“It does not appear to me that S’s being in self-deception with respect to p and unconsciously believing not-p entails his believing—albeit consciously—that p. All my view requires regarding S’s positive attitude toward p is that S be disposed sincerely to avow it.”—Robert Audi (Erkenntnis 18, 1982)
Abstract
I raise the question of what cognitive attitude self-deception brings about. That is: what is the product of self-deception? Robert Audi and Georges Rey have argued that self-deception does not bring about belief in the usual sense, but rather “avowal” or “avowed belief.” That means a tendency to affirm verbally (both privately and publicly) that lacks normal belief-like connections to non-verbal actions. I contest their view by discussing cases in which the product of self-deception is implicated in action in a way that exemplifies the motivational role of belief. Furthermore, by applying independent criteria of what it is for a mental state to be a belief, I defend the more intuitive view that being self-deceived that p entails believing that p. Beliefs (i) are the default for action relative to other cognitive attitudes (such as imagining and hypothesis) and (ii) have cognitive governance over the other cognitive attitudes. I explicate these two relations and argue that they obtain for the product of self-deception.
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Notes
The word “sincerely” is tricky in this context. I’ll come back to it later.
This strategy may also seem to suffer from the problem that the hide one of the beliefs somewhere else strategy suffers from; namely, it’s not clear that anything like deception is happening.
Talbott (1995) has a stronger view than Mele (2001) on this matter. He holds that, since self-deception results in a belief, there can’t also be a belief in the contrary, i.e., doxastic alternative. Mele is open as to whether it’s possible for the self-deceiver to believe the doxastic alternative, but he holds that this isn’t the case in “garden-variety” self-deception. (Note that “doxastic alternative” is my term; I’m simply using it here to help classify views.)
Funkhouser’s (2005) view is actually more complex than being a simple avowal view. I deal with it in this endnote so as not to cause digression from the main argument of this paper. Funkhouser claims that self-deception gives rise to avowals, which may seem to put him in the camp of the avowal theorists Audi and Rey. “Audi is correct that self-deceivers tend to say one thing, while truly believing otherwise....the higher-order account explains why self-deceivers avow what they do, but nevertheless are guided in their actions by a contradictory belief” (pp. 307–308). But it is important to see that what Funkhouser views as self-deception actually mixes avowal and belief views on the product side. The characteristic form of self-deception for Funkhouser is that an agent desires to believe something (to make my point clear, I’ll abbreviate this: D i B i p) and then comes to believe that she believes it (B i B i p—hence the name “higher order account”); but then believing that she believes that p, she avows p without actually believing that p. Closer examination of this form will reveal that it is really just a sub-type of what I call wishful self-deception, since the content of the deceptive element and the content of the product are the same (i.e., B i p—see Sect. 2.1). So Funkhouser clearly holds that the product is a belief—just one with second-order contents—and the avowal may be seen as additional. Thus the disagreement between Funkhouser and myself is this: I think that the self-deception he identifies is one of a number of possible types, whereas he thinks it is the only type. I think examination of the range of cases discussed here supports my view.
This could be a desire, intention, or motivating emotion; of course, it’s controversial which of these it is and what its content has to be.
The spectrum on this front ranges from Mele, who holds that the agent merely has to have data available that supports the doxastic alternative, to those who hold that the agent simply believes the doxastic alternative. For a very instructive discussion of the possibilities here, see Pears (1984, p. 29).
You might claim that a disposition to avow is not a cognitive attitude, since dispositions can’t be regarded as true or false. But clearly, such dispositions involve some representation of things as being a certain way—they are not merely behavioral reflexes—and it’s fair to say that the content of such representations can be true or false. And the assertions they cause certainly will be.
Thus I will take it for granted that self-deception exists.
There are other logically possible options. But the avowal and belief possibilities are the dominant ones.
It may be worth saying what notion of content I’m working with here. When I use “content,” I have in mind the classificatory notion of content that Perry (1998) explicates. That is, when I say that a mental state has a certain proposition as content, I mean that a proposition can be used to classify that state with others that are alike in significance.
It is quite possible for a case of self-deception to be both wishful and willful, with both the desire that p and the desire to believe that p playing a causal role in subverting the agent’s epistemic norms to make self-deception come about. Nelkin (2002) holds the view that it is always a desire to believe that is operative in self-deception; I, of course, hold that this is just one type.
See Trivers and Newton (1982) for a discussion of this case.
Often there will also be a desire that matches the content of the product; that is, a case of self-deception can be both goal-driven and wishful (and possibly also willful). But it’s important to recognize the possibility of distinct types.
