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

3.1 Functionalism

Functionalism is an approach to explaining false consciousness, and ideology more broadly, that is often associated with the controversial ontological assumption that society is a distinct entity that maintains itself through the false consciousness of members of its constituent social groups (Cohen 2001; Shelby 2003).^[12] Still, the reifying assumption is unnecessary. What is crucial to this approach, as paradigmatically put forward by Cohen, is that false consciousness is functionally explained by the maintenance of the social arrangement of a society that is stratified across oppressive lines. By ‘functional explanation’, the functionalist means that the function of an attribute of an object is cited as an explanation of the object having it—akin to the kinds of explanations that are found in the natural sciences. For example, to explain the melanism of peppered moths, it would be sufficient to cite melanism’s function of promoting species survival. This is not because it directly explains the attribute possession but because giving the statement ‘A is functional for B’ as an explanation is adequate as a working hypothesis for why a particular object is A, without yet needing to provide an underlying, elaborating mechanism (like natural selection, in the peppered moths example). Functionalists thus think it sufficiently explanatory for false consciousness to cite its function of maintaining a given oppressive society.

The functionalist would explain Antisuffragist as follows:

Explanation_FN: Ward has the ignorant beliefs that women are naturally deficient at political deliberation and that suffrage is unnecessary for addressing injustices specific to women, motivating her to campaign against women’s suffrage, because this is functional for the patriarchal and bourgeois organisation of Victorian Britain.

Explanation_FN seems to be able to secure Content: the oppressive content of the ideas (that ‘women are naturally deficient at political deliberation’) would be explained as those content that conduce the maintenance of an oppressive society (keeping women out of politics). It also secures Systematicity: the relation of Content to the social structure is purportedly secured by the principle of societal self-maintenance.

There is, however, no concern for Acquisition and Scope: no account is provided for the mechanisms that lead Ward to acquire the relevant ignorant beliefs given her position in gender and economic oppression, nor is there any account of why there should be oppressed agents, like working-class suffragists, who systematically avoid false consciousness. Further, the explanations for Content and Systematicity can only be partial, since Explanation_FN does not account for why there should be a difference between the content of Ward and Simkins’ belief-sets. In considering the overlap of gender and economic oppression, both their false consciousnesses are simply ‘functional for the patriarchal and bourgeois organisation of Victorian Britain’.

It is unclear then, how much Explanation_FN is an explanation for false consciousness so much as a restatement of the explanatory problem, like citing the virtus dormitiva of opium as an explanation for it causing sleep. That is, that false consciousness occurs because it sustains a given oppressive society is uninformative for the general project set out here: it is in fact just rehashing the functional ‘falsity’ in the definition of the concept as an explanation. This is because a functional explanation is, after all, meant as a hypothetical explanation that would guide particular social research into underlying mechanisms (Cohen 1982; Paprzycka 1998). At the level of abstraction we require, it is ill-suited for satisfying the explanatory desiderata.

3.2 Psychologism

‘Psychologism’ refers to various approaches that attempt to explain false consciousness by psychological mechanisms at the individual level, coming out of trends in social psychology to treat structural failures as fundamentally individual failures. These mechanisms that compromise one’s epistemic capacities range from adaptive preferences, where ignorant beliefs are indirectly acquired and maintained through an adjustment of the preferability of an initially preferable object (Elster 1983); the just-world hypothesis, where in virtue of one’s bias that the world is just, oppression is understood as just retribution (Lerner 1980); to aliefs, which are automatic proto-doxastic responses to stimuli (Gendler 2011). Further, many note that the recidivism of false consciousness occurs not just in virtue of an agent’s group membership in such a structure but also in virtue of their self-identification as a group member (Cudd 2006; Meyerson 1991). Roughly, the maintenance of the relevant ignorant beliefs is motivated by a desire to avoid the truth about a given proposition, where this desire is generated by an agent’s higher-order desire to understand themselves as a certain kind of (efficacious and competent) moral agent and where this self-understanding is in turn derived from their membership in a social group.

