Ideology as communication process

Defined as any symbolic construction of the world in whose superordinate “name” human beings can comprehensively order their experience and subsume their specific activities, ideologizing is presented as the function of innate intra‐ and interpersonal categorizing of experience. Ideologies are seen to flourish in open systems and to decline in closed ones. Classical conceptions of science illustrate the process, to the end that an autonomous scientific ideology for the social sciences, including communication, is suggested.