They're nearly two sides of the same coin, the same virtue and the same fault: falling to aim for truth in what you say, failing to aim for truth in what you think.

It is humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood. — creativesoul

I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six falsehoods before breakfast.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. — George Orwell

My god, that's brutal. I had forgotten.

Chomsky said somewhere that his life's work was organized around two complementary problems that he called "Plato's Problem" and "Orwell's Problem". Plato's problem is: How do we know so much, given so little evidence? While Orwell's Problem is: How do we know so little, given so much evidence?

Knowing that 'X' is false makes it impossible to believe 'X'. I believe 'X' about myself. I cannot do both, know that 'X' is false(about myself) and believe that 'X' is true(about myself).

As soon as we become aware that 'X' is false, we cannot possibly believe otherwise. That holds good in cases where 'X' is true, but we believe 'X' is false. If we believe 'X', then we believe 'X' is true; is the case; corresponds to fact/reality; is the way things are; etc. We cannot do both, believe 'X' and know that 'X' is not true; is not the case; does not correspond to fact/reality; is not the way things are; etc. — creativesoul

I'd say that given a dimension of time that this could be overcome. So right now if I believe "X", then I know "~X", I could then choose to believe "X" and forget or ignore "~X"

With a dimension of time we also have changes of awareness. So at different moments we can come to be aware of different things.

Well, strictly speaking 'one' who has two minds is two... not one. We cannot be of two minds, strictly speaking... aside from having some sort of multiple personality disorder. These are common is cases of tremendous childhood trama. It's a coping mechanism. Since the facts are too much for the one individual to bear, the one 'creates' an alternative persona as a means to 'split up' the burdens...

I see nothing wrong with saying that people of one mind can hold contradictory beliefs. I would wager that everyone does, at least during some period of their life. Some become aware of this and choose. Others become aware and suspend judgment. Others become aware and struggle to grasp what's going on, and thus chalk it up to being normal, or some other ad hoc explanation. Others never become aware.

There is some tremendous difficulty involved in becoming aware of one's own false belief, assuming one wants to correct the situation.

It is also quite common to be uncertain about something or other. These latest situations I've mentioned are often spoken of in terms of "being of two minds", and that makes perfect sense in everyday parlance. — creativesoul

I think we're basically in agreement on lying. At least I'm most interested in this more robust theory of lying, as opposed to delusion, just because it's the more difficult case -- and you seem to agree that delusion is possible, just not lying

So your main point of disagreement is really that being of two minds is not normal -- it would have to be a pathology of some kind at play in order for someone to lie to themselves.

I think you mean to say that lying is -- to tell someone a falsehood while knowing it is false. — creativesoul

I had in mind saying "I do not have the money" when "I have the money" is true -- but yeah, I was flipping the signs in my head. The former would be a falsehood, the later a truth, and you'd be saying the falsehood and not the truth.

Lying has less to do with truth, and more to do with thought and belief. That is, lies themselves consist of statements that can be either true or false, but the lie is always told by someone deliberately misrepresenting what they think and/or believe. — creativesoul

I think this is a minor disagreement between us. I see what you mean, but I'd say that you'd have to know something to be true and then say its opposite, whereas you'd say that it comes down to belief -- so you believe "X" is true, but you say "~X".

Good enough for me. I think the split-mind disagreement is the stronger of the two. Yeah?

That's a pretty good example of what lying to oneself would be like in action.

Self-deception - which I presume is the focus of this thread - — jkg20

Yup! :D

is perhaps best not modelled on the binary relation of A deceiving B (even where A and B are the same person). After all, I could deceive myself without engaging in self-deception - an example, suppose I am in the army on a shooting range, and I am charged with camoflaging targets. I do the job so well that even I cannot tell the targets from the bushes. I've deceived myself, but it's not a case of self-deception. Someone earlier in this thread mentioned the idea that self-deception (lying to oneself) is more akin to giving yourself bad reasons for not pushing yourself to the end of a chain of reasoning that will definitively reach a conclusion you do not like.

So it's something, in your view, that happens along a chain of reasoning. So you might have the notion that this is going somewhere bad, and then come up with some reasons that you don't scrutinize too deeply to make it go somewhere good.

That seems right to me and doesn't involve too much metaphysical nonsense about split selves etc.

What's nonsensical about a split self? Is it any more nonsensical than a singular self?

