Why is there a philosophical problem about self-deception?
Self-deception is a common human enterprise. Our capacity for it seems no more exotic a part of our nature than our capacity to spell. We attribute the state freely to others (“you’re kidding yourself”), and come to realise we were in the state ourselves (“I was kidding myself when I said that”). However, when we step back from those confident judgements and try making sense of self-deception, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to do so. The Philosophers’ Magazine
Considerations of self-deception go right to the heart of what exactly is the self that is being deceived, and the nature of consciousness. As a psychiatrist, I’m equally, if not more, preoccupied with self-deception than the philosophers who are just coming to the conclusion that it drives one more nail into the coffin of the notion of the unitary self. Enlisting a patient in the study of his or her self-deception is the daily bread and butter of thoughtful psychotherapists. For example, the proposal in this essay that, perhaps, self-deception is “not one singular psychobehavioural phenomenon, reducing to issues of belief and knowledge” seems a truism to psychotherapists who generate taxonomies of self-deception with their clientele. “Self-deception is perhaps quite eclectic, and is not always easily distinguishable from germane phenomena such as compartmentalisation, repressed conflicts, submerged aggressions, false consciousness, and wishful thinking.” Indeed.
Related: A highly inflated version of reality: …(N)ew research suggests that people lie chronically for a wide variety of reasons, some serious, others relatively benign. In a recent article reviewing 100 years of literature on the subject, as well as several cases in the news, doctors at Yale University find that some chronic liars are capable, successful, even disciplined people who embellish their life stories needlessly. They don’t suffer from an established mental illness, as many habitual fabricators do. They’re just, well, liars. LA Times
