reflectionism

English

Etymology

reflection +‎ -ism

Noun

reflectionism (countable and uncountable, plural reflectionisms)

1. The view that cultural phenomena (literature, art, etc.) simply mirror the ideology of the dominant economic patterns of society.
   • 1996, Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, Powerless Fictions?:, page 180:

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

   • 2001, Ching-Mei Esther Yau, At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, page 62:

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

   • 2011, Silvia Castro-Borrego, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Cultural Migrations and Gendered Subjects, page 144:

     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.

   • 2013, Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature, page 26:

     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."

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.
   • 1985, Johan van der Auwera, Language and Logic: A speculative and condition-theoretic study, page 17:

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

   • 1993, Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora, page 80:

     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.

   • 1997, Todd Siler, Breaking the Mind Barrier, page 119:

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

   • 2022, Per L. Bylund, A Modern Guide to Austrian Economics, page 13:

     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).

3. The belief that judgement is intuitive and that reflection and reason are subsequently applied to justify judgements.
   • 1997, Robert Audi, Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character, page 54:

     I hope by now to have shown that there is good reason to think that ethical reflectionism is a framework of moral inquiry which is far more common than it may appear.

   • 2018, Gordon Pennycook, The New Reflectionism in Cognitive Psychology:

     (see title)

   • 2022, Hossein Dabbagh, The Moral Epistemology of Intuitionism:

     In Audi's view, the method of reflectionism is and deserves to be our basic method for justifying ethical judgments' (1993, 208)

4. The use of reflection to examine and critique aspects of society.
   • 1998, Bart Lootsma, Andreas Broeckmann, Joke Brouwer, The Art of the Accident, page 60:

     Reflectionism allows society to confront itself or to see its own absurdity.

   • 2006, Spotlight on Robert Lauri, page 171:

     The successor to surrealism, from which it borrows its pictorial vocabulary and has assimilated all inflow, reflectionism seeks first and foremost to develop and extend the freedom of the real function of thought.

   • 2006, Torin Monahan, Surveillance and Security:

     Reflectionism employs the tactic of appropriating tools of authoritative organizations and resituating those tools in a disorienting manner toward undercutting the privilege of the organization, in essence leveling (or attempting to level) the surveillance hierarchy (Mann, Nollman, and Wellmqan 2003: 333)

Related terms

• reflectionist