Seeing through Self-Deception

Annette Barnes offers a challenge to the standard characterization of other-deception and self-deception.

Annette Barnes (Author)

9780521620147, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 January 1998

194 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.4 cm, 0.4 kg

"We are grateful to Annette Barnes for courageously shedding light on a difficult and important problem." Béla Szabados, Philosophy in Review

What is it to deceive someone? And how is it possible to deceive oneself? Does self-deception require that people be taken in by a deceitful strategy that they know is deceitful? The literature is divided between those who argue that self-deception is intentional and those who argue that it is non-intentional. In this study, Annette Barnes offers a challenge to both the standard characterization of other-deception and characterizations of self-deception, examining the available explanations and exploring such questions as the self-deceiver's false consciousness, bias and the irrationality and objectionability of self-deception. She arrives at a non-intentional account of self-deception that is deeper and more complete than alternative non-intentional accounts and avoids the reduction of self-deceptive belief to wishful belief.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Other-deception
2. Two models of self-deception
3. The need for an alternative model of self-deception
4. Functioning to reduce an anxiety
satisfying a desire
5. Self-deceptive belief formation: non-intentional biasing
6. False consciousness
7. Intentional and non-intentional deception of oneself
8. Irrationality
9. What, if anything, is objectionable about self- and other-deception?
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of mind [HPM]