Dr Greg Bahnsen - Apologetics & Self-Deception: Part 2

Unless I'm deceiving myself. This is the second Rustan lecture and I believe that our speaker is still Dr. Greg Bonson, unless he has turned into somebody else been looking in the other direction. All of these epistemological difficulties I'm sure will be resolved for us in the next hour and we can go back to our ordinary lives believing in the call common sense, particularly in the scriptures. So I'm sure we all profited greatly from the introductory material that Professor Bonson gave us in the first hour. And now he will continue in his study of apologetics and self deception. In our first lecture we introduced the difficulty and the importance of resolving the difficulty about self deception. And in the second hour I'd like to make some effort, minimal though it be, to offer a Christian solution to the problem and to make application of it. We'll get right into the material unless we run out of time. And you'll find up here on the board the four basic things I'm going to be covering. The first point being that belief is essential to any analysis of self deception. Secondly, I'd like to look at some of the crucial characteristics of the epistemic notion that we call beliefs. I'd like to talk about the incompatibility of beliefs that are involved in self deception if we use the other deception model. And then finally I'll talk about motivated rationalizing of the evidence and self covering intentions as the way that the self deceiver pulls off his feet. First of all, belief is essential to self deception. Undoubtedly at the core of our lives there is something of a cognitive mess. We are inconsistent in our choices, we are incoherent in our convictions. We are persuaded where we ought not to be persuaded and deluded that we really know ourselves quite transparently. At the heart of all these kinds of personal failure and depreciation is the concept of belief. It should seem obvious, I think, that deception is another form of such cognitive error. Deceived people have been misled, deluded, beguiled, or somehow mistaken in what they think and expect to be the case. Granted, there can be many varieties and conditions of this false believing. If Smith believes. Excuse me, If Smith promises to meet Jones at the library at 3 this afternoon but then gets delayed because he is enthralled with a political propagandist across campus. Both Smith and Jones in this case may be deceived, Jones deceived by expecting Smith to come at a particular time, and Smith deceived because he's believing clever lies. It should seem obvious then, for all of these differences that belief is involved in deception, there appear to be few, if any, plausible grounds for disputing that point, and I think the self perception then will be seen as involving the holding of one or more false beliefs. However, in passing I should mention that Herbert Fingarret has recently challenged the construal of self deception in terms of belief, despite how ordinary it is in everyday thinking. Because he thinks that epistemic analyses of self deception create irresolvable paradoxes in themselves, then Garrett wishes to change the emphasis. Instead of talking about belief, knowledge and perception, epistemic notions like that, he wants to change the emphasis and see self deception in terms of purpose of action, and he wants to give it a volitional account. Now, the acceptability of Finn Garrett's claim that belief is not central to an analysis of self deception, it turns out, is supported only indirectly. That is, it's supported only by his offering an alternative account which he thinks to be more adequate than the belief analyses previously given. And I'm going to skip giving you any detailed rehearsal of Fingert's view and simply summarize by saying that Finn Garrett holds that self deception involves adopting an avoidance policy whereby one purposefully chooses to stay ignorant of some engagement of his in the world. Finn Garrett says consciousness is a matter of spelling out to yourself what you do and what you undergo. In self deception, you adopt the policy of not spelling out something about yourself or what has happened to you. I would not judge, however, that Finn Garrett's challenge to the belief analysis of self deception has been successful, and that because his positive virtues in the alternative account are not really evident in the first place, Van Garrett explains his troublesome concept of self deception at the price of an even greater obscurity, that being his metaphor of spelling out an engagement in the world that's not what you would consider a common and ordinary way of explaining things in human relations. A second problem with Fingert's alternative is that the volition, action, family of terms that he wants to rely upon, the volition, action, family of terms is itself actually laden heavily with notions having to do with belief, perception, knowledge, and the following. And the reason for this is that the epistemic and volition families of terms crucially overlap. For instance, you can hardly give an analysis of consciousness and personal identity, both of which are essential to Fingert's view of self deception. You can hardly analyze consciousness and personal identity in a way that which is completely independent of cognitive terms. For if nothing else, beliefs are obviously involved in someone's self identity Thirdly, I think we have to fault Fingarrett's effort to explain self deception in the way he does, because he doesn't cover all of the various important kinds of self deception. He overlooks some rather obvious examples where self deception involves overdoing the steps out of your involvement in the world, and yet with emotional detachment, as though it didn't matter to you, he not only overlooks those, but it seems to me he relies heavily upon some examples which are not self deception at all, but rather would be considered mental disorders. Fourth, and finally, Finn Garrett's alternative account is not acceptable because in the long run it does not rid the notion of paradox, does not rid self deception of the idea of paradox, which simply restates that paradox in new terms. What we have is a person who does spell out his engagement, only to be horrified by it, and then to adopt a policy of not spelling out his engagement. So where we have been saying a person believes but disbelieves, now we have a person spelling out but not spelling out. And I can't really see that we've traded in for anything better by taking the paradox in that garb. And so I conclude that there's no good reason to omit