human constitution. (similarity 0.79)
• Structuralism reframed culture study from decoding social contents to cracking codes (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them #exemplifies (0.70)
• Social and cultural structures overdetermine our natural human constitution. #expands (0.60)
• Causalist explanations are vulnerable to an irremediable self-reference flaw #complicates (0.60) — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 666
• Structuralism decentered individual agency that culturalism treated as authentic #qualifies (0.55)