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Summary

Sustained discussions of self-deception before the 1960s are difficult to find, with notable exceptions including Bishop Butler’s sermon ‘Upon Self-Deceit’ (1964), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of the related notion of ‘bad faith’ in Being and Nothingness (1956). Interest then took off in the 1960s and 70s, mainly prompted by the perception that the idea of self-deception is paradoxical. Key questions discussed in this period were whether and how self-deception is possible. In subsequent decades the reality of self-deception has tended to be taken for granted. Two fundamental questions that still preoccupy philosophers are what is the state of being self-deceived, and what is the process that gets us into and maintains us in that state. Other questions concern the moral implications and consequences of self-deception, the differences between self-deception and kindred phenomena, whether self-deception is an evolutionary adaptation, and whether it is good for us or makes us happy. A large literature from psychology is also highly relevant to this topic and is not covered in this database, which can generally be found under the heading of ‘motivated reasoning’ or ‘motivated cognition’ in the social psychology journals. Early philosophical work on self-deception did not engage much with this empirical literature, though from the 1980s onwards interdisciplinary work has become increasingly common.

Key works Donald Davidson's early papers on self-deception and irrationality, found in his 2004 collection, were much discussed, as was David Pears' 1984 book. An influential early collection of papers is Rorty & McLaughlin 1988. Important elaborations of the 'deflationary' approach are Barnes 1997 and Mele 2001.    
Introductions Encyclopedia articles on self-deception include Deweese-Boyd 2023, Kirsch 2007 (which is more focused on self-deception and morality) and Van Leeuwen 2021Baghramian & Nicholson 2013 and Mele 1987 are relevant survey articles. 
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  1. Self-Deception and Kant's Moral Philosophy.Ryan Preston-Roedder - manuscript
  2. Self-handicapping and self-deception: A two-way street.Eric Funkhouser & Kyle Hallam - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Deflationists reduce self-deception to a motivated bias, eliminating the need for doxastic tension, divided minds, intentions, or even effortful action. While deflationism fits many cases, there are others that demand more robust psychological processes and complexity. We turn to the empirical literature on self-handicapping to find commonplace examples of self-deception with high levels of agential involvement. Many self-handicappers experience non-trivial doubts, engage in strategic and purposive self-deception, and possess knowledge that must remain unconscious for their project to succeed. This occurs (...)
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  3. Self-Deception: A Case Study in Folk Conceptual Structure.Carme Isern-Mas & Ivar R. Hannikainen - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
    Theoretical debates around the concept of self-deception revolve around identifying the conditions for a behavior to qualify as self-deception. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that various candidate features—such as intent, belief change, and motive—are treated as sufficient, but non-necessary, conditions according to the lay concept of self-deception. This led us to ask whether there are multiple lay concepts, such that different participants endorse competing theories (the disagreement view), or whether individual participants assign partial weight to various features and consequently waver (...)
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  4. (1 other version)Instantaneous self-deception.Maiya Jordan - forthcoming - Tandf: Inquiry:1-26.
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  5. Absorbed in Deceit: Modeling Intention-Driven Self-Deception with Agential Layering.Kevin Korczyk - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The paradoxical nature of intentional self-deception has led many philosophers to view self-deception as predominantly non-intentional. I propose that approaching self-deception from an agency-theoretic perspective allows us to rescue the idea that self-deception can at least be driven by intention. By modeling the ‘acting as if’ method of self-deception with agential layering, developed by Nguyen [2020. Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press], I argue that intention-driven self-deception is no more mysterious than other activities that involve self-effacing ends: (...)
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  6. (1 other version)Group Lies and the Narrative Constraint.Säde Hormio - 2024 - Episteme 21 (2):478-497.
    A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs (...)
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  7. Non-belief as self-deception?Lari Launonen - 2024 - Religious Studies.
    The suppression thesis is the theological claim that theistic non-belief results from culpable mistreatment of one’s knowledge of God or one’s evidence for God. The thesis is a traditional one but unpopular today. This article examines whether it can gain new credibility from the philosophy of self-deception and from the cognitive science of religion. The thesis is analysed in terms of the intentionalist and the non-intentionalist model of self-deception. The first proposed model views non-belief as intentional suppression of one’s implicit (...)
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  8. ‘I knew all along’: making sense of post-self-deception judgments.Martina Orlandi - 2024 - Synthese 203 (136):1-15.