reference to beliefs in our analysis of self deception. It seems to be an essential, even if troublesome, part of any proper analysis of a concept. And in particular, I'm going to hold that deceived people are viewed as holding a false belief, a false belief, mind you, and not simply an unwarranted belief. For instance, you have a patient who chooses to believe contrary to his doctor's report of cancer, and it turns out to be right after all. There he had an unwarranted belief, but not a false one. Moreover, I'm talking about false belief and not simply no belief at all, even when you'd ordinarily expect one. Here you might think of the cuckold who simply is ignorant of his wife's infidelity, literally thinking nothing at all about such a question, when the neighborhood is loud with rumors and his head should be troubled with shady light, not excuses. Deceived people believe false propositions, not simply no belief, not simply unwarranted belief. They believe falsely. And so I'm maintaining that self deception as a form of deception involves believing false propositions. Of course, that isn't to say that people do not deceive themselves about their hopes, about their attitudes and their emotions. Obviously, we have such things as false pride, false security to take account of. My point is only that these objects of self Deception must themselves have a cognitive core. The parent who is inappropriately proud of his child's report card from school must at least believe that the card has high marks for that emotion to obtain. Besides, even when emotion appears to be the object of self deception, cognitive language, you'll find, is quite natural in describing it. We might say he may think that he is sorry about Smith being fired, but he knows quite well that he is delighted over it. Belief then should be taken as fundamental to self deception. To be self deceived is to believe something false. And I think we have to observe now going a step further, that the mistaken believing entailed by self deception is fully genuine believing. The self deceiver does not strike us as merely feigning ignorance or being an obvious hypocrite. The self deceiver is concerned with the truth and he will make efforts, strained though they seem to us, he will make efforts to sustain his false belief as somehow rational. He is aware of the weight. He is aware of the import of the contrary evidence to his cherished belief, and he will distort that evidence through pseudo rational treatment of it. Just because he genuinely believes the unpleasant truth or and must bring himself to a false contrary belief, he's not simply play acting, he's not simply pretending. True, he does not behave like a normal believer since his twisting of evidence is as though he's trying to convince himself of something very unlikely. Yet he does not act like a mere pretender either. He behaves in ways which rely upon the truth of what he says about his false belief. We must say that he really believes the false proposition or else he would not after all be deceived if he didn't believe believe it. So the belief involved here is not merely half belief or near belief, for that would reduce self deception to vacillation of opinion or lack of confidence or insincerity. But we have no lack of evidence for the self deceivers full fledged believing of something. It's just that we have too many beliefs of his for which there is evidence. That is to say, he holds many beliefs and some are incompatible. Some. Therefore the belief of which we speak in analyzing self deception is not odd, it's not defective in character and the word belief is not being used in some twilight sense. The belief or beliefs which play a role in self deception are genuine full fledged instances of believing. Let's look at some of the crucial characteristics of belief now. The concept of belief is a central and pervasive aspect of human experience and philosophical reflection. In spite of the notorious philosophical questions that have surrounded it and understanding of it. Since the concept of belief is so familiar to everyone, I think it will be a safe and promising move to analyze self deception in terms of it. Of course it's possible to define belief in such a way as to preclude the possibility of self deception. And I found that some philosophers have done just that. But of course they're the same philosophers who have paid the price of implausibility, and they're talking about human realities. Often enough in the history of epistemology, belief has also been artificially restricted to an ideal philosophical notion of what we might call rational belief, wherein people never believe contradictory propositions. You'll notice in how much of the logic of belief doxastic logic today the treatments are treatments of a notion called rational belief, and not our ordinary believing you and I know so much about. But that will hardly do. Human nature is capable of more things and stranger than common sense philosophers suppose, or than rationalistic philosophers impose on the world in a Procrustean fashion. It is beyond our power, I think, to be wholly rational at all times. If you understand rationality in the popular philosophical sense, never ceasing in full evidential and full logical self scrutiny, continually scanning the full horizon of our past and present beliefs in comparison with new, possibly incoherent additions to the set, nobody does that all the time. I think one stands a far smaller opportunity to rid the world of irrationality and self deception if he takes the shortcut of simply defining them out of existence. And so we should offer a characterization of belief which will help us analyze self deception, realizing that in the long run, the adequacy of our analysis of belief and the adequacy of our analysis of self deception will probably be judged jointly. To give a satisfactory account of the one while being untrue to the other is to fail to do justice to the full range of human reality, and thus to veer off into distortion eventually. Now, instead of giving you a rundown of the traditional ways of handling belief, all of which run into crucial defects, let me simply say that my own perspective is that the traditional attempts at analyzing belief tend to fail, although they're helpful in many ways, nevertheless tend to fail. Just because an analysis of belief is impossible in studying a wide range of concepts in epistemology and philosophy of mind, it begins to appear, or at least it has appeared to me, that the notion of belief is primitive or fundamental to the explanation of these other concepts. And