Alfred Mele

Peter was placed — face down and head first — on a sled, and pushed from the top of a high, snow-covered hill. The brisk wind and flying snow swiftly awoke him. In moments, he had his wits about him and surmised that this early morning trip down the hill was part of his initiation into the SAE fraternity. Peter quickly surveyed his options. He could put an end to his trip by sliding off the sled, or by turning it sharply. He could grasp the steering handles and guide the sled down the slope. Or, in an effort at one-upmanship, he could pretend to remain asleep the entire time, lying still on the sled without grasping the handles or making any voluntary motions: what a coup it would be to convince his prospective fraternity brothers that he had been utterly unfazed by the prank, indeed, that he was never aware that it had occurred! Peter opted for the devious strategy. He was prepared to take control of the sled should disaster threaten: the rogues might have placed a log in the path of the speeding sled. But, as it happened, he had no need to intervene and simply allowed the sled to take its course.

Self-deception raises complex questions about the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. In this book, Alfred Mele addresses four of the most critical of these questions: What is it to deceive oneself? How do we deceive ourselves? Why do we deceive ourselves? Is self-deception really possible? Drawing on cutting-edge empirical research on everyday reasoning and biases, Mele takes issue with commonplace attempts to equate the processes of self-deception with those of stereotypical interpersonal deception. Such attempts, he demonstrates, are fundamentally misguided, particularly in the assumption that self-deception is intentional. In their place, Mele proposes a compelling, empirically informed account of the motivational causes of biased beliefs. At the heart of this theory is an appreciation of how emotion and motivation may, without our knowing it, bias our assessment of evidence for beliefs. Highlighting motivation and emotion, Mele develops a pair of approaches for explaining the two forms of self-deception: the "straight" form, in which we believe what we want to be true, and the "twisted" form, in which we believe what we wish to be false. Underlying Mele's work is an abiding interest in understanding and explaining the behavior of real human beings. The result is a comprehensive, elegant, empirically grounded theory of everyday self-deception that should engage philosophers and social scientists alike.

This article examines the work of two figures in fields whose work has had a significant impact on recent free-will debates, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet and psychologist Daniel Wegner. Libet's groundbreaking experimental studies on human subjects relating brain activities to the appearance or production of conscious experience, volition, and willed action have been much discussed by philosophers and scientists over the past few decades and have influenced subsequent scientific research on these subjects. The second half of the article deals with the arguments of psychologist Daniel Wegner, whose book, The Illusion of Conscious Will, has had a significant impact on free-will debates since its publication. Wegner argues that our experience of conscious control over our willed actions is an illusion. Wegner appeals in part to the Libet experiments and other neuroscientifc experiments on voluntary action.

Regarding a recent book of mine, John Fischer wrote : “I am faced with the difficult task of doing a critical notice of a book, with almost all of which I agree!” I face a similar task here. Fischer and Ravizza’s Responsibility and Control is an excellent book. It develops, in admirable detail, an attractive compatibilist position on moral responsibility in a trio of related spheres—actions, consequences, and omissions—and it presents powerful objections to leading arguments for incompatibilism. Incompatibilists undoubtedly will find much more to worry about in the book than I do, but I will try to stir up a little trouble in this essay. I will sketch three apparent problems.

Even if everything is up for grabs in philosophy, some things are very difficult to doubt. It is hard to believe, for example, that no one ever acts intentionally. Even the most powerful arguments for the unreality of intentional action could do no more, we believe, than place one in roughly the position in which pre-Aristotelian Greeks found themselves when presented with one of Zeno's arguments that nothing can move from any given point A to any other point B. One argument has it, for example, that in order to move from one point to another, a thing must first move to the half-way point; to do that, it must move half way to that point; and so on forever: so nothing ever moves at all. The argument undoubtedly stopped some auditors in their tracks; but eventually they moved on, most of them fully confident that they were doing precisely that

Brian McLaughlin, in “Incontinent Belief” (Journal of Philosophical Research 15 [1989-90], pp. 115-26), takes issue with my investigation, in lrrationality (Oxford University Press, 1987), of a doxastic analogue of akratic action. He deems what I term “strict akratic belief” philosophically uninteresting. In the present paper, I explain that this assessment rests on a serious confusion about the sort of possibility that is at issue in my chapter on the topic, correct a variety of misimpressions, and rebut McLaughlin’s arguments as they apply to the psychological possibility of strict akratic belief and to the etiology of beliefs generally.

