Philosophical Explorations

An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action

ISSN: 1386-9795 (Print) 1741-5918 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpex20

The role of pretense in the process of self-

deception

Xintong Wei

To cite this article: Xintong Wei (2020): The role of pretense in the process of self-deception,
Philosophical Explorations, DOI: 10.1080/13869795.2020.1711960

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2020.1711960

Published online: 12 Jan 2020.

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Philosophical Explorations, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2020.1711960

The role of pretense in the process of self-deception

Xintong Weia,b*
a
Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews, Saint Andrews, UK; bDepartment of
Philosophy, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
(Received 27 March 2019; final version received 10 December 2019)

Gendler [2007. “Self-deception as Pretense.” Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1): 231–

258] offers an account of self-deception in terms of imaginative pretense, according
to which the self-deceptive state is a pretense rather than a doxastic attitude. The self-
deceived agent who deceives herself about p merely pretends that p is true. In this
paper, I aim, first, to show why Gendler’s pretense view requires revision, and
second, to offer an alternative account of pretense’s role in self-deception which
draws on Gendler’s insight but avoids her problematic anti-doxastic conclusion. I
highlight how this view may help to further our doxastic understanding of self-
deception. Self-deception should be understood as a diachronic and dynamic process.
It often starts with pretense, though it always ends with an inappropriate doxastic
attitude, provided that the agent succeeds in deceiving herself. Finally, I discuss some
implications of this view in the wider debates concerning the nature of self-
knowledge and the ethics of pretense.
Keywords: self-deception; pretense; belief; social self-deception; self-knowledge;
privileged access

1. Introduction
There are three main views on what self-deception consists of. According to intentionalist
views of self-deception, self-deception is parallel to interpersonal deception except that the
deceiver and the deceived are one and the same person (Bermúdez 2000; Davidson 1982,
1985; Talbott 1995). To deceive oneself is for one to intentionally acquire a belief known or
believed by oneself to be false. On deflationist approaches, self-deception is reducible to
having motivationally biased beliefs and no intent of deception is required. According to
the deflationist, desire (Mele 2001), anxiety (Barnes 1997) or other motivational factors
play an important role in self-deceptive belief-formation. More recently, some philosophers
have defended what I will call the normativist views of self-deception, which characterizes
self-deception in normative terms, as belief-formation in violation of the epistemic norms
that the self-deceived agent subscribes to (Van Leeuwen 2008), or as failure of self-knowl-
edge in terms of negligence which amounts to a violation of some epistemic norms (Fernán-
dez 2013).
Despite the difference, there is a wide consensus among these three families of views
that self-deception is doxastic. Self-deception is essentially understood in terms of S’s
acquisition of some doxastic attitude about p when S’s overall evidence in conjunction
with the epistemic norms she subscribes to do not warrant that doxastic attitude.1 It is

*Email: l.weixintong@gmail.com; xw30@st-andrews.ac.uk

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 Xintong Wei

easy to see why it is compelling to put self-deception in doxastic terms. After all, self-
deception is a species of deception and the characterization of any form of deception intui-
tively involves the deceived subject acquiring an inappropriate doxastic attitude. Moreover,
putting self-deception in doxastic terms helps to explain the irrationality of self-deception,
since the self-deceived agent engages in some inappropriate epistemic practices in forming
her doxastic attitude.2
Gendler (2007) strikingly challenges the prevailing consensus that self-deception is
doxastic. She offers an account of self-deception in terms of imaginative pretense, accord-
ing to which the self-deceptive state is a pretense rather than a doxastic attitude. The self-
deceived agent who deceives herself about p merely pretends that p is true.
In this paper, I aim to show, first, why Gendler’s pretense view requires revision (Section
2 and 3).3 And second, I offer an account of pretense’s role in self-deception which draws on
Gendler’s insight but avoids her problematic anti-doxastic conclusion (Section 4). I highlight
how correctly understanding pretense’s role may help to further a doxastic understanding of
self-deception. Finally, I discuss some implications of the view in the wider debates concern-
ing the nature of self-knowledge and the ethics of pretense (Section 5).

