More on Self-Deception: Reply to Hellman

Abstract

In his recent critique of my account of self-deception,' Nathan Hellman' seems content with my resolution of the paradoxes of self-deception but charges that I have either ignored or skillfully downplayed certain deeper problems (I 1 3). He finds me oblivious (i zo) to certain counterexamples to my analysis but graciously allows that I do seem to be completely opaque (I 17) to the puzzles that remain. In this reply I wish to answer his two main objections and show that my analysis can handle his alleged counterexamples. I cheerfully concede that puzzles still remain. However, they are not specific to self-deception but are raised by various psychological phenomena. This makes them no less puzzling, but since they are pervasive it is unreasonable to expect them to be addressed by an account of self-deception in particular. Details aside, the main idea of my account is that self-deception is not a matter of getting oneself to believe the opposite of a proposition p one believes or has patently strong evidence for but is something weaker than that: avoiding the thought that p, at least on a sustained or recurrent basis.3 I claim for this account not only that it takes the paradox out of self-deception but also that it does justice to the dynamics of the phenomenon. For