Why They Know Not What They Do: A Social Constructionist Approach to the Explanatory Problem of False Consciousness

Lee Wilson

doi:10.1515/jso-2020-0012

Abstract

Abstract False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap, or are entirely absent.

Highlights

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status
A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap, or are entirely absent
The fourth is agential: the use of the concept is seen as implicitly supporting, if not amounting to, victim-blaming. These problems must be addressed if the concept of false consciousness is to perform the diagnostic work that social philosophers want for it to do in their analyses of structural oppression

Summary

Ideology and False Consciousness

False consciousness is not merely meant to draw attention to neglected oppressive aspects of an otherwise seemingly benign social structure. This is because, as foregrounded in the Marxian traditions and related critical theories, the concept is bound up with the concept of ideology—so much so that the terms ‘false consciousness’ and ‘ideological consciousness’ are often used interchangeably in the case of the oppressed.4 Such theorists generally take ‘ideology’ to refer to a schema of “public meanings, scripts, etc.” that serves in some way to undergird, and arises out of, problematic social practices There is a trend that defines ‘false consciousness’ independently of ideology: as being merely ignorant of the reasons for which an agent holds onto a given set of beliefs, sometimes aligning it with a Sartrean notion of bad faith (Barnes 1997; Shelby 2014) Taking their cue from Engels’ 1893 Letter to Mehring, some philosophers decouple the concept of false consciousness from the concept of ideology and its structural implications, holding that the former is a cognitive matter of misunderstanding the motives of one’s beliefs. If the goal of critique is to conduce the emancipation of the oppressed, for them to overcome their alienation in the social world and in relation to themselves, it must attend to the problems of ideology and attend to how exactly individual epistemic agencies might be restored. The concern here is not just the content of a given ideology and how it manifests in social practices, and the processes rendering an agent’s lived ideological experience ‘natural’ and how they might be avoided or overcome

Explanatory Desiderata

Survey of Extant Approaches

Functionalism

Processualism

Social Constructionism

Interpellation

Recognition

Guarantee

Dynamics

Summary

Conclusion