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

Abstract

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.

Thinking about keywords, and mapping theory

“…A cursory glance at some recent articles in the broad area of social studies seems to suggest a re-claiming or at least a re-thinking of certain concepts: for instance, problematic, society (Burns 2021;Dubet 2021), alienation (Bianchin 2022;Øversveen & Kelly 2022), class (Øversveen & Kelly 2022). The journals Radical Philosophy (2012; Maniglier 2012) and Theory, Culture and Society (2021) have both had special issues devoted to the notion of a problematic.…”