Meaning

The view that cultural phenomena (literature, art, etc.) simply mirror the ideology of the dominant economic patterns of society..

Definitions by Sense

1. The view that cultural phenomena (literature, art, etc.) simply mirror the ideology of the dominant economic patterns of society.
2. The belief that we apprehend the world by copying or reflecting it within the mind; the idea that thought is a reflection of reality, rather than something created by the mind.
3. The belief that judgement is intuitive and that reflection and reason are subsequently applied to justify judgements.
4. The use of reflection to examine and critique aspects of society.

Example Sentences

Economic determinism is the central tenet of political theory and "naive" reflectionism is the basic premise of cultural theory.

Reflectionism is the other side of the coin of normative realism .

Aesthetically, such a position locates the genre of hip hop within the orthodox Marxist theory of representation that is commonly known as reflectionism, and associated with Marxist theorist and literary critic, Georg Lukács.

This “reflectionism” (together with the “images of women” approach) has led to an impasse—and not only because medieval authors had little stake in representing the living reality of women, but rather because it failed to acknowledge the complicated relations between literature and history. Reflectionism and its demand for "authenticity," argues Toril Moi, undermined the autonomy of literature to create its own fictional universes, be they "according to oppressive and objectionable ideological assumptions."

Doesn't reflectionism itself imply that ontology is somehow prior?

That such reflectionism — the required subservience of language to reality — lies at the heart of what comes across as a radical resistance against Communist ideology is something profoundly disturbing. Translated into political terms, this reflectionism becomes the subservience to a higher object that characterizes the relation that Chinese intellectuals have to the authoritarian state.

Reflectionism is a philosophy that paradoxically accepts both monistic and dualistic views. This amounts to "having your cake and eating it too."

Murray Rothbard, by contrast, takes a priori categories to be features of extramental reality that we discover, not something we impose – a position Smith calls “reflectionism” (Rothbard 1997, pp. 64, 105).

Word Forms

• reflectionisms

Related Words

When Should You Use Reflectionism?

Use reflectionism when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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