2015/01/10 by José Eduardo Porcher · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Deception #Argument (complex analysis) #Self-deception #Epistemology #Object (grammar) #Extant taxon #Psychology #Action (physics) #Philosophy #Identity (music) #State (computer science) #Social psychology #Computer science #Aesthetics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1590/s0100-60452015005000002
openalex publication_date 2015/01/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
I assess Tamar Gendler's (2007) account of self-deception according to which its characteristic state is not belief, but imaginative pretense. After giving an overview of the literature and presenting the conceptual puzzles engendered by the notion of self-deception, I introduce Gendler's account, which emerges as a rival to practically all extant accounts of self-deception. I object to it by first arguing that her argument for abandoning belief as the characteristic state of self-deception conflates the state of belief and the process of belief-formation when interpreting David Velleman's (2000) thesis that belief is an essentially truth-directed attitude. I then call attention to the fact that Velleman's argument for the identity of motivational role between belief and imagining, on which Gendler's argument for self-deception as pretense depends, conflates two senses of 'motivational role'-a stronger but implausible sense and a weaker but explanatorily irrelevant sense. Finally, I introduce Neil Van Leeuwen's (2009) argument to the effect that belief is the practical ground of all non-belief cognitive attitudes in circum-stances wherein the latter prompt action. I apply this framework to Gendler's account to ultimately show that imaginative pretense fails to explain the existence of voluntary actions which result from self-deception.