Abstract
I assess Tamar Gendler's (2007) account of self-deception according to which its characteristic state is not belief, but imaginative pretense. After giving an overview of the literature and presenting the conceptual puzzles engendered by the notion of self-deception, I introduce Gendler's account, which emerges as a rival to practically all extant accounts of self-deception. I object to it by first arguing that her argument for abandoning belief as the characteristic state of self-deception conflates the state of belief and the process of belief-formation when interpreting David Velleman's (2000) thesis that belief is an essentially truth-directed attitude. I then call attention to the fact that Velleman's argument for the identity of motivational role between belief and imagining, on which Gendler's argument for self-deception as pretense depends, conflates two senses of 'motivational role'-a stronger but implausible sense and a weaker but explanatorily irrelevant sense. Finally, I introduce Neil Van Leeuwen's (2009) argument to the effect that belief is the practical ground of all non-belief cognitive attitudes in circum-stances wherein the latter prompt action. I apply this framework to Gendler's account to ultimately show that imaginative pretense fails to explain the existence of voluntary actions which result from self-deception.
Highlights
Self-deception is a psychological phenomenon with which every human being is familiar
That would not represent a problem for Gendler provided that she abides by the weaker, vanilla sense of ‘motivational role’ in claiming that pretense can play the role of belief in the motivation of action in a wide range of circumstances
Says O’Brien, ‘it seems to be a quite general point that any ‘regarding as true’ [i.e. cognitive] states which are not beliefs, will require [a] kind of connection to the subject’s beliefs about his actual world if they are to result in action’. This observation sets the tone for the rest of the discussion namely, that what must be appended to the standard account is an account of the particular relation in which beliefs stand to other cognitive attitudes, a relation that confers upon the latter the capacity of producing output in behavior and action
Summary
Self-deception is a psychological phenomenon with which every human being is familiar (with the exception, perhaps, of those who are too good at it). An ‘avowal’ or ‘avowed belief’ means a disposition or tendency to endorse a propositional content verbally (either privately or publicly) This view avoids the static puzzle because it takes self-deception to be a conflict between different kinds of attitudes, namely, full-blown beliefs and mere avowals. Among the main approaches adopted to explain selfdeception, the most widely espoused recently has been the deflationary account, marked on the one hand by its rejection of the literalist interpretation (and of the mysterious, homuncular solutions that have been proposed to the puzzles it engenders) and, on the other hand, for its choice of abandoning the ascription of unconscious, inaccessible belief in the doxastic alternative (Mele 2001).6 According to this view, the mental state and product of self-deception is a form of motivated false belief—the subject has only one belief, namely, the belief in the proposition the self-deception is about. Will often act (and react) on the basis of the content of their self-deceptions, sometimes with dire consequences (while, by contrast, the avowal view is only able to explain verbal behavior). In what follows I will refer to this as the doxastic conception of self-deception and will ignore the subtleties of different doxastic explanations to pursue the more fundamental question of whether ‘self-deceptive belief’ is a tenable notion at all
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