    Individuals deceive themselves about a wide variety of subjects. In fortunate circumstances, where those who manage to leave self-deception embrace reality, an interesting phenomenon occurs: the formerly self-deceived often confess to having ‘known [the truth] all along’. These post-self-deception judgments are not conceptually innocuous; if genuine, they call into question the core feature of prominent theories of self-deception, namely that self-deceived individuals do not believe the unwelcome truth. In this paper I argue that post-self-deception judgments do not track a belief, (...)
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  9. Avowing the Avowal View.Elizabeth Schechter - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (3):623-640.
    This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that the agent qualifies as sincere in asserting the contrary of what they in the most basic sense believe in virtue of asserting what they are committed to believing. It is only by recognizing such commitments and distinguishing them from the more basic beliefs whose rational regulation (...)
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  10. How to Express Implicit Attitudes.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):251-272.
    I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this (...)
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  11. Lug und Selbstbetrug.Marc Andree Weber - 2024 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 72 (3):323-343.
    People who, by intention or negligence, deceive themselves put other people at risk of being misinformed. The paper argues that this kind of misinforming other people is to be avoided for largely the same reasons for which lying is to be avoided – regardless of what exactly these reasons are. This makes the ethical evaluation of self-deception in part dependent on the ethical evaluation of lying. In order to bring out this result as clearly as possible, detailed characterisations of the (...)
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  12. The relationship between self‐deception and other‐deception.Anna Wehofsits - 2024 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 62 (2):263-275.
    Unlike the question of whether self-deception can be understood on the model of other-deception, the relationship between the two phenomena at the level of practice is hardly ever explored. Other-deception can support self-deception and vice versa. Self-deception often affects not only the beliefs and behavior of the self-deceiving person but also the beliefs and behavior of others who may become accomplices of self-deception. As I will show, however, it is difficult to describe this supportive relationship between self-deception and the deception (...)
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  13. Self-deception.Ian Deweese-Boyd - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Virtually every aspect of the current philosophical discussion of self-deception is a matter of controversy including its definition and paradigmatic cases. We may say generally, however, that self-deception is the acquisition and maintenance of a belief (or, at least, the avowal of that belief) in the face of strong evidence to the contrary motivated by desires or emotions favoring the acquisition and retention of that belief. Beyond this, philosophers divide over whether this action is intentional or not, whether self-deceivers recognize (...)
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  14. A Dispositional Account of Self-Deception: A Critical Analysis of Sartre’s Theory of Bad Faith.Guy Du Plessis - 2023 - Qeios 1 (1):1-12.
    This essay addresses the notion of self-deception as articulated by Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre. More specifically, I will critically assess Sartre’s notion of ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi) as a critique of Freud’s depth-psychological account of self-deception. Sartre’s main objection to Freud’s account of self-deception rests on his argument that for self-deception to occur there needs to be a conscious awareness of the coexistence of mutually incompatible beliefs, and that Freud had obscured this fact by splitting the self and with (...)
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  15. Intention, Judgement-Dependence and Self-Deception.Ali Hossein Khani - 2023 - Res Philosophica 100 (2):203-226.
    Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one of the (...)
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  16. Lying to others, lying to yourself, and literal self-deception.Vladimir Krstić - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper examines the connection between lies, deception, and self-deception. Understanding this connection is important because the consensus is that you cannot deceive yourself by lying since you cannot make yourself believe as true a proposition you already believe is false – and, as a liar, you must assert a proposition you believe is false. My solution involves refining our analysis of lying: people can lie by asserting what they confidently believe is true. Thus, self-deceivers need not replace one belief (...)
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  17. The Pragmatic Hypothesis Testing Theory of Self-Deception and the Belief/Acceptance Distinction.Kevin Lynch - 2023 - Philosophy 98 (1):29-53.
    According to the pragmatic hypothesis testing theory, how much evidence we require before we believe something varies depending on the expected costs of falsely believing and disbelieving it. This theory has been used in the self-deception debate to explain our tendencies towards self-deceptive belief formation. This article argues that the application of this theory in the self-deception debate has overlooked the distinction between belief and acceptance, and that the theory in all likelihood models acceptance rather than belief, in which case (...)
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  18. Échec et succès du récit de soi selon Sartre.Pierre-Jean Renaudie - 2023 - Dois Pontos 20 (1).