It is humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood. Deception - in and of itself - comes in many forms. One of which is lying to another. One cannot deceive oneself. That's pure unadulterated nonsense — creativesoul

What you are refusing to take account of, is the fact that people change as time passes, and their minds change as well. Deception is an act in which the act of the deceiver is prior in time to the falsity being believed as true by the deceived, the result of the deception. One is the cause, the other the effect. So the deceiver hands a falsehood and the receiver takes it and is deceived.

There is no logical reason to conclude that one cannot deceive oneself. What the person at an earlier time knew as a falsity, is represented to oneself at that time as as a truth. The same person at a later time, having forgotten the act of deception, believes the falsity as a truth. Never in this whole process does the person "knowingly believe a falsehood" as you insist is necessary for self-deception. The person at one time tells oneself that a falsity is the truth, not actually believing it is the truth. The same person at a later time believes it to be the truth without remembering that at one time it was not believed to be the truth.

So your main point of disagreement is really that being of two minds is not normal -- it would have to be a pathology of some kind at play in order for someone to lie to themselves. — Moliere

Not really. I disagree with the framework itself. I acknowledge that many, if not most, folk talk in ways that lead to self-contradiction and/or incoherence. I acknowledge that these are meaningful ways to talk about stuff. My point is that we can be wrong about some stuff, particularly anything and everything that exists in it's entirety prior to our becoming aware of it. Our mental ongoings are precisely such things. Thought and belief are mental ongoings. We can get such things wrong. If we work from an ill-conceived notion of thought and belief, our notion of lying will suffer the consequences along with all else we say about ourselves.

Deliberately misrepresenting one's own thought and belief is always a lie.

Much talk about lying involves talk about "telling the truth" as well. This has all sorts of problems too. If one must only say what's true in order to be "telling the truth", then the only way that one could do such a thing is if their entire belief system is infallible. Truth cannot be false. That's the problem. We all have false belief. "Telling the truth" doesn't require omniscience. It requires honesty in speech. It requires saying what one believes to be true. "Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is rubbish on it's face. It is either an impossible criterion to meet, or it conflates truth and belief. It's a prima facie example of language based upon gross misunderstanding of how thought, belief, meaning, and truth work together long before we become aware of our ow mental ongoings...

p1 Being tricked requires not knowing your being tricked.
p2 Tricking another requires knowing you're tricking.
c1 Tricking oneself requires knowing that one is tricking oneself, and not knowing that one is being tricked.
p4 One cannot do both, know s/he is tricking him/herself, and not know that s/he is being tricked.
C2 One cannot trick oneself

I remember hearing years ago that it's common for emergency rooms to have a spike in admissions just before dawn. The explanation was people lying awake all night telling themselves "It's nothing" and eventually accepting that something was terribly wrong. — Srap Tasmaner

What's wrong with saying that they believed nothing was wrong, but after all night passing without change in their condition, they began to believe that something was wrong. That is, they changed their belief, as compared/contrasted to misrepresenting it to themselves.

Lying has less to do with truth, and more to do with thought and belief. That is, lies themselves consist of statements that can be either true or false, but the lie is always told by someone deliberately misrepresenting what they think and/or believe.
— creativesoul

I think this is a minor disagreement between us. I see what you mean, but I'd say that you'd have to know something to be true and then say its opposite... — Moliere

Well, I once held that view as well...

Joe watches a car accident happen. A brown car ran a red light and crashed into a blue one. Joe knows the driver of the brown car, and he wants to help her avoid fault charges, so he lies to Brian about what he saw. Brian believes Joe, also knows both drivers and does not like the driver of the brown car. So, even though he did not witness the accident, he claimed he did, and when asked who's fault the accident was, Brian states something that he does not believe to be true, but is when he says "the brown car"...

If being a lie requires knowing something to be true, and saying it's opposite, then Joe lied, but Brian only lied when he said that he too saw it. Both deliberately misrepresented their own thought and belief.

On my view, they both lied. Joe once, and Brian twice. Joe's lie was false. Brian's first one was false, but his second was true...

What's wrong with saying that they believed nothing was wrong, but after all night passing without change in their condition, they began to believe that something was wrong. That is, they changed their belief, as compared/contrasted to misrepresenting it to themselves. — creativesoul

Because that happens too, and it's a different phenomenon. What you're missing is that self-deception is usually strongly motivated and irrational.