as such, belief cannot be traditionally defined in terms of anything more basic. Than itself. Which is why I think we arrive at conflicting, somewhat deficient, and yet equally attractive accounts of belief on, say, the current analysis of belief or the dispositional analysis of belief. But if an analysis of belief cannot be provided here, there's no reason to think that we can't offer a general characterization of the ordinary notion of belief. In doing so, my remarks are going to be merely programmatic, leaving it to other epistemologists who have suggested aspects of the proposed characterization to elucidate and defend those elements at length in their own writing. The general characterization which will be given here is perfect, surfacely incomplete, focusing only on those facets of belief which I deem relevant to the final goal of analyzing self deception, which is, after all, why we're here today. Objection to the incompleteness of this characterization of belief will only be devastating to me. If what is said about belief is not only a failure to answer all of the questions about it, but a failure to answer any in a general sense, then I think we can characterize belief as a possibility positive intellectual propositional attitude which is expressed in a large variety of symptoms, some of which are subject to degrees of strength. A positive intellectual propositional attitude which is expressed in a large variety of symptoms. To believe something is to have a favorable attitude toward a proposition, an attitude of the intellectual rather than merely cognitive or affectional kind. It is to take the proposition as true and a virtually automatic response to the evidence as that evidence is perceived by the person. And thus to believe P is to see it as evidence to regard P as reliable and in the sense that belief is controlled by and informed by the evidence as it is construed by the believer. Belief is often said in our ordinary language to be constrained. Moreover, we speak of some propositions as beyond belief. And it should be added that while belief is a positive propositional attitude informed by the evidence, that evidence is often misconstrued and misperceived and approached with myopia of mind and senses. And thus belief on this characterization by no means precludes believing false propositions. But now I want to be a little more precise. That's a general attitude toward belief. A favorable or positive intellectual propositional attitude manifest in a variety of symptoms. But as a more precise conception of belief, which will be applied consistently throughout our investigation of self deception, I'm going to suggest the belief is an action guiding state of mind, if you will. We might consider it a map like mental state. A map like mental state. Math is that by which we speak. A belief is a mental state by which we steer. It is a math like mental state that is a potential cause of particular actions, be they mental actions or verbal actions or bodily actions. And specifically, belief is a continuing mental state enduring for the whole time of a belief. It is an intentional mental state having self directedness referring to an object and and it's a mental state, as I said, made up of ideas which give a determinative character to the state which corresponds to the proposition that is believed. Belief is a continuing intentional mental state with a stimulus independent causal capacity to affect or guide one's behavior. When I say it's stimulus independent, that means belief doesn't wait for a trigger. Somebody doesn't have to just come in a behavioristic state sense into the right setting to then start manifesting his belief. I can right now just start thinking about horses and doing the things appropriate to my beliefs about horses. I didn't have to come into the right circumstance. It's a stimulus independent causal factor and it's a stimulus independent causal capacity to affect or guide one's theoretical or practical behavior under suitable circumstances in a wide variety of manifestations. So let me summarize and what I'm going to say in the following to say that F believes that P will be understood as true if and only if S relies upon P sometimes intermittently or continuously. Only if S relies upon P in its theoretical inferences and or practical actions and plans. Now while I think that characterization of belief can distinguish it from related notions like thinking or supposing or having a conviction or what have you, I'm going to leave it simply at that very short precise understanding of it. It will turn out now that the grounds for saying that S is self deceived will coincide with or include those for saying that S believes that P. If S did not take P as true or evidence, that is, if S did not have a positive attitude or mental state such that P was relied upon in his theoretical and practical inferences, then we could not distinguish self deception from mere ignorance of or mere dislike for P. It is just because S unavoidably looks upon the evidence as supporting P and is thereby in the mental state of relying upon P and his inferences, practical or theoretical, that his desire to avoid or manipulate that evidence in self deception is meaningful. S does not wish to have his mind informed by the evidence in this fashion any longer. He does not want to believe what he does believe. He would rather forget or hide the unpleasant truth that has gripped him. That is to make covert that he relies upon P in his Theoretical inferences and practical actions and plans. S negative emotional response to P, which is meaningful in part because it is caused by his release at P. Leads him to try to escape his involuntary or uncontrived way of seeing things. In short, his negative emotional response to believing that P. Makes him attempt to escape his belief that he. Now, what are the bases upon which we ascribe belief to somebody like S. Who is the self deceiver, or to anybody else? Well, it will turn out here that what is usually called the occurrence and the dispositional accounts of belief Offer us valuable insights into the bases of belief of scription. Neither a person's actions nor his utterances are infallible signs of belief. To be sure, they're only fairly reliable correlations to his beliefs. And so we have to use the various kinds of expressions of belief to supplement each other. To gain some kind of inductive certainty about what he actually does believe. Now, what kinds of evidence would we use? Well, if S. Is talking about himself, his inward assent to believe, our assertion of peace, his outward assertion