    Over the last thirty years, the narrative conceptions of the Self attempted to account for the connection that ties together human lives and the narratives thanks to which they come to expression. In a famous passage of Nausea, the main character of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel claims that our first-person narratives necessarily fail to account for the irreducibility of life as it is lived. Analyzing this passage, Richard Moran recently pointed out the weaknesses of Sartre’s phenomenological claim about life as it (...)
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  19. Peculiar Access: Sartre, Self-knowledge, and the Question of the Irreducibility of the First-Person Perspective.Jack Alan Reynolds & Pierre-Jean Renaudie - 2023 - In Talia Morag (ed.), Sartre and Analytic Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 84-100.
    In the debates on phenomenal consciousness that occurred over the last 20 years, Sartre’s analysis of pre-reflective consciousness has often been quoted in defence of a distinction between first- and third-personal modes of givenness that naturalists reject. This distinction aims both at determining the specificity of the access one has to their own thoughts, beliefs, intentions, or desires, and at justifying the particular privilege that one enjoys while making epistemic claims about their own mental states. This chapter defends an interpretation (...)
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  20. Coming to Terms with Wang Yangming’s Strong Ethical Nativism: On Wang’s Claim That “Establishing Sincerity” (Licheng 立誠) Can Help Us Fully Grasp Everything that Matters Ethically.Justin Tiwald - 2023 - Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 39:65-90.
    In this paper, I take up one of Wang Yangming’s most audacious philosophical claims, which is that an achievement that is entirely concerned with correcting one’s own inner states, called “establishing sincerity” (licheng 立誠) can help one to fully grasp (jin 盡) all ethically pertinent matters, including those that would seem to require some ability to know or track facts about the wider world (e.g., facts about people very different from ourselves, facts about the needs of plants and animals). Wang (...)
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  21. (1 other version)Ressentiment and Self-deception in Early Phenomenology: Voigtländer, Scheler, and Reinach.Íngrid Vendrell Ferran - 2023 - In Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality. Springer, Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences. pp. 103-121.
    This chapter explores the early phenomenological accounts of Ressentiment provided by Else Voigtländer, Max Scheler, and Adolf Reinach. In particular, it examines the self-deceptive processes that lead to the “inversion of values” inherent to Ressentiment, i.e., how an object previously felt as valuable is denuded of its worth when the subject realizes that she cannot achieve it. For the comparative analysis of the three accounts, attention is paid to three crucial issues: 1) the origins of Ressentiment (etiology); 2) its place (...)
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  22. Hostile Affective States and Their Self-Deceptive Styles: Envy and Hate.Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran - 2023 - In Alba Montes Sánchez & Alessandro Salice (eds.), Emotional Self-Knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This paper explores how individuals experiencing hostile affective states such as envy, jealousy, hate, contempt, and Ressentiment tend to deceive themselves about their own mental states. More precisely, it examines how the feeling of being diminished in worth experienced by the subject of these hostile affective states motivates a series of self-deceptive maneuvers that generate a fictitious upliftment of the subject’s sense of self. After introducing the topic (section 1), the paper explores the main arguments that explain why several hostile (...)
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  23. Theater of lies: The letter to D'Alembert and the tragedy of self‐deception.John Warner - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (3):689-702.
    Though Rousseau is recognized to have treated the problem of self-knowledge with great sensitivity, very little is known about a centrally important aspect of that treatment—his understanding of self-deception. I reconstruct this conception, emphasizing the importance of purposive but sub-intentional processes that work to enhance agents' self-esteem. I go on to argue that Rousseau's fundamental concern about the theater is its capacity to manipulate these processes in ways that make spectators both complicit in their own falsification and vulnerable to elite (...)
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  24. The Relationship of Self-Deception and Other-Deception.Anna Wehofsits - 2023 - Southern Journal of Philosophy (2):263-275.
    Unlike the question of whether self-deception can be understood on the model of other-deception, the relationship between the two phenomena at the level of practice is hardly ever explored. Other-deception can support self-deception and vice versa. Self-deception often affects not only the beliefs and behavior of the self-deceiving person but also the beliefs and behavior of others who may become accomplices of self-deception. As I will show, however, it is difficult to describe this supportive relationship between self-deception and the deception (...)
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  25. Backsliding and Bad Faith: Aspiration, Disavowal, and (Residual) Practical Identities.Justin White - 2023 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (1).
    Disavowals such as "That's not who I am" are one way to distance ourselves from unsavory actions in order to try to mitigate our responsibility for them. Although such disclaimers can be what Harry Frankfurt calls "shabbily insincere devices for obtaining unmerited indulgence," they can also be a way to renew our commitments to new values as part of the processes of aspiration and moral improvement. What, then, separates backsliding aspirants from those in denial who seek unmerited indulgence? Drawing on (...)