A psychologistic explanation of Antisuffragist would be:

Explanation_ps: Ward has the ignorant beliefs that women are naturally deficient at political deliberation and that suffrage is unnecessary for addressing injustices, motivating her to campaign against women’s suffrage, which is formed and maintained owing to psychological mechanisms that inhibit her ability to appropriately respond to suffragist reasons.

The variety of mechanisms identified by those who adopt this approach ensures that Acquisition would be satisfied. However, on its own, Explanation_ps cannot satisfy Content, Scope, and Systematicity. As Michael Rosen observes, a focus on content-insensitive failures of individual psychology is inadequate for why the content of the ignorant beliefs that are accepted and maintained through these mechanisms are the kind that support structural oppression (Rosen 1996): the question remains as to why ‘women are naturally deficient at political deliberation’ should be the content of Ward’s belief in psychological failure, instead of ‘women have equal capacity for political deliberation’. Further, why these failures do or do not occur (and continually so) in a systematic way remains unaddressed. Unsurprisingly, explicit attempts to explain false consciousness with psychologism do so by hybridising the approach with functionalism (Meyerson 1991), historicism (Elster 1982), or processualism (Shelby 2003).

These hybrid approaches are nevertheless inadequate for critique. Psychologism-functionalism and -processualism hybrids (as we will see) would still fail to account for Scope and at least Systematicity, since no explanation is provided for systematic resistance (like why such mechanisms are not also in operation for suffragists). And while a psychologism-historicism hybrid, wherein psychological mechanisms are contextualised within historically specific social practices (like the asymmetrical upbringing and education of Victorian women), may well account for Acquisition, Content, and Scope in particular cases of false consciousness, it remains too uninformative for our concern here for a general theory—failing Systematicity.

3.3 Processualism

Processualism is gaining attention recently due to ongoing work on epistemic oppression (pioneered by Kristie Dotson), drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of the concept of ideology as cultural hegemony (Medina 2013; Mills 2017). The approach attempts to explain false consciousness by articulating the epistemological implications of the hegemonic relations between the oppressing group and the oppressed. That is, instead of understanding individual epistemic failure among the oppressed to be fundamentally explanatory as is the case in psychologism, processualism understands epistemic failure to be a relational failure. That is, processualism approaches false consciousness as a result of an active exclusion of the oppressed from participating in the larger epistemic community by the oppressing group at various orders (Dotson 2014). As such, the oppressed have deflated credibility with regard to themselves and epistemically defer to an credibility-inflated oppressing group with respect to the relevant ignorant beliefs.

According to the most recent and detailed processualist account by Jason Stanley (2015), it is because the oppressed are regularly placed in high-stakes situations (due to less material security) that they lose knowledge. That is, as a result of pragmatic encroachment (whether in virtue of interest-relativity or confidence-shaking), self-confidence in oneself as an epistemic agent decreases. And given the epistemic advantage afforded by their material advantage, members of the oppressing group overextend epistemic and practical authority over to claims pertaining to the oppressed. Consequently, the oppressed defer to the oppressing group’s claims, which are systematically detrimental because their content derive from legitimation myths developed by the oppressing groups. Such myths arise out of the latter’s desire to preserve the material inequality from which they benefit (like through propaganda).

The processualist would explain Antisuffragist as follows:

Explanation_pr: Ward has the ignorant beliefs that women are naturally deficient at political deliberation and that suffrage is unnecessary for addressing injustices, motivating her to campaign against women’s suffrage, due to her deference to the epistemic authority of men, who propagate the myth of the political inaptitude of women to maintain their position in the gender hierarchy.

In this way, Explanation_pr aims to satisfy Acquisition with epistemic deference, Content with legitimation myths, and Systematicity with how these relational practices presuppose the hegemonic organisation of social groups.