There is another prevalent type of mental phenomenon commonly called self-deception that I think would better be classified otherwise. The phenomenon I have in mind should be called self-inflation bias. This is simply a general tendency that many or most people have to see themselves in a comparatively more positive light than evidence would justify. This differs from the types of self-deception I discuss here in that it is the result of a more general habit of thinking positively about oneself, as opposed to being caused by a specific desire or deceptive element. Thus, when people think about themselves as better drivers than they actually are, this is probably the result of self-inflation bias. The self-inflation bias seems to me to involve a fixed frame for interpreting incoming information in a self-flattering way. Self-deception, on the other hand, involves motivated selection of different frames. Furthermore, self-deception and self-inflation bias differ in that the former phenomenon, but not the latter, involves an epistemic tension in the mind of the agent between the evidence cognized and the product of self-deception; in the self-inflation bias, on the other hand, the agent is rather wholehearted in holding the flattering picture of herself. Unfortunately, no one I know of has distinguished clearly between self-deception and the self-inflation bias (cf. Taylor and Brown 1988). This is not to say that the two phenomena are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they can both be involved in the etiology of the same unjustified belief.
Rey doesn’t discuss consciousness in his article.
See, for example, Funkhouser (2005) for such reasoning. This kind of reasoning doesn’t actually seem to play a central role in Audi’s or Rey’s work.
There is much more to be said here about how the evidence that supports the doxastic alternative is encoded in the mind of the self-deceiver. This issue can’t be decided here, but the following are some suggestions. Suppose an agent is self-deceived in believing that p. If this is the case, the agent doesn’t believe that ∼p, but she does have beliefs in propositions (say, q, r, and s) that provide compelling evidence in favor of ∼p. We might call the beliefs that q, r, and s caged beliefs, for their subject matters are motivatedly not attended to; furthermore, if they were attended to adequately, they would produce the belief that ∼p. The self-deception is precisely what prevents her from forming the belief that ∼p and yields the belief that p. Nevertheless, a variety of sub-doxastic states (e.g., differing degrees of suspicion) can still result from the caged beliefs (i.e., her beliefs that q, that r, and that s) in the evidence that favors ∼p; it is the presence of these sub-doxastic states that gives rise to the epistemic tension inherent in self-deception. But, I must emphasize, adequately addressing this issue would require an entire paper on its own.
See Lazar (1999) for a discussion of the role of emotions in self-deception.
That is, she finds the thought pleasant to run through her conscious mind, regardless of its truth. Such a process can lead to self-deception, but it is not tantamount to self-deception. An example of this kind of thinking would be the injured athlete who repeats in her mind the thought that her leg doesn’t hurt; she knows it does, but this is a pleasant thought to have. Another possibility is that the woman in Rey’s case does believe something self-deceptively, but what she believes is that she believes her lover is intelligent. Her self-deceptive belief is second-order, so we shouldn’t expect it to have the consequences of a first-order belief simply that her lover is intelligent. This would make Rey’s case conform to the form of self-deception that Funkhouser (2005) discusses. If this is the case, I think it would make more sense to say that she’s self-deceived in believing that she believes he’s intelligent. Thanks to one anonymous reviewer for suggesting this second possibility.
It should be clear that I take the pilot and the business woman to be paradigm cases of self-deception. Indeed, they do have the basic elements (intuitively appraised)—cognitive attitudes with content contrary to the weight of the evidence they’ve encountered, where those attitudes are held under the influence of motivations with related content. But, as one anonymous referee has pointed out, it is of course open to Audi or Rey to respond that these are not actually cases of self-deception. The reasoning would be that, since they have beliefs instead of avowals, they’re not really self-deceivers. That would, I think, be an exceedingly puzzling move, since the fact that they actually believe makes it seem as if they are more seriously deceived than if they merely avow. And the source of the false cognitive attitude is the self in these cases just as much as it would be in cases that fit Audi’s and Rey’s definitions.
One anonymous referee has pointed out that one must do more than believe evidence that contradicts an hypothesis in order to reject the hypothesis; one must also accept it as relevant contrary evidence. (E.g., believing that p won’t get you to reject the hypothesis that q unless you also conceive of the truth of p as being contrary to the mooted truth of q.) This, however, doesn’t undermine my point that beliefs govern hypotheses, since it will be beliefs about whether something is relevant evidence that matter. This does show, however, that fully characterizing the governance relation will involve discussion of many more details than can fit into this paper.
Velleman (2000) claims that there is no difference between the motivational role of beliefs and the motivational roles of other cognitive attitudes. I think this view, however, is based on wrongly generalizing from cases where believing and other cognitive attitudes cause similar behaviors to the conclusion that they have the same motivational role in all cases. My discussion in this section should make clear some of the ways in which motivational roles for cognitive attitudes differ.
One way of distinguishing one cognitive attitude from another is by noting differences in kind of context in which they are psychomechanically effective. I pursue this strategy in forthcoming work.
I have not discussed the relation between the product of self-deception and imagining here because the contents of imagining are too susceptible to other influences aside from beliefs, such as fears, so examining the contents of imagining is not likely to be illuminating in this context.
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Acknowledgments
This paper has benefited from helpful exchanges with Dagfinn Føllesdal, Wes Holliday, Krista Lawlor, Al Mele, John Perry, Tiffanie Poon, Ken Taylor, Robert Trivers, and two anonymous referees of Erkenntnis. I gave an early version to members of the Philosophy Department at Stanford in the spring of 2005. I completed this paper while supported by a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation.
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Van Leeuwen, D.S.N. The Product of Self-Deception. Erkenn 67, 419–437 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9058-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9058-x