Here's a salient example: relationships. Self-deception often involves manipulation of evidence, but when it comes to figuring out what are other people think and feel, a lot of that evidence is subtle and ephemeral. We're good at picking up on these tiny tells, almost unnoticeable variations in inflection, expression, eye movement and focus, tone of voice -- all of that stuff we process without usually being consciously aware of it. We just know.

My point is this: it's particularly easy to get away with fooling yourself in this context because your "judgment" was arrived at automatically based on "evidence" you probably couldn't articulate. And that makes it all too easy to dismiss. You don't want to believe something's bothering your spouse? No problem: there's not much you could really point to as evidence anyway. (It was just a feeling you had.) But anyone who's ever done this knows they were fooling themselves.

Or, from the other side, want to believe that cute girl in your homeroom, or at work, or making your coffee, is into you? You can probably find something to count as "evidence". For most of us, enough contrary evidence arrives and quickly enough that a restraining order is unnecessary.

It occurs to me that we can very easily and in the true sense of the phrase 'lie to ourselves' if we're content with deceiving our future-selves rather than our present-selves; the necessary ingredients are forgetfulness or suggestibility (as you can probably imagine, someone with Alzheimer's could quite effectively lie to their future selves).

A weak case can be built upon the consumption of fictional entertainment where immersion causes a suspension of disbelief. While we're never fully deceived by fiction (and that it is the fictional work doing the deceiving), the intent to become immersed in the first place (which requires some albeit weak or pseudo-level of belief change) can constitute a form of intentional self-deception. "Escapism" highlights the difference between this kind of intentional self-deception and the mere consideration of hypotheticals.

A strong case for the intentional deception of our future selves exists in the case of intentional mood altering practices (though they do not necessarily come with specific belief changes, mood changes can easily cause changes in belief). It may not be "lying" to instigate a general mood change but it's definitely intentional self-manipulation to purposefully alter one's mood by pro/prescribing substances, physical activities, or other means. Mood changes would most directly affect emotionally contingent opinions, but they can and do also impact actual beliefs. For instance, someone who lacks confidence might try to consciously project confident body language (i.e: smile more) in hopes that it will impact on how confident they actually feel, and in turn change their beliefs which are in part dependent upon their confidence (i.e: what they can accomplish, the moral nature of the average person, etc...).

Drinking in order to forget or become distracted from an unpleasant reality seems to at least fit the description of "lying by omission". If an omission can be a lie, then at least while inebriated we are possibly being lied to by our former selves...

Because that happens too, and it's a different phenomenon. — Srap Tasmaner

Is it though? Seems to be a different explanation of the same phenomenon; one with fewer entities, no self-contradiction, equal explanatory power, and just as much plausibility. Why opt otherwise?

What you're missing is that self-deception is usually strongly motivated and irrational... — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, and the explanation is self-contradictory, and thus furthering the irrationality.

...Here's a salient example: relationships. Self-deception often involves manipulation of evidence, but when it comes to figuring out what are other people think and feel, a lot of that evidence is subtle and ephemeral. We're good at picking up on these tiny tells, almost unnoticeable variations in inflection, expression, eye movement and focus, tone of voice -- all of that stuff we process without usually being consciously aware of it. We just know.(emphasis mine) — Srap Tasmaner

Are we though? On my view, there are multiple underlying reasons for what is otherwise the same outward behaviour(s). Misattribution of meaning regarding these subtle behaviours that we purportedly 'just know' runs rampant. That is particularly the case between people from vastly differing cultural, familial, and otherwise socially influenced norms.

My point is this: it's particularly easy to get away with fooling yourself in this context because your "judgment" was arrived at automatically based on "evidence" you probably couldn't articulate. And that makes it all too easy to dismiss. You don't want to believe something's bothering your spouse? No problem: there's not much you could really point to as evidence anyway. (It was just a feeling you had.) But anyone who's ever done this knows they were fooling themselves.

Anyone whose ever thought that something was bothering their spouse, based upon subtle behaviours but didn't want to get into it and so avoided addressing their own 'feeling' and their own belief that something may be wrong, weren't fooling themselves into believing otherwise. They were rationalizing their own decision to not talk about it. In this case, the person is deliberately not representing their own thought and belief, because they are intentionally avoiding talking about it.

Or, from the other side, want to believe that cute girl in your homeroom, or at work, or making your coffee, is into you? You can probably find something to count as "evidence". For most of us, enough contrary evidence arrives and quickly enough that a restraining order is unnecessary.

