X - Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception

Summary

According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceivers intentionally deceive others into believing something, p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe that p is false while their victims falsely believe that p is true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, selfdeceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something, p, and there is a time at which they believe that p is false while also believing that p is true.

Elsewhere (most recently in Mele, 2001), I have criticized the traditional conception of self-deception and defended an alternative, deflationary view according to which self-deception does not entail any of the following: intentionally deceiving oneself; intending (or trying) to deceive oneself, or to make it easier for oneself to believe something; concurrently believing each of two contradictory propositions. Indeed, I have argued that garden-variety instances of selfdeception do not include any of these things. On my view, to put it simply, people enter self-deception in acquiring a belief that p if and only if p is false and they acquire the belief in a suitably biased way. Obviously, this shoulders me with the burden of showing what suitable bias amounts to, and I have had a lot to say about that. The suitability at issue is a matter of kind of bias, degree of bias, and the nondeviance of causal connections between biasing processes (or events) and the acquisition of the belief that p.

In Mele, 2001 (pp. 106–12), I suggested a test for relevant bias. I called it ‘the impartial observer test,’ and I argued that its appropriateness is underwritten by…