would be evident to us. It would also be evident to us in the way that he behaves, the way that he reasons, the way that he gestures, the way that he feels. His beliefs are evident in his habits, his decisions, his inactions, his action, his emotions, his lack of emotion, his in the whole range of behavior, actually. For you see, we must take account of the fact that belief sentences are, in one of their most important functions, explanatory of human behavior, one's own avowals of his belief. To avow that I believe this, or to disavow that I believe something, one's own avowals of beliefs, I recognize, have a presumptive authority. A presumptive authority. But they can be defeated, and we often do defeat them by cautious and relatively thorough observation of the other behavioral indicators in a man. So over time, what I'm saying, if you want to put it very easily over time, actions do speak louder than words, even the believer's own words. Let's look secondly, not just at the basis of belief ascription, but also at the notion of assent. Not all of our beliefs, I'm contending, are formed contrary, consciously, rationally, deliberately, and with the giving of internal or external assent to them. What is it to give assent? To give assent is to explicitly spell out inwardly or externally how one stands in respect to a proposition, thereby bringing one's belief to a conscious level of experience. I may have a belief about something in China. That until somebody poses the question Question I may not rationally deliberate or think upon it, become aware of it. Yet there is no special logical or conceptual connection between beliefs and their linguistic expression. Holding a belief is not logically dependent upon a competence to express that belief verbally. Let me take this a step further. The cognitive and the affective aspects of belief can sometimes be separated in a person. Indeed, they can even be at odds with each other. For example, hoping for what you know cannot be, fearing what you know cannot hurt you. Failing to feel conviction in the face of strong proof. Sometimes the way we feel and the way that we think just don't jive. Accordingly, we can easily imagine a situation where most of the effective manifestations of belief that P occur in S, that is, that we can see these things in the person believing. And yet this person does not assent to it. Even when the proposition is attended to in mind. He doesn't notice that his actions, emotions, assumptions, inferences, etc. Are such as would be expected symptoms of someone who accepts P. Yet when we ask him whether he believes P, he answers that he does not. He gives the same answer when silently discoursing within himself. Even though he does not show the assent symptoms of belief, his condition is quite obviously belief. Like most, if not all of the other symptoms of belief are present. So in most respects he is just like a normal believer. And his behavior can hardly be understood without postulating in him a belief that be. Now, I think it would be an artificial imposition at this point to erect some terminological rule prohibiting us to say correctly that S believes P under such circumstances. For you see, that kind of rule would only screen off the complexity of human nature and behavior from us. For we can certainly imagine if we had not actually encountered people who would protest that they do not hold beliefs about the inferior human dignity of people of other races, and yet who evidence just such an attitude in their social behavior. Nonetheless, therefore, the criterion of assenting to a sentence when asking can fail us as a way of making belief ascriptions. In the case of an unapprehended belief. The fact that belief can be divorced from explicit assent, then shows us that there can be beliefs held by a person of which he is not aware, that is, of which he is not consciously entertaining in mind or introspecting. I think it's simply a false picture we often entertain of intelligent beings if we think of them as incessantly talking to themselves internally and always making explicit or reporting upon their mental states. And mental acts simply doesn't happen. We talked about the basis on which we ascribe belief to a person. We talked about the fact that assent, while it is one symptom, is by no means logically necessary as a symptom of belief. And thirdly, and very importantly, I want to point out as a crucial characteristic that the avowal or disavowal of belief is not incorrigible. It is subject to correction and to falsification. In addition to the fact that belief need not be accompanied with explicit or personal awareness of one's belief, we must also observe that self ascriptions of belief. Ascribing to myself such a belief I'm avowing that I believe or that I don't, that self ascriptions of belief by way of assent and disavowals of belief are not incorrigible. They can be overridden with reasons to make us think them false, and therefore they're not infallible. Such reports can actually be mistaken. A person can be held to believe something from which he dissents and can be found not to believe some things to which he assents to some appreciable extent. Then we can be mistaken about our own beliefs. Avowing and disavowing would not be infallible guarantees of belief and unbelief. And the reason for that is simply there are limits to our self knowledge. Even though our own reports about our beliefs, say about our pains or about our perceptions or about what we think, our own beliefs may have a presumptive authority. We do grant them a very high degree of accuracy. But nevertheless there are limits on them. Normally, first person present tense occurrence mental state beliefs are direct, far more reliable than counterpart beliefs about others, and excellent evidence for the presence of the states that they are reporting. But they are like our beliefs about others in that they nevertheless are fallible, dubitable, corrigible and testable. Examples of ought to examples in ordinary experience are not hard to find which cannot be explained away or recategorized. For instance, the example of the mistaken disavowal of racial prejudice. We expect a common correlation between one's avowals and beliefs, but we don't expect a necessary one. All I'm contending here is please turn tape over at this time. It's very similar to this one of racial discrimination. And I think that this is such a common occurrence in your own lives, you could probably supply one of your own. Anyway, the fourth point that I need to make before we move on in our analysis. The fourth crucial characteristic