2. Gendler’s account of self-deception as imaginative pretense

Let us begin our discussion by laying out Gendler’s pretense view of self-deception.
Gendler gives the following account of self-deception:

A person who is self-deceived about not-P pretends (in the sense of make-believe or imagines
or fantasizes) that not-P is the case, often while believing that P is the case and not believing
that not-P is the case. The pretense that not-P largely plays the role normally played by belief in
terms of (i) introspective vivacity and (ii) motivation of action in a wide range of circum-
stances. (Gendler 2007, 223–224)

Gendler (2007, 239–240) distinguishes two kinds of pretense: performative pretense

and imaginative pretense. To have a performative pretense of p is to act non-believingly
as if p were the case. Performative pretense is common in, for instance, theatrical perform-
ance, make-belief games, interpersonal deception and so on. When I performatively pretend
to be someone, I act in ways that are appropriate for the role specified and I do the sorts of
things one would normally do in that circumstance. For example, when I play King Lear I
weep over the “dead body” of Cordelia. By contrast, an imaginative pretense is to “rep-
resent things as being a certain way to oneself” (Gendler 2007, 240). It is common in,
for instance, reading a fiction, watching a play and so on. When I read the story of King
Lear, I imagine King Lear’s tragic deterioration into madness. I have emotional responses
to his fate – I rejoice, I despair, though I know that the events recounted are not real. In
engaging with the fictional work, I represent things as being a certain way according to
the contents of the fictional work.
On Gendler’s account of self-deception, the agent who self-deceives herself about p is
primarily engaging with an imaginative pretense (pretending the world being a p-like way),
and may also be engaging with a performative pretense (acting (non-believingly) as if p
were true) to reinforce her imaginative pretense (241).
Gendler’s account of self-deception as imaginative pretense is motivated by two well-
known puzzles of self-deception which put considerable pressure on doxastic conception of
self-deception. To facilitate our discussion, consider a classic illustration of doxastic self-
deception in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina:
 The Role of Pretense in the Process of Self-deception 3

Vronsky went whenever there was a chance of meeting Anna and whenever he could speak to
her of his love. She gave him no encouragement, but every time they met her heart quickened
with the same feeling of animation that had seized her in the train the day she first saw him. She
knew that at the sight of him joy lit up her eyes and drew her lips into a smile, and she could not
quench the expression of that joy. At first Anna sincerely believed that she was displeased with
him for daring to pursue her; but soon after her return from Moscow, having gone to a party
where she expected to meet him but to which he did not come, she distinctly realised, by
the disappointment that overcame her, that she had been deceiving herself and that his
pursuit was not only not distasteful to her, but was the whole interest of her life. (Tolstoy
1975, 143)4

In this episode of self-deception, our heroin Anna Karenina claimed to sincerely believe that
she was displeased with Vronsky, despite that there are plenty of signs indicating that she
was in fact in love with him. In fact, on Tolstoy’s construal, she knew that she was not dis-
pleased with Vronsky – she knew that joy lit up her eyes whenever she sees him. Anna had
been deceiving herself that she was displeased with Vronsky, perhaps out of fear of a failed
marriage, or perhaps because of her desire to maintain a self-conception as a devoted
mother and wife.
This kind of cases give rise to what Mele (2001) identifies as the static and dynamic
puzzles of self-deception. First, how is it possible that someone intentionally brings
about a belief that she knows or believes to be false? If Anna Karenina knew all along
that she was in love with Vronsky, how could she trick herself to believe that she disliked
him? Mele calls this the dynamic puzzle of self-deception. Second, there is also the static
puzzle of self-deception. The self-deceived agent seems to be in an impossible state of
mind, e.g. that of believing two contradictory propositions p and not-p. How could Anna
believe that she was displeased with Vronsky while also knowing or believing that it is
not the case?
On Gendler’s pretense view, Anna Karenina’s self-deceptive state is an imaginative pre-
tense that she was displeased with Vronsky. The pretense view thus avoids the two puzzles.
The dynamic puzzle does not arise because there is no distinctive problem with intention-
ally pretending something to be true while believing that it is false. Nor does the static
puzzle arise because on the pretense view there are no contradictory beliefs. It also main-
tains the agential aspect of self-deception in the sense that the self-deceived agent engages
in pretense in deceiving herself.
I think Gendler makes an important contribution to the debate by drawing our attention
to the role of pretense in self-deception. Gendler is right that someone who is self-deceiving
about p may be pretending that p, but she is wrong that someone who is self-deceived about
p is merely pretending that p. It is a mistake to identify the self-deceptive state as an ima-
ginative pretense. In the next section, I give two arguments why the self-deceptive state
cannot be an imaginative pretense.

