Abstract: Discussions of domination in political philosophy have traditionally focused on political or economic modes of domination. However, a robust tradition developed in the twentieth century that drew attention to culture as a medium of domination. Cultural domination differs from archetypal examples of domination because the forms of constraint that limit the freedom of the dominated are far more diffuse, supported by hegemonic norms enforced through individual behavioral patterns rather than by the threat of sanction from some central authority. But even though "cultural domination" is an importantly distinct and philosophically interesting category of analysis, there hasn't been an attempt to characterize rigorously how one distinguishes specifically cultural structures of domination from other forms of domination, leaving the category somewhat vague. This vagueness is perhaps a reflection of the vagueness in the very concept of "culture" itself. In this talk, I attempt to remedy this problem by proposing a more precise approach to delineating the domain of the cultural, and to how one could identify structures of domination within that domain. I provide some basic guidelines for constructing a causal model that isolates specifically cultural causal patterns from other forms of social influence on behaviour. With a causal model of culture in hand, I propose criteria for identifying the causal signature of domination within that model. Identifying causal structures of domination within a model that isolates cultural causes gives us a characterization of "cultural domination". The modeling approach taken in this paper is an attempt to provide a framework for fruitful interaction between normative social philosophy and the social sciences.

About the Speaker: Tarun Menon is a philosopher working at the School of Arts and Sciences in Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Previously, he has worked at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies. His area of research is the philosophy of the natural and social sciences, with a focus on questions regarding causation, explanation, and scientific inference. His published work includes analyses of emergence in physics, the aggregation of multiple sources of evidence in science, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and issues of justice in international climate negotiations. His most recent published work has been interrogating the role of values in science and defending a novel version of the claim that science should be value-free. https://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/people/tarun-menon