Ideological Signatures: A Grid-Relative Criterion for the Individuation of Ideologies

What individuates an ideology? Doctrinal criteria fail because doctrines migrate across families and families survive doctrinal revision; morphological criteria improve on them by attending to how concepts are arranged, but remain internal to what an ideology says. This paper proposes a grid-relative criterion: an ideology is individuated by what it does to a grid of questions it did not author and cannot abolish. Within a stratified, emergentist-realist account of social reality, a matrix M = C × S crosses five existential conflicts with four social subsystems; each of its twenty cells holds a question thematized by durable symbolic forms before any ideology intervenes. An ideology operates on the matrix as a bounded weighting ω over the cells and as a chain of six operators — translation, fusion, naturalization, silencing, revelation, scission — understood as species of decontestation acting on questions rather than on concepts, and realized by specifiable social mechanisms. The signature of an ideological family is the pair ⟨ω, chain⟩. Families are treated as historical kinds, not stipulated types: membership is fixed by lineage and replication, and the signature is the syndrome that the lineage explains. The framework locates its claims with the help of the grounding/anchoring distinction, answers the fictionalist denial of social levels, and states which of its results are argued, which are proposed, and which are conjectured. A closing protocol specifies how ω and the operators can be estimated from corpora and what observations would disconfirm the signatures proposed for ten families. Preprint, version 1. Under double-anonymous peer review at a journal (venue withheld until decision); not yet peer reviewed.