of belief is its voluntariness or to A certain extent, its voluntariness. Up to this point in our characterization of belief, we have attended to the sense in which belief is involuntary. We've taken it as a positive attitude toward a proposition which is constrained by the way in which the evidence is seen. Yet in an important sense, believing can be viewed as voluntary and under one's control. Either it was noted that the way in which a person sees the evidence is under his control, or as I said before, believing is seeing as and therefore is under a person's voluntary control. And the way that a person takes the evidence so that it constrains belief is also under a person's voluntary control. For instance, since I see myself as right handed, I can't voluntarily and right here on the spot genuinely believe that I am left handed. Although I can say that I am. I can pretend that it's true. I just can't make myself believe right now I'm left handed. I think we've all had the kind of experience that led David Hume to speak of belief as a feeling or automatic response to circumstances. Few, if any people you see can look out a window and see dark clouds and pouring rain, only then to force themselves to believe that it's sunny and bright outside. Nobody can believe contrary to the way in which he sees the evidence. However, and this is the kicker, one can exercise some control over the way in which he sees the evidence. One can direct his attention, give prominence to some matters over others, suppress what he wishes to encounter or not to encounter, re evaluate the significance of past consideration and all the light. If belief is seeing as, then we must also recognize that seeing as is somewhat subject to one's will. In that sense a person is free to ignore the grounds for a belief, in which case a belief is not compelled. While it may be true that s cannot voluntarily choose to believe whatever he wishes, just like that, he may nevertheless freely doubt propositions, suspend judgment about them, voluntarily inhibit the extension of his inferences from them. So direction of our thoughts is a kind of doing, isn't it? It's by the direction of our attention that we encourage or we thwart our propensity to believe things. And thus a person is free to fortify or to undermine beliefs he may have by voluntarily concentrating his attention on certain evidence, ignoring other evidence, misconstruing evidence, seeing it as something it is not, or in the wrong light, or in the wrong proportion, or what have you. In such ways as these, he can deliberately cultivate a belief, whether about some objective matter, or about himself and his beliefs. And he can cultivate a belief which it turns out is wrong, it's contrary to the facts. So now, with these crucial characteristics of belief in mind, that it's an action guiding state of mind, a mental state, that a sense is not logically necessary to it, that avowal is not incorrigible, and finally, that there's a certain degree to which belief is voluntary. With those crucial characteristics in mind, we can go on to explicate, I hope, a non paradoxical account of self deception. I'm going to look first of all then at incompatible beliefs being involved in self deception. According to the other deception model. We should maintain the appropriateness of modeling self deception on other deceptions, contending that there is a common sense for the word deception in both other deception and self deception. Now, this does not commit us to going to the extreme of making self deception out to be a literal case of other deception or like other deception in every detail, as though there was a split personality. In fact, if we did that, it wouldn't be self deception, it would be in fact other deception, one part deceiving, the other part. Rather, self deception should be seen as a general parallel to other deception in certain specifiable ways. Models are not intended to be identical to that which they model. And other deception is a model for self deception. It's like it in some ways, unlike it in other ways. Here are some specifiable ways in which other deception is like self deception. For instance, they both share these elements. The deceiver is responsible for causing the deceived to believe falsely. Secondly, the fact that the deceived hold, at least implicitly, an erroneous belief about the deceiver's belief is common to both of them. And thirdly, the rationalization maneuvers taken in the faith of evidence brought to the attention of the deceiver by others is going to be common. In some cases we have two people involved in these transactions, and in some cases we have one. But we have in all cases at least those three characteristics. So given the other deception model, incompatible beliefs need to be attributed to the self deceiver on the basis of his behavior. And accordingly, self self deception can be portrayed as a conflict state wherein s holds incompatible belief. It's at this point that the important notion of the iteration of belief is going to enter. And very simply, that's going to mean that we're going to talk about first order beliefs. I believe the dog is dangerous. And then second order beliefs will be beliefs about my first order beliefs. Iterated beliefs will mean I'm going to reiterate the belief even in mentioning the second one. I do not believe that my belief that dogs are dangerous is a dumb belief. In essence, the self deceiver holds a first order belief. He believes that he, which is far from being a matter of personal indifference to him, somehow distressing he has a personal stake in it or against is a special kind of belief, one which S dreads he cannot face up to he wishes were otherwise, since it brings some unpleasant truth as he perceives it before him. And so F comes to deny that belief. He believes that P, he sees the evidence, it's clear that this is true, but he can't stand it. And so he comes to deny that belief. While believing that P. He comes to hold additionally a second order of belief. And notice now a false second order belief about that first belief. Namely, he comes to believe that he doesn't believe it. It's all very clear, isn't it? Let me do it one more time for you. The believer has a first order belief that dogs are dangerous. And then he brings himself to a second order belief about that belief. And in this case he comes for various reasons to not want to believe it. So he convinces himself. I don't believe that. I believe dogs are dangerous. That is to be distinguished logically from I don't believe that dogs are dangerous. Although, and here's the