3. Why Gendler’s account requires revision

Following Velleman (2000), Gendler contends that belief is an attitude that essentially aims
at truth, whereas pretending or imagining that p is independent of one’s commitment to a p-
world. Gendler argues that the mental attitude we attribute to the self-deceived agent,
through which we describe, explain and predict her actions, cannot be belief:

If I believe that P, I bear the attitude that I do towards P with the aim of thereby bearing that
attitude towards something true. But the self-deceived subject’s attitude towards not-P is, in
4 Xintong Wei

important ways, reality-indifferent: she does not hold not-P because not-P is true; she holds not-
P because she wishes to be (or to have the experience of being) in a not-P world. (Gendler 2007,
242)

The truth-aiming feature of belief is understood in broadly normative terms, as Gendler

cashes it out further in terms of its relation to evidence:
… if I bear an attitude of belief towards P, I should be willing to submit my evidence for P to
rational scrutiny, and I should be committed to abandoning my belief if I acquire grounds for
thinking it false. (Gendler 2007, 236, my emphasis)

Gendler’s anti-doxastic conclusion that the self-deceptive state is not a belief relies on two
premises:
(P1) Belief is essentially a truth-aiming attitude.
(P2) The self-deceptive state is not truth-aiming.

Given that it is widely held among philosophers that belief is the kind of attitude that essen-
tially aims at truth, I do not take issues with (P1) here.5 I focus my discussion on (P2).6
Recall that on Gendler’s view, if a person did believe that p, she had the aim of thereby
bearing that attitude towards something true. But in the case of self-deception, Gendler
argues, the person who is self-deceived about p does not seem to be reality-sensitive or
responsive to evidence with respect to her attitude towards p, as such, she does not seem
to have the aim of bearing that attitude towards something true. Hence the self-deceptive
attitude is not a truth-aiming attitude.
Gendler’s argument for (P2) seems to be a form of inference to the best explanation: the
self-deceived agent’s insensitivity to reality is best explained by the claim that the attitude
involved is not truth-aiming.
This inference is not warranted for two reasons. First, truth-aiming is a normative
feature: from the descriptive fact that a person who is self-deceived about p bears an attitude
that fails to track the reality, we cannot conclude that the self-deceptive attitude does not
have the normative feature of truth-aiming. Compare: the fact that I failed to hit the
target while shooting does not show that I did not aim at the target – it may very well be
explained by the fact that I am not a good archer. Similarly, the fact that the self-deceptive
attitude fails to hit the target of truth does not mean that it is not truth-aiming. Its failure to
hit the target of truth may very well be explained by the fact that the self-deceptive attitude
is ill-grounded.7 A climate change denier’s attitude towards global warming is insensitive to
reality, but this is not a good reason to think that he does not have a belief.
Gendler here might conflate whether an attitude is truth-aiming with whether the
subject who has that attitude is truth-aiming. Gendler seems to think that the latter
implies the former. Since the self-deceived agent does not aim at truth (because she is insen-
sitive to reality), the attitude she has is not truth-aiming.
However, even if we grant that the latter implies the former, I do not think it is right to
say that the self-deceived agent does not aim at truth. We observe that in cases of self-decep-
tion, the self-deceived agent tends to minimize her contact with evidence or tries to explain
it away when confronted. For example, on Mele’s deflationist account, the self-deceived
tends to treat the evidence in a biased way in support of her self-deceptive belief (Mele
2001). The fact that the self-deceived agent would appeal to evidence (despite in a
biased way), suggests that she, at least, takes herself to be aiming at acquiring true beliefs.
To put the point slightly differently, from a third-person point of view, the self-deceived
agent does seem reality-insensitive and may engage in irrational practices such as ignoring,
 The Role of Pretense in the Process of Self-deception 5

