Abstract

The Concept of Illusion maintains that the concept of illusion has an important but previously unarticulated role in social science, that the concept matters for explaining human behavior, and that the presence and influence of illusion upon thinking is as natural and unproblematic as the presence and influence of illusion upon perceiving. ;Disillusionment is a disruption in certain cognitive illusions about ourselves or others, considered as intentional agents. One is disillusioned either with oneself as agent or with another person as agent Disillusionment is compared to moods, feelings, and attitudes and the concept of disillusionment is used prominently in political science, history, and psychology in ways that call for conceptual clarification. ;Illusions of peace, illusions of security, and illusions of progress are often cited in historical research. Economists speak of the money illusion, the profit illusion and illusions of scarcity while social psychologists refer to illusions of control, illusions of contingency, and illusions of freedom. In social psychology, attribution theory uses the concept of illusion in describing how people misattribute properties and actions to each other. The "actor-observer effect" researched by attribution theorist can be interpreted as a pair of opposing cognitive illusions about behavior. These illusions can lead the actor to blame his circumstances when he fails and can lead the observer to blame the actor for failing. "Actor" and "observer" are not mutually exclusive paradigms for understanding behavior but rather are complementary activities which favor certain cognitive illusions that oppose each other. ;Cognitive illusions are similar to perceptual illusions in that they are deceptive and stable, and persist in the face of contrary knowledge. However, a cognitive illusion consists of a belief rather than a percept. Unlike bias or prejudice, a cognitive illusion persists not owing to any subjective preference but because evidence either appears to warrant the belief or cannot conclusively disconfirm it. ;Peceptual illusion is a misleading perceptual experience which occurs in a context of normal perception, and perceptual illusions can be classified as either deceptive and stable or as ambiguous and multistable . Unlike hallucinations and delusions, perceptual illusions have real, albeit distorted or misjudged, objects in the world. ;The Concept of Illusion is a work of philosophical psychology which defends the thesis that the concept of illusion rightly includes mental illusions as well as perceptual illusions. These mental or "cognitive" illusions are defined as stable and deceptive false beliefs wich influence judgement and behavior because they resemble true beliefs for the believer in the way that evidence seems to support them. The social and behavioral sciences, notably history and psychology, use the concept of illusion to describe behavior but without a clear defintion of the concept