Galeotti on Self-Deception

This chapter explores some similarities and differences between Elisabetta Galeotti’s position on self-deception in her groundbreaking book, Political Self-Deception, and Alfred Mele’s position on this topic in, for example, his Self-Deception Unmasked and some subsequent work. In Part I of her book, “The Philosophy of Self-Deception,” Galeotti argues for revision of Mele’s conception of self-deception in three connections. The first concerns the alleged need for distinctions between self-deception, on the one hand, and wishful thinking and delusion, on the other. The second concerns the desire for a theory that tells us why, in all cases in which there seemingly is some chance that a person will come to be self-deceived in believing that p, the person does or does not come to believe that p. A position on self-deception that does not include such a theory is said to suffer from the “selectivity problem.” The third concerns accommodating both “straight” and “twisted” self-deception in a unified account of self-deception (where twisted self-deception, unlike its straight counterpart, involves believing something that one does not want to be true). It is argued that Galeotti’s conception of self-deception is significantly closer to Mele’s than she believes, and, where the two positions do diverge, some grounds are offered for preferring Mele’s position to hers. A topic discussed in the political sphere is Galeotti’s insightful application of Cass Sunstein’s notion of probability neglect to twisted self-deception about the weapons of mass destruction issue in Iraq. In this connection, it is argued that a philosopher like Galeotti who holds that probability neglect plays a significant role in accounting for some cases of twisted self-deception is not in a position to claim that Mele’s view of self-deception is undermined by a selectivity problem. If Mele’s view has a selectivity problem, so does the appeal to probability neglect at issue.