important point, the behavioral manifestation of those two is going to for the most part be identical. A man who believes that dogs who does not believe that dogs are dangerous, and a man who does not believe that he believes that dogs are dangerous. These two men are going to for the most part act in identical ways. So, due to the pain it would otherwise cause him, S cannot believe that he believes P, although it need not do so. This denial of his belief can actually take the form of and be facilitated by S coming to believe not P as a way of counteracting this belief. But that's a very complicated matter in philosophy and I don't think we'd have time to really explicated here. The important point in my analysis is that he comes to a false second order belief about his believing that P. The behavioral symptoms of believing that one does not believe P and the behavioral symptoms of believing not P, it will be observed then often overlap extensively and the examination of one's actions both may be easily taken as disbelieving P. What I'm holding is that the incompatibility of beliefs which is found in self deception, where S believes that P and yet believes that he does not believe that P is not then logical in nature. The incompatibility is behavioral and practical in nature. And if you're taking notes, I think that's one point you're not going to want to miss. The incompatibility is not logical, it is practical. Therein lies a good deal of the misconception of many journal articles on the subject. For that matter, even when self deception leads us to believe that P and to believe that not P, that is not really formally contradictory, where you see the two beliefs held by the self deceiver are incompatible because they call for conflicting types of behavior, we wouldn't want to say that the man believes P and not P. What we'd rather say is that he believes P and he believes not P. Now, without putting that up here on the screen, you probably wouldn't follow that. There's no logical contradiction. Even if you forget my iterated qualification about the denial of his release, there's no contradiction because we're not saying of a man who is in self deception that he believes the proposition P and not P. That might be contradictory. It all depends on what your conception of belief is. But rather we're saying this man believes P and it's the case that he doesn't believe P. And I suppose short of having a course in logic, that may not seem all that significant to you, but it makes all the difference in the world because we're saying that he has a belief and he doesn't have a belief. He's in a conflict spirit. But it's a conflict state. That's very practical. It's not logical. It's not as though we're asking him to believe contradictions, it's just that he's in a contradictory state. In particular, then S believes P, but his ascent to P is blocked by acquiring. On my analysis, and you can forget this on my analysis, his ascent is being blocked by acquiring the second order belief that he does not believe P. Use another color here. We're saying that F believes T is also true that F believes that F does not believe P. Okay, so you have to have both. He believes that dogs are dangerous, but he also believes that he does not believe that dogs are dangerous. Now, S has an obvious interest at stake in maintaining the rationality of his second order belief contrary to the first order belief that be and our analysis will contend that this state of mind comes about when in the face of evidence adverse to his cherished second order belief, S engages in contrived and pseudo rationality in his treatment of the evidence. That is, he manipulates, he suppresses. He rationalizes the evidence so as to support a belief which is incompatible with his belief at P. If he looked at himself like we look at him, he'd have all the evidence he needs that he believes P. But because he wants to strain and rationalize that evidence, he doesn't come to believe that he believes P. But he forces upon himself to believe that he doesn't believe punishment. He ignores the obvious. He focuses away from the undesirable indicators. He twists the significance of evidence, goes to extreme measures to enforce this policy of hiding his belief that deed. Now, this rationalizing activity, in order to count as self deception and not something else like simply a cavalier disagreement, must be given a motivational explanation. S distorts the evidence in order to satisfy a desire, namely the desire to avoid the discomfort or pain associated with believing that peace by means of it, he enters into and maintains self deception believing that he does not believe that peace. Actions which have the effect of achieving the special state of incompatible beliefs which has been traced here are referred to in our statement, like S is deceiving himself regarding peace, whatever actions he takes to get into this state. Here are the actions we call self deceiving actions. We need to go a step further. We talked about motivated rationalizing of the evidence. But the whole question is how can a man be culpable for this? How can he be conscious of it, but not conscious of it? And so, in the final portion of my analysis, we have to look at the self covering notion of intention as human actions, motivated rationalizing of one's beliefs as human actions. This motivated rationalizing may be purposefully engaged. That is, they may be done intentionally. If we said of a man that he just fell into self deception, it would be no more a human action or uniquely human action than falling into a pit. But what I want to contend is that he can do it on purpose. Although we need not do it on purpose. There may be accidental cases, unintentional cases. The important thing are the strong cases of self perception of interest to us as Christian apologists. Now, the vexed questions of awareness and purpose in self deception address what is perhaps the underlying perplexity in making sense of self deception. And this is a position I will propose to untangle that perplexity. While the self deceiver is aware of the truth of P, he does not entertain it before his mind, as it were, internally perceiving his belief, nor does he give it a sense. Accordingly, the self deceiver is not aware that he holds incompatible belief. He has them. But since he's not looking at one of them, he doesn't know that he has incompatible beliefs. After all, he doesn't believe that he has a belief. That's he he only believes. But he does not believe that. Peace now. He should recognize the incompatible situation. He should. But the strategy of hiding