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  26. Self‐deception and moral interests.David A. Borman - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (4):1409-1425.
    Adult persons normally are taken as prima facie authorities regarding their own avowed interests, so that an accusation of self-deception with respect to such interests troubles our default presumptions. Furthermore, the difficulty, in practice, of knowing when such accusations are warranted presents a peculiar obstacle to moral justification, inasmuch as knowing how the interests of various persons really are likely to be affected by some act or norm is an accepted preliminary to moral justification across a wide range of theoretical (...)
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  27. Motivated reasoning and the ethics of belief.Jon Ellis - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (6):e12828.
    In recent years, motivated reasoning has received significant attention across numerous areas of philosophy, including political philosophy, social philosophy, epistemology, moral psychology, philosophy of science, even metaphysics. At the heart of much of this interest is the idea that motivated reasoning (e.g., rationalization, wishful thinking, and self‐deception) is problematic, that it runs afoul of epistemic normativity, or is otherwise irrational. Is motivated reasoning epistemically problematic? Is it always? When it is, what is the nature of the violation? Philosophical projects on (...)
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  28. Moral Responsibility for Self-Deluding Beings.David J. Franz - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (4):1791-1807.
    In this article, I argue for four theses. First, libertarian and compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility agree that the capability of practical reason is the central feature of moral responsibility. Second, this viewpoint leads to a reasons-focused account of human behavior. Examples of human action discussed in debates about moral responsibility suggest that typical human actions are driven primarily by the agent’s subjective reasons and are sufficiently transparent for the agent. Third, this conception of self-transparent action is a questionable idealization. (...)
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  29. Interactive Self-Deception in Digital Spaces.Eric Funkhouser - 2022 - Philosophical Topics 50 (2):65-84.
    Self-deceptive projects are frequently supported by our social environment, with others influencing both our motives and capacities for self-deception. Digital spaces offer even more opportunities for interactive self-deception. Digital platforms are incentivized to sort us and capture our engagement, and online users also have desires to be sorted and engaged. The execution of self-deception is partially offloaded to algorithms and social networks that filter our evidence, selectively draw our attention to evidence, offer rationalizations, and give us repetitive and emotion-laden feedback. (...)
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  30. (1 other version)Imposter Syndrome and Self-Deception.Stephen Gadsby - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):247-261.
    ABSTRACT Many intelligent, capable, and successful individuals believe that their success is due to luck, and fear that they will someday be exposed as imposters. A puzzling feature of this phenomenon, commonly referred to as imposter syndrome, is that these same individuals treat evidence in ways that maintain their false beliefs and debilitating fears: they ignore and misattribute evidence of their own abilities, while readily accepting evidence in favour of their inadequacy. I propose a novel account of imposter syndrome as (...)
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  31. Bullshit as a practical strategy for self‐deceptive narrators.Leslie A. Howe - 2022 - Philosophical Forum 53 (3):195–206.
    This paper argues that bullshit is a practical resource for self-deceiving individuals, or those who merely prefer to avoid self-examination, insofar as it is able to provide a mask for poor doxastic hygiene. While self-deception and bullshit are distinct phenomena, and bullshit does not cause self-deception, bullshit disrupts the capacity to interrogate the motivational biasses that fuel deception. The communicative misdirection engaged in by ordinary social bullshitters is applied reflexively by the self-deceiver to distort, evade, and obfuscate the self-deceiver's self-accounting. (...)
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  32. (1 other version)Instantaneous self-deception.Maiya Jordan - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (2):176-201.
    ABSTRACT This paper offers an account of intending to self-deceive which opposes that provided by standard intentionalist accounts of self-deception. According to my account, self-deception is attained instantaneously: to intend to self-deceive that P is thereby to self-deceive that P. Relating this to the concepts of evidence, belief and self-awareness, I develop an account of self-deception which holds that self-deceivers misrepresent themselves as believing what they profess to believe. I argue that my account yields solutions to the central problems of (...)
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  33. Can predictive processing explain self-deception?Marko Jurjako - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-20.
    The prediction error minimization framework denotes a family of views that aim at providing a unified theory of perception, cognition, and action. In this paper, I discuss some of the theoretical limitations of PEM. It appears that PEM cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of motivated reasoning, as instantiated in phenomena such as self-deception, because its cognitive ontology does not have a separate category for motivational states such as desires. However, it might be thought that this objection confuses levels of explanation. (...)
