§ Political Correctness: Exposition

§ ≡ A section of Political Correctness: A Historical and Phenomenological Analysis
{ T•of•C « Section 1.1 » }

What is reality? In recent years, strides have been made in our understanding of how the human organism gathers and processes information about "reality". The great progress results from an approach combining advanced research technologies with the models of cognitive psychology. Cognitive neuroscience is a young field, and the project is still in its early stages of development. It is clear, however, that human perceptions of reality are generated in the face of stimuli-source ambiguity, and the processes that have evolved in humans (processes that have played a role in inducing biologically successful behavior) include a probabilistic evaluation of empirical information. (See, for example, Comparison of Bayesian and empirical ranking approaches to visual perception, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Volume 241, Issue 4).

Reality, then, in terms of how an organism approaches it or devises successful behavior towards it, is a construct. In this series of posts, we propose to investigate concerted attempts to influence or manipulate our own and others' perceptions of reality through the use of language. In particular, we intend to look at the phenomenon of political correctness, including:

1. the history of its inception and subsequent development;
2. its connection to other programmatic attempts to shape the perception of social reality through the manipulation of language and other symbolic systems; and,
3. the extent to which its purpose and its effect have remained parallel.

By political correctness, we refer to the belief in:

• credibility by assertion; and,
• the practice of using societal pressure to change the assertion in order to change the social reality.

We make a few assumptions that may or may not still stand at the end of our investigation. Those include that the phenomenon applies particularly to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and that it is separate from but related to phenomena such as rhetoric (ancient and modern), propaganda (Nazi, Stalinist, anti-communist, and others), taboo, and other cultural moves to preserve or modify language.