ON THE CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGIES

As a social practice, discourse allows for the concrete expression of the opinions and beliefs that a person or group may have regarding a fact, a situation, or another social group. This makes discourse an effective mechanism for socialization, which can be used to reproduce and endorse ideologies, understood as concepts that include a social and a subjective dimension. Therefore, while values or ideals are systems of beliefs expressed in tradition, they are also cognitive structures that build individual thought and action patterns. It is precisely this subjective dimension that grants discourse greater power and symbolic efficacy, since the meaning of human experiences is determined by social interactions, which are ultimately communicative acts that take place in the symbolic world of language. Thus, discourse and ideology are intimately linked.