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Alfred Mele's deflationary account of self-deception has frequently been criticised for being unable to explain the “tension” inherent in self-deception. These critics maintain that rival theories can better account for this tension, such as theories which suppose self-deceivers to have contradictory beliefs. However, there are two ways in which the tension idea has been understood. In this article, it is argued that on one such understanding, Mele's deflationism can account for this tension better than its rivals, but only if we reconceptualize the self-deceiver's attitude in terms of unwarranted degrees of conviction rather than unwarranted belief. This new way of viewing the self-deceiver's attitude will be informed by observations on experimental work done on the biasing influence of desire on belief, which suggests that self-deceivers don’t manage to fully convince themselves of what they want to be true. On another way in which this tension has been understood, this account would not manage so well, since on this understanding the self-deceiver is best interpreted as knowing, but wishing to avoid, the truth. However, it is argued that we are under no obligation to account for this since it is a characteristic of a different phenomenon than self-deception, namely, escapism.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Alfred Mele, Johannes Roessler, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments on this paper or parts of it, and also to the audiences at The Nature of Belief conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 2010, and at seminars in Warwick University, where material from it was presented.
Notes
Notes
[1] Note that to qualify as ICPs, the stakeholders would also have to put a reasonable amount of effort into assessing the issue. The idea here is presumably that we should not put much stock into the judgments of people who assess an issue in a cursory way, as people for whom the issue does not matter could be inclined to do. Rather, an ideal judge would be one who is impartial, and yet motivated to come to an accurate judgment on the issue (having what psychologists call “accuracy motivation”). Though in this experiment Kunda did not seem to make any special efforts to ensure that non-stakeholders were so motivated, the experimental context might have supplied this somewhat. Furthermore, other studies that have made such efforts have presented similar deviations between the judgments of stakeholders relative to non-stakeholders to what's witnessed here (Lundgren & Prislin, 1998).
[2] This choice of expression has some disadvantages, and is one I wish to avoid. Theorists who employ this terminology often represent the range of degrees of belief on scales ranging from 0 to 1, where 0 means that one is certain that not-p, and where 1 means one is certain that p. However, many also believe that talk of believing that p simpliciter can be understood as having a sufficiently high degree of belief. Consequently, one can fail to believe that p because one has too low a degree of belief that p. But this is odd: one would think that having any degree of belief towards p presupposes that one believes that p, just as feeling angry towards A to some degree presupposes that one feels angry towards A, even if only a little.
[3] Mele does say that his ideas on self-deception could be formulated in terms of “degree of belief/confidence” (2001, p. 10). However, he doesn’t exploit this possibility for dealing with the tension issue, though he perhaps proposes this approach when he suggests one way of accounting for behavioral tension cases by saying that the self-deceiver may believe that p while believing there's a significant chance that not-p (1997b, p. 96).
[4] Two salient similarities are that (1) both cases typically involve the deceived having either a false or an unwarranted belief, and (2) that in both cases, the actions of the deceiver are responsible for the deceived having this problematic belief, though in self-deception, of course, the deceiver is the same person as the deceived.
[5] Funkhouser (2005, pp. 299 & 304) anticipates this objection, and responds by saying that since conceiving of self-deception on the model of the interpersonal case leads to well-known problems, we shouldn’t feel that there needs to be a close similarity between self-deception and interpersonal deception. But surely there must be some similarity, some shared features between the two cases to sustain them both as species of deception, and deep conflict cases simply don’t appear to have the requisite similarity.
[6] The alcoholic, for instance, who uses alcohol as a means of escape from an unpleasant reality, might have also deceived himself about his true motives for using alcohol, or into believing that he can indefinitely avoid the unpleasant reality, or that his present behavior is sustainable, or that he's a victim, or that he doesn’t have it in him to change.