Kent Bach

There is a simple view of motivation on which desires are like pain-killers; they come in different strengths, and their strength determines their efficacy. That is, the stronger a desire the greater its motivational force and, when two desires conflict, the stronger one “wins out” over the weaker. This view makes it puzzling how anyone could ever exhibit “strength of will” and act on the weaker desire, even when it is a desire for something more highly valued than what is more strongly desired. When the will, as the agent of reason, enters the fray, an explanation of what a person is motivated enough to do must reckon not only with competing desires and their motivational forces, but also with the will’s capacity to be affected by different ones in ways not proportional to their force. However, this complication sheds little light, for if the will must bestow its stamp of approval on a desire before the desire leads to action, then, it would seem, motivational force should be measured by strength of effect on the will. And if that’s the way to measure motivational force, then, since by that measure one always acts on the desire that affects one’s will most, there is no problem of strength of will after all. But the problem seems real, however inapt the label.

As philosophical topics go, self-deception has something for everyone. It raises basic questions about the nature of belief and the relation of belief to thought, desire, and the will. It provokes further questions on such topics as reasoning, attention, self-knowledge, the unity of the self, intentional action, motivation, self-esteem, psychic defenses, the unconscious, personal character, and interpersonal relations. There are two basic questions about self-deception itself, which each take a familiar philosophical form: What is it? How is it possible? These questions have both an analytic and a psychological side. Is self-deception, as its name suggests, literally a case of lying to oneself? If not, how different can it be from other-deception and still deserve its name? Psychologically, what processes does self-deception involve and how is it motivated?

I enumerate the main disagreements between Devitt and me, and then elucidate the most fundamental one. It concerns what it takes to refer to something. Devitt takes a liberal view on this, according to which a speaker’s having a certain object in mind and intending to refer to it puts the hearer in a position to form singular thoughts about it. There is no requirement that the hearer have any independent access to the object. My view is more restrictive, not allowing “reference borrowing” of the sort that Devitt apparently thinks referential uses of definite descriptions involve. For me, if the speaker has a certain object in mind and intends to refer the hearer to it, and the hearer recognizes this intention, that merely enables him to form a general thought. It does not enable him to form a singular thought about it himself.

Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s book is ultimately a defense of their self-styled Semantic Minimalism, but it’s mainly a protracted assault on semantic Contextualism, both moderate and radical. They argue at length that Moderate Contextualism leads inevitably to Radical Contextualism and at greater length that Radical Contextualism is misguided. Supposing that “[Radical Contextualism] is the logical consequence of denying Semantic Minimalism”, they think they have given an indirect argument for their version of Semantic Minimalism. But they overlook a third view, one that splits the difference between the other two. Like Contextualism it rejects Propositionalism, the conservative dogma that every indexical-free declarative sentence expresses a proposition. Unlike Contextualism, it does not invoke context to fill semantic gaps and, indeed, denies that filling those gaps is a semantic matter. Like Cappelen and Lepore’s brand of Semantic Minimalism, it rejects the very idea of pragmatic intrusion into semantic content. However, in rejecting Propositionalism, it is more radical, indeed, more minimalist than their version of Semantic Minimalism. It does not imagine that sentences that intuitively seem not to express propositions at least express “minimal propositions.” Radical Semantic Minimalism, or simply Radicalism, says that the sentences in question are semantically incomplete—their semantic contents are not propositions but merely “propositional radicals.”

I thank my critics for time, thought, and effort put into their commentaries. Since obviously I can’t respond to everything, I will try to address what strike me as the most important questions they ask and objections they raise. I think I have decent answers to some questions and decent responses to some objections, in other cases it seems enough to clarify the relevant view, and in still others I need to modify the view in question. One complication, which I won’t elaborate on, is that the views under consideration have evolved, or at least changed, over the years, so that my critics are aiming at a moving target, albeit a slowly moving one. Before responding, I will sketch some of the main ideas behind my view, including their unifying motivation, and mention a few key distinctions that are particularly relevant to topics addressed by my critics.

Al Mele has been as persistent as anyone in his pursuit of self-deception. He has taken it on in a series of papers over the past twenty years and at various places in previous books. The present book brings together his main ideas on the subject, and readers unfamiliar with its puzzles or Mele's approach to it will learn a lot. The cognoscenti will not only have their memories refreshed but will be treated to much that is new, including recent experimental work that Mele marshals in support of his deflationary account of "straight" self-deception. There is also a chapter devoted to the neglected case of "twisted" self-deception, in which the self-deceiver believes something he wishes not to be the case