Ellen Fridland

I argue that framing the issue of motivated belief formation and its subsequent social gains in the language of self-deception raises logical difficulties. Two such difficulties are that (1) in trying to provide an evolutionary motive for viewing self-deception as a mechanism to facilitate other-deception, the ease and ubiquity of self-deception are undermined, and (2) because after one has successfully deceived oneself, what one communicates to others, though untrue, is not deceptive, we cannot say that self-deception evolved in order to facilitate the deception of others

In the past 20 years or so, the psychological research on imitation has flourished. However, our working definition of imitation has not adequately adapted in order to reflect this research. The closest that we've come to a revamped conception of imitation comes from the work of Michael Tomasello. Despite its numerous virtues, Tomasello's definition is in need of at least two significant amendments, if it is to reflect the current state of knowledge. Accordingly, it is our goal in this paper to reformulate Tomasello's definition of imitation in order to account for both the latest empirical findings and the conceptual considerations that follow from them. Specifically, we argue that a satisfactory definition of imitation ought to be formulated as follows: imitation is the reproduction of an observed behavior where the agent imitating recognizes the behavior of the demonstrator as goal-directed and has some particular interest in or concern for replicating the precise technique performed by the aut..