his dreaded belief prevents him from recognizing it. And if he did recognize the incompatibility and did not resolve it, he wouldn't be self deceived any longer. He'd simply be irrational or perhaps vacillating in his opinion. Further, the self deceiver is not aware that his professor cherished belief about his beliefs is false, even though as a rational man he should know that it's false to say he doesn't believe B he's not aware that it's false. And for that reason we don't call him a bare liar. A critical question, however, is whether one can try to deceive himself and not be aware of these things. Can one engage in self deception on purpose? A common assumption is that if S purposes to do something, then he must be aware of its character. Thus, if F. Can purposely engage in the activity of self deception, rationalizing the evidence so as to hide a dreaded belief, it would seem that he would be aware of its character. He would believe that he is attempting to deceive himself, and that would foil the effort. If you know you are trying to deceive yourself, you can hardly succeed in doing it. Just as much as if one person realized that another person was intending to mislead him in the truth, that other person could hardly successfully do the misleading. However, I would argue that F. S awareness of his aim, his awareness of his intention to do this deed, his awareness of his aim to make the belief that P corp by believing something incompatible with it, will not undermine the success of his deception efforts. What F. Thinks about his purposeful attempt at self deception need not be deception defeating. And we're all asking why? I mean, I keep saying this, but why not? Well, because the intention to deceive oneself can be what is called self cuddling. To intend to deceive oneself, you not only cover the belief, but you cover the intention to cover the belief of self covering and intention. That is, S. Can purpose not only to hide his beliefs at peace, he can also purpose to hide his hiding of it. The self deceiver conceals his intention from himself, or in short, he deceives himself about his intentions and at the very same time that he deceives himself about his belief. He knows that he believes P, he can't stand it. He must with this motivation rationalize the evidence. But as he takes this approach to the evidence very much on purpose, if he's going to remain rational, maintain his self esteem, he must also deceive himself not only about the belief, but about his motivation in approaching the evidence for the belief. What's the problem with the suggestion? Is it only a verbal way of solving the problem? Here we have to cover this deception, so we call it a self covering intention. The argument has been made in some dissertations and in a few articles that this one involved in fact an infinite regress of self deception. I must deceive myself about my belief and now take a step back and deceive myself about about that intention. And now take a step back and deceive myself about that self deceiving intention and belief. And on and on and on and on. Are we going to have an infinite regress of self deceptions in the case of a purposeful self deception? To avoid an infinite regress of self deceptions in the case of purposeful self deception, it must be possible for self deception to be self covering, obscuring itself in the very same process of obscuring S's beliefs at P and yet not calling for a further intention regarding itself in this matter. And all I'm saying here then is that it must be possible for one intention to have two objects so that you don't have to have an intention about this object, the belief, then an intention about this object, the intention itself, than an intention about the intention about the object, and so forth. If an intention can be bifurcated into two objects, then we would solve our problem. And instead of spending a lot of time in complicated philosophical analysis, I simply wish to prove that an intention can be self covering by giving you what is perhaps the most obvious example that you will know in your life that intentions can be self covering is proved. I think if we simply look likens self deception to the intention to go to sleep. Obviously, if you intend to go to sleep and do the things necessary, you lay down, you count the sheep, whatever it is you intend when you want to make yourself go to sleep, that intention will be self covering just in case you are successful. So there are intentions which cover themselves over when they are successfully performed. And if that's true, then there's no reason for us to say that self deceiving intentions cannot likewise be self covering. Granted, when the man intentionally wants to deceive himself and is aware of it at the outset, he is going to eventually lose his awareness and consciousness of what he's doing. If he's successful, the point will come where he can no longer look back and say, that's what I was doing, doing. But at the time that he began, he could. It's like the intention to put out your eyes. At some point in the process, you can no longer audit and examine what's going on. So, in summary, let us say that the statement S deceived himself is true on the following three conditions. S deceived himself is true when one S be believes that P 2, F is motivated to deny his belief that P and 3 by misconstruing the evidence, F brings himself to believe that he does not believe that P. Okay, he sees the evidence and he believes it, but he's motivated to deny that belief because he doesn't like what he sees. And so by misconstruing, by rationalizing, hiding, and so forth, he brings himself to a second order belief, a false second order belief, namely that he does not believe that he believes. Peace. In terms of the characterization of belief that I've offered in this hour now, this analysis of self deception amounts to the through motivated rationalization, S brings it about that in his theoretical inferences and or practical actions and plans, he mistakenly relies upon the proposition that he does not rely upon T and his theoretical inferences and or practical actions and plans. Through motivated rationalization, S brings himself to an incorrect belief about himself. He mistakenly uses that incorrect belief as a premise in its theoretical and practical inferences. Or to put it another way, through motivated rationalization, S comes into a mental state of believing that he does not believe P even though in fact he is in the mental state of believing P S relies on a conception of himself as not relying on P. However, his observed behavior indicates