Here again, how is this lying to oneself? One either believes that another is into them or not. The belief, very well may be unfounded, but it is a belief nonetheless. One is not lying to themselves, rather they just believe things without good enough reason.

A strong case for the intentional deception of our future selves exists in the case of intentional mood altering practices (though they do not necessarily come with specific belief changes, mood changes can easily cause changes in belief). It may not be "lying" to instigate a general mood change but it's definitely intentional self-manipulation to purposefully alter one's mood by pro/prescribing substances, physical activities, or other means. Mood changes would most directly affect emotionally contingent opinions, but they can and do also impact actual beliefs. For instance, someone who lacks confidence might try to consciously project confident body language (i.e: smile more) in hopes that it will impact on how confident they actually feel, and in turn change their beliefs which are in part dependent upon their confidence (i.e: what they can accomplish, the moral nature of the average person, etc...). — VagabondSpectre

I'm at a loss here...

One can most certainly change the way that they look at the world by virtue of changing the way they talk about it and/or themselves. One can do this deliberately. One can deliberately change they way that they behave as a means to change the way they feel. This can, in turn, change one's belief.

How is that deception?

If it takes talking about one person as though they were a plurality of different selves in order to make sense of lying to oneself, it seems to me that it makes better sense to abandon the notion altogether and learn to talk about the same situations in better ways...

How is that deception? — creativesoul

Because it's intentional belief altering via coercive/irrational means. Is deception the intent to conceal or manipulate or is it the successful concealment/manipulation of objective truth? I'll satisfy both:

Lets say I'm at a singles bar looking for a date, and I know that statistically my chances of being successful are low... Consuming alcohol can make me go from believing it is true that I will likely fail to either forgetting or believing the opposite, even while it remains true that I will likely fail despite the statistical benefits alcohol may confer.

I think if one ( it ought to be two, really) could completely grasp that the image can do nothing to help in this situation, that one is completely helpless, then one simply does stop. One gives up. — unenlightened

If there are two... who/ what is the other?

If there are two... who/ what is the other? — Evil

It is hard to answer, because in saying anything, I am going to be making an image. But as near as I can get, compare :

1. I am an English philosopher. (identity, image)
2. I am writing a post. (activity, fact)

If I make an identity of 'poster', then I am a poster even when I am not posting, or a philosopher when I am not philosophising, or English when I live in France.

p1 Being tricked requires not knowing your being tricked. — creativesoul

You're mixing present and past tense "being tricked". "Having been tricked" requires not knowing that you've been tricked. And this is fulfilled when you forget that you've tricked yourself.

p4 One cannot do both, know s/he is tricking him/herself, and not know that s/he is being tricked. — creativesoul

Why not?

The reason I say that lying being based on knowledge or belief is a minor disagreement is because I'm willing to go along with your theory of lying. I'm not so interested in justification, meaning, truth, or belief as much as I am in a theory of mind. So sure, it's a disagreement, but I'm fine with setting the stage as you say -- that lying is the intentional misrepresentation of one's own belief. That fits well enough for me.

It seems to me that if we are of a split mind that we could still accomplish this -- adding a dimension of time and some notion of awareness would resolve any sort of conflict. And if this could be demonstrated to be non-pathological, it would even be a possible normal event ("possible" just because that seems more empirical question that I do not have an answer to)

EDIT: (Relates to the above)

If it takes talking about one person as though they were a plurality of different selves in order to make sense of lying to oneself, it seems to me that it makes better sense to abandon the notion altogether and learn to talk about the same situations in better ways. — creativesoul

I don't see what makes a singular self better than a divided self. For that matter I'm not sure what would make a divided self better than a singular self, at this point.

One wouldn't need to be a literal two selves within a single mind. I think merely having a divided mind -- of whatever kind -- is enough to count as lying as you define lying. Some part of the mind can deliberately misrepresent a belief to another part of the mind, and our awareness can shift from the one to the other through time.

But what would make either notion a better notion?

If it takes talking about one person as though they were a plurality of different selves in order to make sense of lying to oneself, it seems to me that it makes better sense to abandon the notion altogether and learn to talk about the same situations in better ways...

That seems along the right lines to me. The "splitting of selves" approach (I think it goes by the term "psychological partitioning" in the literature) only makes sense if one tries to force self-deception into the model of one person being deceitful to another. In those cases the key point is that the deceitful person both believes/knows something to be the case and intends that the other should believe the opposite is the case. Self-deception does not seem like that to me, it is more like having a suspicion that something you wish to be true may not be true, but rather than pursuing the chain of reasoning that will decide the issue for you, you give yourself (perhaps bad) reasons for not pursuing that chain of reasoning.

