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

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.

Infusing courageous love for universal dignity and environmental response-ability through management education and learning: Inspired By Freire’s dream

“…The collective deflections from attending to structurally embedded inequality of power may be the 'obstacle' to universal justice that some do not want to address. Wilson (2021) states, we 'know' but we do not act. Almost a decade ago, Klein (2014) argued, for example, that even many of those people then conscious of the effect of climate change, their sense of personal liability in this catastrophic reality could be pacified by the emerging rhetoric of sustainable or ethically portrayed market consumerism.…”