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  34. Being Self-Deceived about One’s Own Mental State.Kevin Lynch - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (3):652-672.
    A familiar puzzle about self-deception concerns how self-deception is possible in light of the paradoxes generated by a plausible way of defining it. A less familiar puzzle concerns how a certain type of self-deception—being self-deceived about one's own intentional mental state—is possible in light of a plausible way of understanding the nature of self-knowledge. According to this understanding, we ordinarily do not infer our mental states from evidence, but then it's puzzling how this sort of self-deception could occur given that (...)
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  35. Self-Deception as a Moral Failure.Jordan MacKenzie - 2022 - The Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):402-21.
    In this paper, I defend the view that self-deception is a moral failure. Instead of saying that self-deception is bad because it undermines our moral character or leads to morally deleterious consequences, as has been argued by Butler, Kant, Smith, and others, I argue the distinctive badness of self-deception lies in the tragic relationship that it bears to our own values. On the one hand, self-deception is motivated by what we value. On the other hand, it prevents us from valuing (...)
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  36. Self-deception in the predictive mind: cognitive strategies and a challenge from motivation.Francesco Marchi & Albert Newen - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (7):971-990.
    In this article, we show how the phenomenon of self-deception when adequately analyzed, can be incorporated into a predictive processing framework. We describe four strategies by which a subject may become self-deceived to account for typical cases of self-deception. We then argue that the four strategies can be modeled within this framework, under the assumption that a satisfying account of motivation is possible within predictive processing. Finally, we outline how we can ground this assumption by discussing how such a systematic (...)
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  37. (1 other version)Creencias conceptuales generales: entre dogmatismo esporádico y patológico. Notas sobre disonancia y autoengaño en construcciones intelectuales distorsionadas (General conceptual beliefs: between sporadic and pathological dogmatism. Notes on dissonance and self-deception in distorted intellectual constructs).Pietro Montanari - 2022 - In Dario Armando Flores Sorias & José Alejandro Fuerte (eds.), Filosofia y espiritualidad. Reflexiones desde la tradición filosofica en diálogo con el presente. Universidad de Guadalajara UDG. pp. 171-203.
    Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...)
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  38. Everybody lies: deception levels in various domains of life.Kristina Šekrst - 2022 - Biosemiotics (2).
    The goal of this paper is to establish a hierarchical level of deception which does not apply only to humans and non-human animals, but also to the rest of the living world, including plants. We will follow the hierarchical categorization of deception, set forth by Mitchell (1986), in which the first level of deception starts with mimicry, while the last level of deception includes learning and intentionality, usually attributed to primates. We will show how such a hierarchy can be attributed (...)
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  39. The Social Epistemology of Introspection.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (3):925-942.
    I argue that introspection recruits the same mental mechanism as that which is required for the production of ordinary speech acts. In introspection, in effect, we intentionally tell ourselves that we are in some mental state, aiming thereby to produce belief about that state in ourselves. On one popular view of speech acts, however, this is precisely what speakers do when speaking to others. On this basis, I argue that every bias discovered by social epistemology applies to introspection and other (...)
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  40. Towards a Holistic View of Self-Deception in Kant’s Moral Psychology.Maria Eugênia Zanchet - 2022 - Con-Textos Kantianos 16:194-219.
    In his notable account of lying in the _Doctrine of Virtue_, Kant draws a parallel between self-deception and external lying, and argues that the agent who lies throws away her personality and dignity. Challenged by many commentators, this explanatory strategy may suggest that Kant's prohibition of deception would be motivated by a contentious teleological principle. In my account, I reject this suggestion and further show that this parallel can help us better understand the nature of self-deception. By borrowing elements from (...)
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  41. (1 other version)Imposter Syndrome and Self-Deception.Stephen Gadsby - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy:1-12.
    Many intelligent, capable, and successful individuals believe that their success is due to luck and fear that they will someday be exposed as imposters. A puzzling feature of this phenomenon, commonly referred to as imposter syndrome, is that these same individuals treat evidence in ways that maintain their false beliefs and debilitating fears: they ignore and misattribute evidence of their own abilities, while readily accepting evidence in favour of their inadequacy. I propose a novel account of imposter syndrome as an (...)
