A critique of ideology ultimately turns on a set of fundamental ontological propositions about the necessary limitations of any linguistic or symbolic system. The limitations in LANGUaGE AND IN SYMBOLS
These propositions concern the widely known paradoxes that bedevil any attempt by a semantic system to explain its own limits, and/or how it came into being.
If what preceded the system was radically different from what subsequently emerged, how could the system have emerged from it, and how can the system come to terms with it at all?
If we name the limits of what the system can understand, do not we, in that very gesture, presuppose some knowledge of what is beyond these limits,
The only manner in which we can explain the origin of language is within language, Yet we presuppose, again in the very act of the explanation, the very thing we were hoping to explain.
Similarly, to take the example from political philosophy of Hobbes’ explanation of the origin of sociopolitical order, the only way we can explain the origin of the social contract is by presupposing that Hobbes’ wholly pre-social men nevertheless possessed in some way the very social abilities to communicate and make pacts that Hobbes’ position is supposed to explain
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