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Abstract
Gendler [2007. “Self-deception as Pretense.” Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1): 231–258] offers an account of self-deception in terms of imaginative pretense, according to which the self-deceptive state is a pretense rather than a doxastic attitude. The self-deceived agent who deceives herself about p merely pretends that p is true. In this paper, I aim, first, to show why Gendler’s pretense view requires revision, and second, to offer an alternative account of pretense’s role in self-deception which draws on Gendler’s insight but avoids her problematic anti-doxastic conclusion. I highlight how this view may help to further our doxastic understanding of self-deception. Self-deception should be understood as a diachronic and dynamic process. It often starts with pretense, though it always ends with an inappropriate doxastic attitude, provided that the agent succeeds in deceiving herself. Finally, I discuss some implications of this view in the wider debates concerning the nature of self-knowledge and the ethics of pretense.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Philip Ebert, Crispin Wright, Alan Millar, Jonathan Ichikawa, Madeline Hyde and two anonymous referees of this journal for their thoughtful and invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the audience of the KBNS Self-knowledge Seminar where the paper was presented for their helpful questions and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Xintong Wei is a PhD student at the St Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme in Philosophy (SASP); and a member of the Knowledge Beyond Natural Science research project based in the Philosophy Department at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on epistemology, the nature of belief and theories of normativity.
Notes
1 One’s doxastic attitude about p may include a belief that p, a disbelief that p and a lack of opinion of p. It is also widely accepted that beliefs come in degree, that is, beliefs come with various certainty about the truth of the proposition. I will assume that we endorse a proposition as a belief with a high degree of confidence. For an overview of various issues concerning the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief, see, Ebert and Smith (Citation2012). More will be said concerning the relevance of degrees of belief to self-deception in Section 4.
2 These two points are merely meant to offer some reasons why doxastic construal of self-deception is a position worth defending. A fuller defence of the doxastic view is developed throughout the paper.
3 Gendler’s pretense view has drawn some critical attention in the literature, e.g., Porcher (Citation2014). Another anti-doxastic view (which will not be discussed in this paper) is proposed by Audi (Citation1982, Citation1997) and Rey (Citation1988), according to which self-deception does not consist of a belief but an avowal. For criticism of the avowal view, see, Van Leeuwen (Citation2007).
4 The passage is also cited in Gardner (Citation2007).
5 Although most philosophers do agree that there is a general norm of truth that governs the attitude of belief, there is an ongoing debate about how to analyze this truth-aiming feature and whether it is an essential feature of belief. For a recent survey on the latest debates on the normativity of belief, see, McHugh and Whiting (Citation2014). For more discussion on the aim of belief, see a recent volume edited by Chan (Citation2013).
6 Many thanks to two anonymous referees of this journal for pressing me on several issues regarding (P2), which helped me greatly to improve my arguments.
7 As Cassam (Citation2014) rightly points out, we are not homo philosophicus – our actual beliefs often do not conform to what we rationally ought to believe.
8 Note that this is not to say pretense is not criticizable. A pretense may be criticized for its role in bringing about false beliefs. I explore the issues concerning the ethics of pretense in Section 5.
9 Van Leeuwen (Citation2009) argues that pretense can be distinguished from belief on the basis of their different motivational profile. On his view, beliefs that represent the practical setting we are in are the practical ground of imagining – we will not act on the basis of an imagining in the absence of those beliefs.
10 Of course, there could be examples of pretense constructed in such a way that they have extensive motivational effects. But I believe that the phenomena in general is relatively clear: in so far as the majority of cases of pretense are concerned, they do seem to have limited motivational effects.
11 For empirical studies on cognitive quarantine see, for instance, Taylor (Citation1999).
12 Note that to say that pretense has the quarantining feature is not to say that pretense state is necessarily transparent. I am not committed to the transparency thesis that, if one pretends that p, then necessarily one knows or is aware that one pretends that p.
13 Imaginative immersion is a phenomenon discussed in Schellenberg (Citation2013) and Liao and Doggett (Citation2014). It has motivated some philosophers to argue that belief and imagination exist on a continuum. For further discussion, see, for instance, Langland-Hassan (Citation2012).
14 Note that, I do not claim that every case of self-deception involves pretense. My point is, first, in cases where pretense does play a role in self-deception, it should be located in the process of self-deception, rather than be identified as the self-deceptive state. And second, it is plausible to think that many cases of self-deception are cases where pretense plays such a role.
15 I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for raising many thought-provoking suggestions, which helped me greatly to develop my account in this section.
16 See also, Baumeister and Cairns (Citation1992).
17 My account therefore connects self-deception to interpersonal deception through the instrumental role performative pretense plays in the process of both kinds of deception.
18 Here I understand collective or joint self-deception in a minimal sense, that is, a group of people acquiring the same self-deceptive doxastic attitude regarding p. For a recent discussion of collective self-deception, see, Deweese-Boyd (Citation2017).
19 A point of interest for further research is the effect of the use of social media on self-deception. Social media may facilitate both individual and collective self-deception as it creates a social context that makes the loop of pretense easier to operate and harder to break, e.g., it is easier for one to situate oneself among likeminded people and it is harder to detect whether a user is merely pretending something to be true or not.
20 Degree of belief is roughly understood as one’s confidence in p, tracking the perceived strength of justification one has for that proposition. There is a large debate between traditional and formal epistemologist about the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief in general, which I will bracket here. See also, footnote 1.
21 Typically, S fails to conform to the norm of evidence – S ought to believe that P if and only if P is well-supported by the evidence available to S. S’s beliefs should be responsive to the changes in the body of evidence in the sense that S ought to revise her beliefs in light of new evidence. Motivational factors can be broadly understood along the Williamsian line, as what figure in one’s subjective motivational set, including desires, feelings, hopes and so on (Citation1981, 105). Different theories of self-deception might have different views about what motivational factors are relevant in self-deception.
22 For discussion of the privileged access thesis, see, for instance, Wright (Citation1998, Citation2015).