However, this account is unable to account for Scope in all instances of false consciousness. Amia Srinivasan illustrates this with the case of a woman whom we would say does retain knowledge that she was sexually harassed, despite being in a high-stakes situation like taking legal action against her boss for the act and despite the “scepticism or gaslighting she encounters”, such that “she continues to act rationally when she pursues her protest” (Srinivasan 2016, p. 378).^[13] Some address of this might be found in the idea of practices where oppressed agents direct their “epistemic energy toward and in connection with other non-dominantly situated subjects”, attending to affinities and distinctions among them (Pohlhaus Jr. 2020, 245). These would accordingly form new relations and alliances independent of oppressors and illuminate “how epistemic systems function in the non-ideal world” (cf. Medina 2013; Pohlhaus Jr. 2020, 247). However, the idea of such practices does not suffice for how some of the oppressed avoid false consciousness to begin with.

Yet even if this could address Scope, under any processualist approach, Content is not always satisfied. A conspiratorial account of the oppressing group is not always plausible. It is often the case that the maintenance of legitimation myths is unintentional (perhaps as a matter of ideological consciousness in the oppressed) or even only tacit in practice (like implicit bias). Especially for myths maintained by the same group across long time scales, such deception would require an accurate grasp of the actual state of affairs, which is not only unnecessary for propagating these myths but also largely unempirical (Shelby 2003). Admittedly, it may be the case that legitimation myths are sometimes initially formed by a select portion of the oppressing group intentionally seeking to preserve their material inequality. But the crucial point is that it would be implausible to see this in all occasions of false consciousness. It seems more plausible and common that many legitimation myths that supposedly reinforce structural oppression are not perniciously created. Examples of this include the notions of meritocracy and racial colour-blindness. While these notions may have since been used to legitimise certain structures of oppression, this does not imply that their formation were similarly motivated: meritocracy has its earliest, and most influential, articulations in Plato’s Republic and Confucius’ Analects; and racial colour-blindness in the US civil rights movement.

Further, the necessary material basis of this approach cannot accommodate the persistence of cases of false consciousness when there is material equality between groups. We see this in cases of ‘Pinkerton Syndrome’, where Singaporean Chinese would tend to provide preferential treatment for White people (Chew/Young/Tan 2019). And more generally, processualism alone is still insufficient to account for the positive internalisation of the relevant content by some significant portion of the oppressed, especially among those that further produce highly abstract and nuanced constituent elaborations of the ignorant beliefs. Women antisuffragists were at the forefront of the Victorian literati. It is not clear why they should not just be defeatists, sceptics, or ironists about such beliefs. Both these explanatory gaps apply to Explanation_pr. Systematicity and Acquisition thus do not fully obtain under processualism either.

4.1 Interpellation

The ‘interpellation of individuals as subjects’ is a constitutive process by which an individual becomes a kind of subject under a representational schema. In other words, social properties are constructed upon a base property (aspects of the individual human being) to create a subject (an interpellated individual). Whether under constitutional (Searle 2010), response-dependent (Pettit 1991) or conferralist frameworks (Ásta 2018), social construction minimally involves a joint acceptance condition:

members of a group individually accept facts F about object O and there is mutual knowledge that other members accept F.

That is, kinds of objects are socially constructed when the kind of object comes to possess certain social property, where such a property arises out of a joint acceptance (that a kind of object O is F) by members of a group of people whether at the level of formal institutions or informal communities.

Crucially for interpellation, groups of people—that is, members within them—are also constructed as subjects, insofar as they have properties jointly accepted of them within a network of social practices. For example, an intersex individual born with both ovarian and testicular tissues would be assigned exclusively either female or male by most medical institutions. These interpellating social categories and corollary properties come with, if not just are, constraints and enablements within social contexts that would have significant effects on the attitudes and behaviours of individuals. That is, individuals are interpellated as subjects insofar as they are always already constructed under some schema that relate them in social practices—as schematised objects—to other resources, other schematised agents, and to themselves. Such schematisation is a precondition of being considered a participant in a given social practice.

