Self-deception and its interactions with introspection

Angebote / Angebote:

The topic of self-deception originates several problems within the field of philosophy. There is large disagreement over its definitions and over which cases might count as proper cases of self-deception. At a basic level, selfdeception is considered the process through which a subject S acquires a belief against their best evidence (Deweese-Boyd, 2016, introduction). However, this is just the skeleton, some early definition most people could agree on, of the phenomenon that I am going to discuss in this paper. It should be noted although I am here describing self-deception as a process, it can also be a state, namely the state a subject enters after the process of deceiving themselves. In fact, generally, the belief obtained through self-deception is then retained through time. It is in these instances that we talk of a self-deceived subject. In this dissertation I will usually refer to self-deception as a process since that is its most discussed aspect by philosophers. It is more crucial and harder to define. However, I am not going to skip over discussing how a subject maintains their self-deceived state when this becomes relevant.