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  42. Can Wittgenstein’s Philosophy account for Uncertainty in Introspection?Pablo Hubacher Haerle - 2021 - Wittgenstein-Studien 12 (1):145-163.
    What happens when we are uncertain about what we want, feel or whish for? How should we understand uncertainty in introspection? This paper reconstructs and critically assess two answers to this question frequently found in the secondary literature on Wittgenstein: indecision and self-deception (Hacker 1990, 2012; Glock 1995, 1996). Such approaches seek to explain uncertainty in introspection in a way which is completely distinct from uncertainty about the ‘outer world’. I argue that in doing so these readings fail to account (...)
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  43. Laura Papish, Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform. [REVIEW]Samuel Kahn - 2021 - Ethics 132 (1):266-269.
    Laura Papish’s Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform is an ambitious attempt to breath new life into old debates and a welcome contribution to a recent renaissance of interest in Kant’s theory of evil. ​The book has eight chapters, and these chapters fall into three main divisions. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the psychology of nonmoral and immoral action. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on self-deception, evil, and dissimulation. And chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on self-cognition, (...)
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  44. On the function of self‐deception.Vladimir Krstić - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4):846-863.
    Self-deception makes best sense as a self-defensive mechanism by which the self protects itself from painful reality. Hence, we typically imagine self-deceivers as people who cause themselves to believe as true what they want to be true. Some self-deceivers, however, end up believing what they do not want to be true. Their behaviour can be explained on the hypothesis that the function of this behaviour is protecting the agent's perceived focal benefit at the cost of inflicting short-term harm, which is (...)
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  45. Self-Deceptive Inquiry.Dion Scott-Kakures - 2021 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 45:457-482.
    I develop the claim that paradigmatic cases of self-deceptive inquiry and belief-formation result from cognitive disorientation. In cognitive disorientation, the data, experiences, and practices we make use of in typical inquiry lead us awry in systematic fashion. The self-deceiver encounters a puzzle or a threat to her picture of the world; this doubt or uncertainty gives rise to questions she struggles to settle. Drawing on the theory of cognitive dissonance, I show that while taking herself to be engaged in the (...)
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  46. Self‐deception about truthfulness.Matt Sleat - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):693-708.
    European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 693-708, June 2022.
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  47. Rationalizing.Martin Sticker - 2021 - Cambridge University Press.
    Kant was a keen psychological observer and theorist of the forms, mechanisms and sources of self-deception. In this Element, the author discusses the role of rationalizing/Vernünfteln for Kant's moral psychology, normative ethics and philosophical methodology. By drawing on the full breadth of examples of rationalizing Kant discusses, the author shows how rationalizing can extend to general features of morality and corrupt rational agents thoroughly. Furthermore, the author explains the often-overlooked roles common human reason, empirical practical reason and even pure practical (...)
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  48. Self-Deception.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2021 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
    In this entry, I seek to show the interdependence of questions about self-deception in philosophy of mind, psychology, and ethics. I taxonomize solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception, present possible psychological mechanisms behind it, and highlight how different approaches to the philosophy of mind and psychology will affect how we answer important ethical questions. Is self-deception conducive to happiness? How does self-deception affect responsibility? Is there something intrinsically wrong with self-deception? The entry, on the one hand, is a tour of (...)
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  49. Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain.Shankar Vedantam & Bill Mesler - 2021 - WW Norton.
    From the New York Times best-selling author and host of Hidden Brain comes a thought-provoking look at the role of self-deception in human flourishing. Self-deception does terrible harm to us, to our communities, and to the planet. But if it is so bad for us, why is it ubiquitous? In Useful Delusions, Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler argue that, paradoxically, self-deception can also play a vital role in our success and well-being. The lies we tell ourselves sustain our daily interactions (...)
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  50. On self-deception: from the perspective of Zhu Xi’s moral psychology.Kaili Wang - 2021 - Asian Philosophy 31 (4):414-429.
    In order to construct a satisfactory theory of cheng-yi 誠意 (making thoughts sincere), Zhu Xi 朱熹 develops an account of how self-deception (zi-qi 自欺) is possible—a profound problem that has puzzled many philosophers. In Zhu’s opinion, zhi 知 (knowing) can be divided into two categories: a priori knowing and empirical knowing. The further division of empirical knowing defines three sorts of self-deception: (1) the self-deception caused by one’s ignorance (wu-zhi 無知), (2) the self-deception caused by one’s superficial knowing (qian-zhi 淺知), (...)
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