Importantly, apart from institutional regulation like incarceration or even the threat of negative communal sanctions (which both apply to the already-constituted subject), Althusser notes a “[strange] obligation to respond to every hailing [by interpellation]”: an underlying norm for an individual to acknowledge themselves as being addressed by the social schemas they find themselves in (Althusser 2014, p. 191).^[15] This norm of acknowledging ‘being a subject who is addressed as such-and-such’ asserts a pressure on individuals to participate in joint acceptances whose source is thus neither institutional nor communal but simply an individual’s receptivity to sociality—even if they do not subsequently recognise themselves in the schema or only do so in defeatism, scepticism, or irony. Non-binary individuals, for example, still acknowledge binary gender schemas as at least addressing them—albeit problematically. Therefore, the normative force of joint acceptances is not found merely coming from the confines of the oppressed group (cf. Thompson 2017). Both oppressing and oppressed groups partake in the same, wider social structure and ideology, within which they partake in the joint acceptance of themselves as instantiating certain social facts particular to the groups they belong to.

So while schemas may be found to be functionally problematic in critique, the constructive acts that give rise to certain attitudes and self-understandings that support structural oppression need not be—that is, both the initial positing of an object as possessing certain facts and the subsequent joint acceptances. Pace conspiratorial accounts, constructive acts may also just be defective or unwitting, with the effect of the oppressive relation resulting unintentionally.

4.2 Recognition

As a result of interpellation, a subject is able to have standing under a schema or ideology—be recognised—with respect to the social world, other subjects, and, most importantly for the concept of false consciousness, oneself. That is, a subject acquires social standing within a network of practices, within which they are related to—reinforcing joint acceptance—as such-and-such a subject, whether practically (in sexual harassment) or representationally (in TV scripts). And this forms the basis of their self-recognition and hence self-understanding. This is what Ian Hacking (1995) observes as ‘the looping effect’, feedback loops between social classifications and how the classified understand themselves and behave (Figure 1):

Figure 1:

Looping Illustration 1

That this feedback loop occurs might be said to be simply a feature of our cognition in general. Seen from the predictive processing paradigm, cognition aims to track the world by modelling sensory input with generative models, which “capture the statistical structure of some set of observed inputs by inferring a causal matrix able to give rise to that very structure” (Clark 2015, p. 21). Our cognition not only models objects and their relationship to each other but also agents—including, crucially, our selves. Unlike cognitions of objects and other agents, which involve causes that pertain to sensory data coming from outside the body, our self-cognition involves modelling endogenous causes (Seth, Suzuki, and Critchley 2012). Such self-cognition begins in infancy, when we start to apply the ‘agent-models’ generated prior, and the agent-models ascribed to us, to understand the endogenous sensory input of the body as caused by such-and-such an agent—on the basis of which we then act accordingly, confirming the ascriptions (Hohwy and Michael 2017). Such application of agent-models continues into adulthood. This is thus how interpellation is internalised and one recognizes oneself as such-and-such a subject under a given schema: in this feedback loop between the agent and the ascribed classification, the corollary social properties and schemas are more than jointly accepted of a classification—they become one’s own properties and self-understanding.^[16]

Pertinent to false consciousness is how such a complex of feedback loops leads to certain joint acceptances taking precedence over others. We need to attend to how, in cases of structural oppression, certain looping mechanisms systematically function to promote specific ignorant beliefs in spite of counter-evidence. That is, we are concerned with how the concept can guide attention to what these epistemically unresponsive mechanisms are, as well as how they work to naturalise ideological experience of the social world such that beliefs pertaining to these social objectifications, and not others, are ‘guaranteed’—that is, taken for granted as (putative) knowledge in the agent’s lived experience.

