Although, Dk’s comment is an excellent clarification. However, my sense is that most social-scientists posit a “no-bullshit” view of ideology and take a Cartesian subject-object divide as fundamental. For example, if you went to an economist or any rational choice theorist and tried to explain how the subject-object divide should collapse into itself, my suspicion is that one would be dismissed and laughed at for being a “silly philosopher.”

Shared reality theory makes me think of Schutzian phenomenology. His whole work was a buildup of conscience out of intersubjective social relations which in turn “tune in” other relations to create a habitable social space, whereby each action relates to another action in a total sphere. He termed this total sphere “ideology,” as in the collection of intersubjective relations which make up a worldview that filters reality.

But what exactly? I guess we might see in Part 2. I’d be curious to see if there is any connection between shared reality theory and the extended mind thesis, which comes out of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, whereby individual cognition extends beyond the head of the individual (pat example: an individual thinking with pen and paper). I think that one of the most interesting applications of this idea is to the social domain, e.g., in understanding aspects of interpersonal cognition and communication that fall somewhere between simply “other people influence what I think” and “groups have minds, just like individuals do”. The extended mind paradigm challenges a lot of dispositional thinking about social cognition, or at least it seems so to me. I wonder whether shared reality theory does so as well, and if so, whether it does so in the same way. From what’s posted so far, it’s hard to tell.

Even very vulgar Marxism would have established a very different view of ideology — the suicidal synthesis of Freudian psychology and Lukacsian reification in critical theory was aimed at this very problem.

I suppose it is quite unfortunate that (Marxist) sociologists write in such silly prose as a way to impress those within the sub-discipline. At every turn it seems that a combination of behavioral economics, social psychology and social theory could unite under a common language to explain the plethora of confusing problems that neoclassical economics leaves in its wake, i.e. current financial crisis.