hand-picking, misinterpreting evidence. However, from the agent’s own point of view, she is
not reality-insensitive in the sense that she is responsive to what she believes to be the rel-
evant evidence, even if, objectively the evidence might have been inappropriately
manipulated.
Another reason why the inference to (P2) is not warranted is this. If (P2) were true, that
the self-deceptive attitude is not a truth-aiming attitude, then it would be difficult to see how
we can demand the agent to revise her attitude for epistemic reasons – her attitude towards p
is not irrational, unjustified or incorrect. Compare: if I imagine that trees can talk, there is no
pressure for me to revise my attitude, but if I believe that trees can talk, there is.8 It seems
that in the case of self-deception, we often do, and in most cases rightly so, criticize the self-
deceived agent’s attitude towards p for failing to track the truth. This, or so I argue, suggests
that in practice we take self-deceptive attitudes to be subject to epistemic norms and criti-
cisable in light of such norms. In short, the anti-doxastic conclusion is not warranted due to
the lack of support for (P2).
The second argument why the self-deceptive state cannot be a pretense runs as follows.
Consider the plausible thought that pretending that p will not have the same motivational
effect as having a belief that p. To begin with, it is true that you might in many ways act
as if you were a doctor for various reasons. Maybe you are playing a game with your daugh-
ter. Or maybe as someone who gives up a degree in medicine for philosophy, such imagi-
native pretense stimulates experience that would make you feel happy. No doubt,
imaginative pretense does have motivational effects on your actions and thoughts, but
the effects seem limited. To pretend that you are a doctor will not prompt you to actually
draw prescriptions for your friends who are ill.
To unpack this thought further, whether a given pretense will lead to actions seems
dependent on the context of the practical setting of the scenario.9 In a make-belief game
you play with your daughter, you may carry on playing your doctor role when she says
that she has a headache. But once you realize that she is really feeling unwell, you will
change the course of your actions and act on your other beliefs since the relevant context
has been changed. One will act on one’s pretense that is appropriate in a given context
only if one chooses to, as it were, “enter the game” in the first place, which implies that
one has a belief about the relevant context of pretense. Pretense does not guide our
actions in the same way as beliefs do – they can motivate our actions and thoughts only
in a limited context of pretense. Once we exit the context of pretense, pretense has no effi-
cacy in prompting actions or thoughts.10
These intuitive thoughts on the difference between pretense and belief are supported by
empirical studies on pretense. In fact, Gendler (2010) recognizes quarantining as a central
feature of pretense – “the events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only
within that pretense-episode” (2010, 136). The phenomenon of quarantining has been
widely studied and there is plenty of psychological evidence showing how even young chil-
dren manage to keep distinct what they believe from what they merely pretend. Gendler
(2010) cites various studies which show that children as young as 15-month-old have the
capacity to keep track of what is pretended and by the age of three they are able to articulate
the difference.11 The pretender usually keeps track on the realm of pretense and reality, and
they know what behavior is appropriate in the context of pretense and which one is not.12
Now, if the self-deceptive state is a pretense, as Gendler claims, then we would expect
that the self-deceptive state has these features of pretense. We would expect that the self-
deceived agent to be motivated in the same way as someone who acts on a pretense
would and be subject to the same limitation.
6 Xintong Wei