4.3 Guarantee

Social objects are guaranteed by the stability they acquire within social structures over time. There need not be any general reason for why these objects naturalise over others, or why these objects and not others are constructed to begin with—the circumstances and content of the constructions, just as the reasons for their propagation, are of course socio-historically specific. At the same time, this feedback loop always occurs against a formal background system of other loops that occur in the broader social world and among other subjects. Hacking (2007) observes that looping also involves more than the arcs between classifications and classified at the individual level, including also, at the structural level, knowledge involving such classifications, experts who classify, and institutions that uphold classifications (Figure 2):

Figure 2:

Looping Illustration 2

Consider, for example, how the link between disabled people and disability classifications are understood to stabilise and be stabilised by how disability is understood in medical and non-medical literatures, medical professionals and disability activists, as well as hospitals and legislative councils (Lim 2018).

Our concern here is explicitly for looping mechanisms that are epistemically unresponsive (unlike, say, epistemic virtues). Remaining pluralistic about the mechanisms, then, the following is a suggested, inexhaustive list of such mechanisms at both individual and structural levels, noting that they need not all occur and that not all of them are problematic in themselves:

Individual: Nash equilibria, stereotype threat/boost, implicit bias, wishful thinking, confidence-shaking, speech act accommodation, epistemic laziness, testimonial injustice, etc.^[17]

Structural: market equilibration, culture industry, consumer production, hermeneutical injustice, etc.^[18]

An example of a looping mechanism functioning at the individual level to perpetuate structural oppression as may be found in the stereotype boost for East Asians in North America. Joint acceptance of East Asians as possessing properties of being highly competent but cold and submissive constructs the classification of the ‘Asian-American’ as a model minority and interpellates relevant individuals (Berdahl and Min 2012). This undergirds the recognition of the Asian-American-as-model-minority that manifests in practices like hiring decisions or deferring the calculation of splitting of the bill to them. With these practices, many such individuals also recognise themselves as possessing these properties due to the stereotype boost, contributing to their relative absence in leadership positions (Sy et al. 2010).

An example of a looping mechanism functioning at the structural level is found in Haslanger’s example of market equilibration in the global food industry:

In a less-globalized world than ours, food crops were grown to support the local cuisine and the local tastes and culinary techniques evolved in ways that took advantage of the crops. In more complex and broadly social changes we can watch consumer taste develop so that certain products become ‘must haves’ in a particular milieu. Trends in cuisine can become trends in production which, in turn, affect trends in labor, and this affects schemas of class and taste, and so on.

[…]

The reliance on, say, wheat in a particular cuisine may seem inevitable, natural, ‘given’. Wheat is what is available; wheat just is what we eat. But the wheat is available because of the impact of schemas on resources that establish farming practices, food distribution, and such. Given the stability of such structures, culinary taste conforms. In this context quinoa, or soy, or spelt tastes bad and has a funny texture too; so who would want to plant it? (Haslanger 2011, p. 197–198)

This provides with a looping mechanism that stabilises, say, Orientalist attitudes towards tofu-based dishes as ‘a Far East exoticism’.

Looping effects thus allow us to say that the ignorant beliefs in false consciousness both supports (functional ‘falsity’) and is supported by structural oppression (genetic ‘falsity’), though we avoid vacuous circularity since the relevant ideological schematisations of the oppressed are constructed and naturalised for an agent over time. This also means that the formation of a given false consciousness in the agent neither is causally prior to, nor emerges simultaneously with, the relevant oppressive relation. Rather, the relevant oppressive relation exists, at least initially, independently of the interpellation and hence also prior to the development of the particular false consciousness—guaranteeing it. That is, looping mechanisms normalise, or render ‘natural’, existing oppressive relations. This is not to say that such oppressive relations do not also depend on false consciousness later on, only that it is impossible to exhaust the reasons for why a given instance of false consciousness is problematic without also attending to why the relations of its corresponding social structure(s) are problematic.^[19]