Drawing on recent empirical work, this philosophical paper explores some possible contributions of emotion to self-deception. Three hypotheses are considered: (1) the anxiety reduction hypothesis: the function of self-deception is to reduce present anxiety; (2) the solo emotion hypothesis: emotions sometimes contribute to instances of self-deception that have no desires among their significant causes; (3) the direct emotion hypothesis: emotions sometimes contribute directly to self-deception, in the sense that they make contributions that, at the time, are neither made by desires nor causally mediated by desires. It is argued that (1) is false and that (3) is defensible and more defensible than (2)

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick.

Weakness of will has perplexed philosophers since Plato's time. This chapter places some of the literature on volitional disorders and addictions in a philosophical context dating back to Plato and Aristotle in an attempt to shed light on issues that a theorist who wishes to analyze the idea of a volitional disorder will face. Key here is the notion of the irresistability and resistability of pertinent desires, which is explored in relation to George Ainslie's work on the ability to make and adhere to personal rules.

This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations on judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended; the influence of considerations of luck, skill, and causal deviance on judgments about what agents do intentionally; what interesting properties all cases of intentional action might share; and the debate between proponents of, respectively, "the Simple View" of the connection between intentional action and intention and "the Single Phenomenon View" of that connection. A substantial body of literature is devoted to the project of analyzing intentional action [1] . In this article, I explore the bearing on that project of some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended. This article may reasonably be regarded as a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a range of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and, likewise, of the potential bearing of attempted philosophical analyses of folk concepts on empirical studies of those concepts.

This chapter is a commentary on the others, concentrating on themes that link many of them. It provides conceptual background on free will, distinguishes among distinct philosophical positions on the topic (including compatibilist and incompatibilist positions), discusses determinism and laws of nature, connects free will to consciousness, critically examines Benjamin Libet's work on free will and consciousness, and considers the light that Daniel Wegner's contribution to the volume sheds on the “the illusion of conscious will” and free will.

Self-Deception, Properly understood, Is not paradoxical. Although self-Deception involves motivated false belief, It is not properly modeled after "intentional" interpersonal deception. Thus, The major source of paradox is dissolved. Moreover, Even intentional self-Deception need not be paradoxical and there is good reason to believe that a kind of self-Deception which "would" be paradoxical never occurs. Finally, In cases of self-Deception, As in instances of akratic action, There is scope for blame

This chapter separates the problem of self-deception into two component questions: how it happens and what it is. The key to this chapter's account of self-deception is called “deflationary view”. Self-deception, it notes, does not entail “intentionally deceiving oneself; intending to deceive oneself; intending to make it easier for oneself to believe something; concurrently believing each of two explicitly contrary propositions”. The chapter also offers a discussion of the notion of “twisted self-deception”: the phenomenon of the self-deceived person believing something he or she wants to be false.

Some scientists have reported what they regard as evidence of indeterministic brain processes that influence behavior (Brembs 2011, Maye et al. 2007). How do these reports bear on the positive side of libertarianism about free will? That is an approximation of my guiding question in this article. I make the question more precise in section 1, in light of some conceptual and scientific background. In the remainder of the article, I seek—and eventually offer—an answer. Topics dis-cussed along the way include control, Frankfurt-style cases, and whether event-causal libertarianism is an uninhabitable half-way house between compatibilism and agent-causal libertarianism.