However, this does not seem to be the case in self-deception. As Porcher (2014, 321–
322) rightly points out, there is an inherent tension in Gendler’s model of self-deception. On
the one hand, self-deception requires a certain level of ignorance of one’s situation. In par-
ticular, the self-deceived agent does not act with the background belief that she is acting in a
context of pretense. On the other hand, acting on the basis of a pretense and for it to have the
motivational efficacy requires the self-deceived, at least to some extent, to be aware that
they are in a context of pretense.
To address this difficulty, one might improve Gendler’s model of self-deception by
introducing the phenomenon of imaginative immersion.13 Imaginative immersion occurs
when the boundary between reality and pretense is difficult to keep track of for the
subject. Typical examples are cases in which children lose themselves in games of make-
belief or actors lose their own personality to the roles they are playing. If the kind of pre-
tense involved in self-deception is a case of imaginative immersion (I will call this kind of
pretense immersive pretense) in which the self-deceived agent loses track of the pretense-
reality difference, then the initial difficulty is resolved. Because the pretender’s background
belief about the context of pretense is implicit or momentarily suppressed. So the fact that
the self-deceived agent does not appear to act on such background belief about the context
of pretense does not undermine Gendler’s account.
However, I think there remains significant differences between belief and pretense’s
motivational roles even in the case of imaginative immersion. The imaginatively immersed
agent remains connected to reality, in the sense that the background belief about the pre-
tense-reality difference is still there, albeit being implicit or momentarily suppressed. As
a result, she does not have the dispositions to act beyond the context of pretense. If an
actor, “immersed” in his superman personality, attempted to jump over a skyscraper, it
would seem more appropriate to say that he lost his mind believing that he was superman
as opposed to praising him as a terrific actor. So, for the subject who pretends that p, even in
an instance of imaginative immersion, there remains an (implicit) boundary between reality
and the context of pretense. The imaginatively immersed actor, despite momentarily losing
track of reality in pretending p, is not disposed to act beyond the context of pretense.
It is the same with the children who lose themselves in games of make-believe. Even if
they lose track of reality and forget that they are playing a game, their actions are still very
much limited in scope. For example, the location where all the actions happen is limited to
the playground and only the children who participate in the games are involved. So even in
the case of imaginative immersion, pretense’s motivational role is limited, no matter
whether the subject keeps track of the reality-pretense difference or not. Moreover, pre-
tense’s motivational role in imaginative immersion is also subject to temporal limitation.
The immersion would only last for a limited amount of time – when the game or the
play comes to an end, the agent can return to reality fairly easily.
So, if the self-deceptive state is an immersive pretense that p, we will see the above
limitations manifested in garden variety self-deception such as “I am smarter than my col-
leagues”. However, this does not seem to be the case. There does not seem to be a boundary
between pretense and reality of any sort for the self-deceived agent. One’s dispositions to
act (caused by that self-deceptive attitude of being the smartest person in the department) do
not seem to be limited to a certain context. It is not obvious there is a spatial–temporal limit-
ation either. The moment of realization, when the self-deceived agent can return to reality,
may never come. In short, for the person who is self-deceived that he is smarter than his
colleagues, the motivational roles of his self-deceptive attitude does not seem to be
subject to the same limitations that place on an immersive pretense.
 The Role of Pretense in the Process of Self-deception 7

To recap, in this section I explained why we should not endorse Gendler’s anti-doxastic
conclusion that the self-deceptive state of self-deception is an imaginative pretense.
However, there is, I believe, something right about Gendler’s analysis of self-deception
involving pretense, only that she wrongly identifies it as the self-deceptive state. In what
follows, I argue that pretense may play a crucial role in the process of self-deception.

4. Pretense’s role in self-deception

In this section, I propose an account of self-deception involving pretense playing a catalyz-
ing role in irrational formation of self-deceptive doxastic attitudes, where evidence is neg-
lected or ill-interpreted.14 In light of our discussion of pretense in the previous section, I first
explore the interplay between various types of pretense in self-deception. I then discuss how
this model provides a framework for theorizing socially embedded self-deception. Next, I
elaborate in more detail how pretense brings about a self-deceptive doxastic attitude.
Finally, I highlight how this picture of pretense’s role in self-deception would further our
understanding of doxastic self-deception.15
Consider Lena who believes truly that her last novel is not a success. Naturally, she
wishes/desires that her novel is well received, and fears/dislikes that it is not successful.
She may begin to imagine how the world would be like if it were true that her last novel
is a success. She may reinforce her imaginative pretense by performatively pretending
that her novel is a success, such as speaking to her friends as if her novel is a great hit,
that she was flooded by positive responses from critics and readers.
Her imaginative pretense may in turn enhance her performative pretense. To act as if p
were true, it calls upon Lena’s skills to imagine what the situation would be like if p were
true, what sort of actions would be called for in that kind of situation, what she would say in
response if someone were to challenge her about p. Her imaginative pretense may therefore
help her to carry out her performative pretense in a more convincing way.
This interplay between imaginative and performative pretense helps to create a narra-
tive in which the vividness and persuasiveness of her imaginative pretense is enhanced.
As a result of such interplay, Lena may become temporarily immersed in her pretense,
forgetting about the boundary between reality and fantasy. Her pretense would typically
allow her to enjoy some emotional responses and practical benefits as if it were the case
that her novel is a success. The immersive pretense would provide the medium in which
Lena can maximize such benefits, as the boundary between reality and the context of pre-
tense becomes implicit or suppressed. These emotional and practical benefits would in
turn motivate Lena to keep pretending that p. Call this mechanism of mutual reinforce-
ment between imaginative, performative and immersive pretense the loop of pretense in
self-deception.
This model of self-deception where the loop of pretense plays a role in bringing about a
self-deceptive attitude provides a useful framework for theorizing the kind of social self-
deception discussed in Dings (2017).16 Dings makes an interesting observation that locating
oneself among individuals who are likeminded about p and interacting with them could be
effective strategies to bring about a self-deceptive attitude that p. He calls such strategies to
self-deceive social strategies. One may deceive oneself about p by either surrounding
oneself with people who are already likeminded about p (“situating social self-deception”)
or one may do so by making the people around her become likeminded about p (“persuasive
social self-deception”) (Dings 2017, 17–19).
The social context of self-deception is an important yet undertheorized issue. The major
accounts of self-deception outlined in the introductory section say little about how a self-
8 Xintong Wei