4.4 Dynamics

The dependence of false consciousnesses on an oppressive relation means that they are domain-based: indexed to the range of resources and agents schematised by the relevant social structure. A given social structure would delineate a stabilised complex of loops, but a given domain may at the same time be schematised, partially or wholly, in other structures (oppressive or otherwise). Importantly, this mean that a given instance of false consciousness is limited both in its content and mechanisms. An instance pertaining to suffrage, for example, would not involve beliefs about Pluto. Being domain-based means that false consciousness might not develop, or could erode, for at least two reasons: radical marginalisation and epistemic friction.

Radical marginalisation comes from Marx’s own description of the proletariat as the locus of the possibility of German emancipation: the violent revolt of the fully oppressed, who have nothing to lose but their ‘radical chains’, against the existing structure as a whole. It is precisely the insignificance of the structure for such agents who are completely marginalised that allows for the possibility of emancipatory consciousness. This is because the stabilising mechanisms have no force on them since they are not subjects under the domain of the ideological schemas (for example, there would be no stakes at all for confidence-shaking): they would be able to form beliefs independent of ideology.

Epistemic friction comes from the fact that different social structures may schematise over the same resources and agents. That is, an agent likely has multiple group memberships within a given society and, as such, be under multiple schemas in cases of overlapping oppression (whether purely oppressor, oppressed, or a mix). As Althusser notes:

Ideologies never stop interpellating subjects as subjects, never stop ‘recruiting’ individuals who are always-already subjects. The play of ideologies is superposed, criss-crossed, contradicts itself on the same subject: the same individual always-already (several times) subject. (Althusser 2014, p. 193–194).

From this multiplicity, ideologies can either be compounded or neutralised for an agent. When they are compounded, schemas combine such that a given false consciousness can gain not only content but further stabilising mechanisms that reinforces evidence-resistance. At the same time, these overlaps can also condition the prevention or erosion of false consciousness in cases where ideologies are neutralised. For such a multiplicity of self-understandings may generate what José Medina calls ‘epistemic friction’, a discordance resulting from incompatible schemas and stabilising mechanisms running up against each other, which may lead to ‘meta-lucidity’. An agent would thus have “insights in to the functioning of perspectives that makes it possible to redraw [one’s] cognitive maps, to redescribe [one’s] experiences, and to reconceptualize [one’s] ways of relating to others” (Medina 2013, p. 47). Such reconceptualisation would not take place in abstracto, but rather would be responsive to the various extant self-understandings.

In both cases of a lack of development or erosion, it is by participating in alternate social constructions of objects—and oneself as a subject—in non-ideological or resistant communities that one might come under social schemas stabilised by epistemically responsive mechanisms, and thus non-ideological or emancipatory knowledge. This supports the processualists’ insight of resistant practices, while also accounting for how agents might avoid false consciousness in the first place.

However, such erosions—which may take a while—render emancipatory consciousness only possible and cannot guarantee actualisation. For resistant communities to be successful, alternate schemas must overcome the interpellation of the old ideologies.^[20] That is, to the extent of diminishing the joint acceptances that issue from the norm of acknowledging that one is interpellated by a particular ideology. For example, no one would acknowledge being hailed as a Roman citizen in Victorian Britain. Such diminishment requires sustained competition and control over the schematised resources and looping mechanisms, and may be unsustainable in the long run without disrupting looping at the structural level, as well as the corollary reconfiguration of the internal relations of the relevant social structures. The massive changes to British labour markets during the First World War and the consequent shifts in public consciousness of women’s role were crucial for securing suffragism’s success. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that false consciousness is just as commonly, if not more often, reinforced by epistemic friction (Nyhan and Reifler 2010). Or erosion sometimes even results in a new type of false consciousness developing in moments of meta-lucidity as a flight from ‘meaning vertigo’ back to the interpellation of the old ideology (Melo Lopes 2019). Similarly, it remains a controversial empirical question whether a revolt by the radically marginalised has ever been or will ever be more than a possibility.