Lets say I'm at a singles bar looking for a date, and I know that statistically my chances of being successful are low — VagabondSpectre

This is a point that should have been made earlier. Beliefs are almost always best thought of as partial, as confidences. You believe you're unlikely to be successful and that you have a chance of being successful. Alcohol either suppresses the former completely, or just futzes with the numbers, so that your chances look better with every drink. You're not going from believing P to believing ~P or something, because you believe both, partially, from the start. Typical self-deception is deliberately mis-calibrating your confidences.

I think what you describe is plausible. I don't think I'd call it lying in the strict sense.

But what makes this plausible description something which actually annuls the act of lying to oneself?

By "splitting of selves" I just mean it generically -- like, I can see multiple ways you or others might parse what that means. Partitioning, or having a tripartite division of mind such as Plato's or Freud's, or as I've been saying just having an awareness which can move from different parts of the mind, or as un has been saying between the image, the self, and the speaker of the sentence making the division. I'm sure there are other ways it could be parsed.

In some sense there is a factual aspect that would need to be investigated ,and it could even be case-by-case. But investigating the facts of a mind is something of a tricky business, and deserving of some philosophical scrutiny to understand how a fact might be significant one way or another. And in a sense I think it's worthy to note that it may not be just the facts -- as un points out, there could also be commitments of one kind or another in making an identity, which are over and above the facts.


And then even more generally speaking -- what would make this singular self picture a better picture than a split self picture? It must be more than the facts because we could probably reconcile facts either way.

Another thought on "splitting" --

Something that @VagabondSpectre's approach does make me think of, explicitly at least, is that there could also be a difference between a self and a mind. So the self has a seemingly singular quality to it -- we always feel like we're the same person and can entertain, at least in a clear and distinct way as philosophers tend to like to do, about one thought at a time. But the mind can be much wider than the self, and it may not just be the self that lies but the mind.

what would make this singular self picture a better picture than a split self picture? — Moliere

For some purposes we ignore what's going on under the hood. You, the single individual person, are responsible for what you say, and for the consequences of your decisions. Looking under the hood provides a more nuanced description, but it's really changing the subject.

Is it? If it is necessary to have a split mind in order for it to be possible for one to lie to oneself, then it seems pretty relevant to me. At least it's a logical next step, under the assumption that this is the only way to parse that phrase into something which is actually lying to oneself, as opposed to it just being a turn of phrase that, in a strict sense, means something else.

it seems pretty relevant to me. — Moliere

Absolutely. In fact, since posting it occurs to me that the concept of "lying" belongs to one level -- the person level, where we hold individuals responsible for their words -- while "self deception" belongs to another level, where we try to understand how we and others think.

I think that's probably right, but we've become so sophisticated that now we hold people responsible for fooling themselves. Which is not completely crazy -- as I said above, I think there are related norms in play here. Both lying and self-deception are violations; they're just not exactly the same violation of exactly the same norm.

p4 One cannot do both, know s/he is tricking him/herself, and not know that s/he is being tricked.
— creativesoul

Why not? — Moliere

My apologies.

I'm at a momentary loss here. I presumed that that was obvious. I am rather prone to mistakenly assuming that my interlocutor has read me for quite some time, and thus is already amidst the same stream of thought that I've been following for quite some time now.

This ought help to make it more so...

One cannot be tricked into believing something if they know both how they're being tricked, and that they're being tricked.

One who is performing the trickery knows both how and that they're doing it. That is because it's being done purely for the sake of doing so. Intentionally tricking oneself is impossible.

One cannot know how and that one is tricking him/herself and not know how and that one is tricking oneself.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

...I'm willing to go along with your theory of lying. I'm not so interested in justification, meaning, truth, or belief as much as I am in a theory of mind. So sure, it's a disagreement, but I'm fine with setting the stage as you say -- that lying is the intentional misrepresentation of one's own belief. That fits well enough for me. — Moliere

All mind consists entirely of thought and belief on my view. All thought and belief is meaningful and itself presupposes truth... lies notwithstanding. Without introducing meaning, truth, and belief into the mix whatever theory of mind discussed will be utterly incomplete, wouldn't you agree?