deceived agent may interact with her social environment and how that interaction may
impact her self-deception.
In the proposed model, the social context in which the loop of pretense operates is made
relevant to theorizing about self-deception. Performative pretense, e.g. acting as if p, is part
of the self-deceiving agent’s interaction with other people during the process of both “situ-
ating” and “persuasive social self-deception”. Performatively pretending that p is one way
to make yourself at home among people who have similar opinions about p. It also plays an
important part in persuasive social self-deception since acting as if p is one way to make
other people believe that p.17
As a result of locating oneself in social surroundings that affirm p, the self-deceiving
agent is likely to receive positive feedback confirming her pretense regarding p and leads
her into immersive pretense. Lena among her most avid fans is likely to get the feedback
that it is indeed true that her last novel is a great success. As a result, her evidential basis
is weakened since the source of her belief about the success of her novel comes from unreli-
able testimony.
Socially embedded immersive pretense is more powerful than solitary immersive pre-
tense, and is more likely to lead to not only individual self-deception, but possibly also col-
lective or joint self-deception of an entire group who are involved in that episode of
immersive pretense.18The degree of Lena’s immersion in a social environment where
people around her affirm that her last novel is a success, is likely to be higher than an
episode of immersive pretense where Lena temporarily lost track of reality while pretending
that her novel is a success. To exit such immersive pretense, greater efforts are required –
such as leaving or changing the relevant contexts. The more pervasive and more influential
the social context of pretense is, the easier for one to immerse in her pretense and harder for
her to exit it.19
I have so far given an account of how various types of pretense may interact in the
process of self-deception and the relevance of social context in self-deception. I will now
elaborate in more detail how this loop of pretense helps to bring about the self-deceptive
doxastic attitude.
Let us focus on Lena’s case. One plausible idea is that Lena’s pretense that p changes
her degrees of belief regarding p and gradually leads to the acquisition of a stable doxastic
attitude about p.20
In the early stage where Lena is merely pretending that her last novel is a success, she
wouldn’t care about the presence of evidence showing that it is not so. She does not believe
that her last novel is a success and her degree of belief in the proposition that the novel is a
failure is high. However, as a result of her pretense, she is likely to be immersed in a social
environment that affirms the truth of her pretense. Her evidential basis is therefore wea-
kened. Furthermore, as emotional responses and practical benefits that result from her
immersive pretense enhance her wish/desire that her last novel is a success, or fear/
dislike that it is a failure, these motivational factors may result in her efforts to minimize
her interactions with failure-supporting evidence and shift her attention to success-related
thoughts. These motivational factors might also lead to an inappropriate selection and
interpretation of evidence. For example, she would find excuses not to read review articles.
She may interpret the critical comments on her website as malevolent trolling, despite that
they are serious responses to her work. In short, pretending that p, in the process of self-
deception, gradually lowers the subject’s degree of belief in not-p and increases the
degree of belief in p-related evidence.
As a result of her deteriorating epistemic position and as she becomes more immersed in
her pretense, Lena begins to increase her confidence in the proposition that her last novel is
 The Role of Pretense in the Process of Self-deception 9