that P is part of his theoretical and practical inferences, his part of his stock of premises. Now, when he engages in such self deception on purpose, the deception, as I said, is self covering. It obscures not only the dread belief, but also the intention and motivation to rationalize away the evidence in favor of it. So let me put it to you in one sentence if you want to look at this whole thing not in technical analysis, just to help you remember what self deception is. Self deception involves deception by the self, of the self for the sake of the self. And about self deception is deception by the self of the self. Actively I deceive myself. I do it for the sake of myself to preserve my cherished beliefs or Self conceptions and I do it about myself for my sake. And how do I do it? By believing falsely about my own beliefs. Let me give you a couple of examples as we consider again that case of Mrs. Jones that we took up last hour. The principal calls her and says that her son Johnny has been caught stealing lunch money out of students debts. The evidence is plain Johnny is a thief. We can add to the story that this is the third or fourth time she's received such calls. And she's noticed money missing out of her own purse. At home she's aware that Johnny has been coming home with expensive items from the store. Mrs. Jones shows all the affairs symptoms of believing the proposition that Johnny is a thief. She tries to avoid situations in which she is likely to be reminded of his dishonesty. However, she moves to a new neighborhood, a new principal. She transfers Johnny into a new school. She does not have a phone put into her home so that no calls can be brought from the principal. She keeps an unusually attentive eye on her boy and she won't discuss why she does these things with her neighbors. Yet on the other hand, since nobody in the Jones family has ever stooped to dishonesty, she persuades herself that Johnny has never done a dishonest deed. She forgets the past evidence. She supplies more credible explanations of the present evidence. After all, the money is missing from her purse. Because she's such a careless and forgetful person. She expresses confidence in her son to others and she makes a show of giving him mature responsibilities. She tries to do only what one who believed in Johnny's virtue would do. She freely confesses that she has a fine boy who is a joy to her, a paragon of virtue. And yet she flies off the handle at him over trifling matters. Unlike the way she used to relate to him prior to the afternoon phone calls. She seizes upon every oblique reference to personal integrity to deliver an extensive extended speech on the importance of honesty among the younger people of our day. She astonishes and embarrasses others by culminating her discourse with an emotional outburst that her Johnny is the living example of an honest child. When neighbors get curious over her missing cash and Johnny's new unusually expensive acquisition, Mrs. Jones fidgets. She slightly blushes. She looks away. She enters in a halting fashion. She treats the broach evidence in a very unusual and distorted fashion world. All the while apparently satisfying herself that her interpretations are very plausible. The scenario could be extended. But even from this much we should be willing to say that the affective Symptoms of believing that Johnny is deceived justify us in attributing that belief to Mrs. Jones. She cannot stand the thought that her son, however, could sleep so low. She is motivated to hide this information. She is motivated to dissent from it. She has a desire to rid herself of the psychic discomfort caused by believing that Johnny is a thief. Consequently, she rationalizes the evidence. The school officials have a vendetta against Johnny. They're framing him because he's such a good student. She leans on implausible interpretations of the facts. She ignores the bastion, often the most obvious indicators. Thereby she brings herself to believe that she does not believe in Johnny's dishonesty. She fools herself, you see, about her awareness of the truth. The symptoms of this false second order belief are nearly identical with believing the negation of the proposition that Joni is deceived. Merely. She does not conceive of herself as not trusting her son, and so she assents to his virtue, making makes a show of relying on him. She meets all of the criteria proposed, and accordingly we say quite naturally that she is deceiving herself. And so it seems to me that the analysis of self deception which I have offered here is sufficient to describe accurately the common and the obvious cases of self deception to which we often hear reference. More importantly, and in closing, this analysis is self deception in terms of iterated beliefs, corrigible disavowals and self covering intentions is also adequate to explain the self deception described by Paul in Romans 1 and utilized in a crucial way in presuppositional apologetics. First of all, all men know and hence believe that God exists. The revelational evidence is so plain that nobody can avoid holding the conviction that that God exists, even though they may never explicitly assent to this belief. We can ascribe such a belief to men on the basis of their observed behavior in reasoning how they rely on the uniformity of nature without any explanation, we see that in their morals holding to ethical absolutes without any explanation of that, we see it in their emotions how they fear death even though they say there's nothing after it. Nevertheless, all men are motivated in unrighteousness and by fear of judgment to ignore, hide and disavow any belief in God. By misconstruing and rationalizing the relevant inescapable evidence around and within them, men bring themselves to believe that they do not believe that they believe in God. Sinners can purposefully engage in this kind of activity, for they also deceive themselves about their motivation in handling the evidence as they do and about their real intentions, thereby as we're going to sleep about their beliefs, or as the Bible puts it, forgetting their God. Because the evidence is clear and because the suppression of the truth is intentional, we can properly conclude that all men are without excuse and that they bear full responsibility for their sins of mind and reasoning. And in this sense I think we can better understand and appreciate what Paul says in Romans 1, namely that knowing God, all men suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Non paradoxically, they culpably deceive themselves about their own nature. Thank you.