Explaining Ideology: Mechanisms and Metaphysics

Bianchin, Matteo

doi:10.1177/0048393120917758

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…;Elster 1986, 476 ff. ;Mayerson 1991, Bianchin 2020, Bianchin 2021). These mechanisms might explain the content of false consciousness but do not bear on the distortion of pre-reflective self-awareness that is crucial to its subjective structure.…”

Section: Self-awareness and Self-understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The upshot is that, insofar as false consciousness involves identifying to some extent with a flawed self-understanding that tracks alienated self-awareness, it is not fully explained by well-known distorting mechanisms that affect attitude formation like confirmation bias, wishful thinking, preference adaptation, evidence neglect, and so forth (see Bianchin 2020; Bianchin 2021; Elster 1983, 141 ff. ; Elster 1986b, 476 ff.…”

Section: Self-awareness and Self-understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How can consciousness be false? Alienation, simulation, and mental ownership

Bianchin

2022

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Self Cite

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Alienation has been recently revived as a central concept in critical theory. Current debates, however, tend to focus on normative rather than on explanatory issues. In this paper, I confront the latter and advance an account of alienation that bears on the mechanisms that bring it about in order to locate alienation as a distinctive social and psychological fact and to dissolve a paradox it seems to involve. In particular, I argue that alienation can be explained as a disruption induced by social factors in the sense of mental ownership that comes with the first personal awareness of being a subject of attitudes, emotions, and actions, and outline how social factors can play a structuring causal role in the process that brings it about. In the first section, I introduce the theme and explain why it is important to focus on the mechanisms that underlie alienation. In the second section, I maintain that understanding how alienation works is crucial to make sense of false consciousness. In the third section, I consider the relevance of mental ownership to explaining alienation and discuss existing evidence about whether and how it can fail. In the final section, I argue that disturbances in the simulation routines that support social cognition might underpin alienation, and outline how social factors might play a structuring causal role in this connection.

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Section: Self-awareness and Self-understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Self-awareness and Self-understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%