4.5 Summary

I will now summarise the foregoing and how social constructionism accommodates the previous three approaches. The social constructionist approach to false consciousness understands the formation and maintenance of ignorant beliefs to be grounded in agents taking a certain socially objectified understanding of themselves as natural self-understanding, within variable complexes of epistemically unresponsive looping mechanisms that are embedded in oppressive social structures over time. A given complex could overlap with another to form either a non-additive set of beliefs that includes both ideologies, or erode either sets of beliefs—this depends on the compatibility of looping mechanisms salient for the agent in question.

The social constructionist would explain the particular case of Antisuffragist as follows:

Explanation_sc: Ward has the ignorant beliefs that women are naturally deficient at political deliberation and that suffrage is unnecessary for addressing injustices, motivating her to campaign against women’s suffrage, because the contents of those beliefs are being sustained by a complex of looping mechanisms at the individual level and structural level. These mechanisms are patriarchal and bourgeois.

At the individual level, this involves a loop between Ward’s self-understanding and patriarchal and bourgeois classifications: the classification of ‘domestic creature’ under patriarchal ideology and the classification of ‘subject who is capable of activities that secure economic independence’ under bourgeois ideology. These then merge as ‘women are capable of national domestic interests’ and is sustained by mechanisms like testimonial injustice and epistemic arrogance.

At the structural level, these would further involve an organisation of loops involving: the contemporary gender exclusion in political institutions but gender inclusion in literary institutions; the expert opinions of members of the Houses of Parliament, literary figures, and critics; and the limited public knowledge of the political capacity of women. These are sustained by mechanisms like hermeneutical injustice and market equilibrium.

Acquisition and Content are thus met in Explanation_sc and shown to be interacting in the complex of looping mechanisms at both individual and structural levels. Scope is met in attending to how suffragists might lack similar testimonial injustice or might not have similar assurances with the ‘existing constitutional machinery’, thereby coming to know of women’s capacity to perform activities that would but do not secure economic independence, sustained by the growing resistant community of the social movement. And lastly, Systematicity is met, since Acquisition, Content, and Scope are interconnected by the complexes of looping mechanisms in both gender and economic structures whose domains significantly overlap. And, while the general form of this explanation may be applied to cases like Simkins’, the particular explanation (Explanation_sc) only extends to antisuffragists in a similar social position to Ward. The looping mechanisms pertaining to the latter involve a different overlap of gender and economic oppression to the former: the resources of upper- and middle-class British women then, like charitable funds and chambermaids, are not shared by working-class women.

Like functionalism then, social constructionism is pluralistic regarding which underlying mechanisms are at play in general: it could be one or a combination of them in a particular case of false consciousness. Instead of a specific mental state that agents are in, false consciousness is to be understood as a conceptual tool that regulates systematic social research (without predetermining the particular mechanisms for every instance). What is further provided by the social constructionist framework is a means to identify and unify these mechanisms under a given ideology or, importantly, multiple ideologies (Acquisition), as well as account for their absence (Scope).

Social constructionism also accommodates the various possible psychological mechanisms that might factor into particular cases of false consciousness, without committing itself to any one (or set) of them as essential to the concept. Moreover, it provides an account for why ideal psychological conditions are so difficult to achieve and sustain, in supplementing the psychologistic approach with Content, Scope, and Systematicity.

Finally, like processualism, social constructionism is attentive to epistemic oppression and the epistemic failure of false consciousness as relational failure. It also provides an account for the possibility of the success and failure of resistant epistemic practices. At the same time, social constructionism is also able to address cases that are not conspiratorial in origin or that do not depend on material inequality (Scope), as well as the positive internalisation of ideological self-understanding (Acquisition).