a success (due to her increased confidence in success-related evidence) and decrease her
confidence in the proposition that her last novel is not a success (due to her misinterpreta-
tion or negligence of failure-related evidence). At this stage, she may begin to wonder
whether, perhaps, that her last novel is a success is true after all. She switches back and
forth between the two contradictory beliefs as her degrees of belief in those propositions
fluctuate. Eventually, Lena forms a stable belief that her last novel is a success. She is
self-deceived. Her false belief that her last novel is a success, in conjunction with desires
and other beliefs, guides her actions.
If the above account of pretense’s role in self-deception is correct, it helps to further our
doxastic understanding of self-deception, most importantly, by drawing attention to the
process of socially embedded self-deception. Most doxastic accounts of self-deception
hold that, if S deceives herself about not-p, then necessarily, S acquires some doxastic atti-
tude about not-p, in violation of some epistemic norm(s) due to motivational factors the
agent has.21 But they do not pay sufficient attention to the subject’s psychological states
and epistemic practices prior to the acquisition of the self-deceptive doxastic attitude.
For example, on Mele’s (2001) influential account, S is self-deceived about not-p iff S
believes falsely that not-p; S treats data to the truth value of not-p in a motivationally
biased way; this biased treatment is a non-deviant cause of S’s acquiring the false belief;
and the body of data possessed by S at the time provides an overall warrant for p. But
Mele’s account is more or less silent on the phases leading towards self-deception and it
does not accommodate one important aspect of the phenomenon of self-deception,
namely, in self-deception, one may not immediately acquire a stable false belief.
In contrast, if pretense does play a catalyzing role in self-deception, then it predicts that
there is a borderline period where the self-deceiving agent is turning into a self-deceived
one: her attitude towards p is changing from that of merely pretending to a doxastic attitude,
e.g. actually believing that p. Self-deception is a diachronic and dynamic process. We might
expect that during this borderline period, the attitude is unstable. Some of her assertions that
p and self-attribution of p-belief are insincere. She may switch forth and back between pre-
tending and believing: sometimes Lena is merely pretending that her novel is a success and
her actions are guided by the pretense only in certain contexts, but sometimes, as her con-
fidence in various success-related propositions increases, she may genuinely believe that
her novel is a success. When the attitude towards p, in conjunction with desires, starts to
play central role in guiding her thoughts and actions (no sign of quarantining), she succeeds
in deceiving herself. She no longer thinks of not-p as a pretense but believes that not-p. My
account of pretense’s role in self-deception furthers our understanding of doxastic self-
deception by shedding lights to the process through which a self-deceptive doxastic attitude
may be brought about.
Moreover, recall that one of the main motivations for Gendler’s pretense view is that it
offers a solution to the dynamic and static puzzle of self-deception identified by Mele
(2001). By properly locating pretense’s role in the process of self-deceptive belief-for-
mation, we keep the strength of Gendler’s proposal in solving these puzzles yet avoid
the problems with her anti-doxastic conclusion.
It solves the dynamic puzzle of self-deception, for the self-deceiving agent does not
begin with an intention to bring about a false belief. In the early phases, she is merely pre-
tending that p. But as she is drawn deeper and deeper into her imaginative pretense, the
emotional responses and practical benefits she enjoys from such pretense significantly
magnify her motivational factors for p, which eventually lead her to an irrational belief-for-
mation. At no stage during the process, is an intention to bring about a false belief required.
It also solves the static puzzle of self-deception, for at no stage during the process does the
10 Xintong Wei

agent hold contradictory beliefs. In the beginning, the self-deceiving agent believes truly
that not-p and merely pretends that p. In the borderline phase, she switches between believ-
ing not-p (while pretending p) and believing p. In the final phase of self-deception, the self-
deceived agent no longer holds the belief that not-p. Her confidence in p has significantly
increased and she believes falsely that p, though with ill-grounded reasons.
We also keep the strength of Gendler’s proposal in accounting for the agential aspect of
self-deception and improve the non-intentionalist doxastic approaches (e.g. the deflationist
and the normativist views) of self-deception. The process of pretense which leads to a self-
deceptive doxastic attitude is a form of self-manipulation. It accommodates the intuitive
thought that in self-deception we somehow trick ourselves into believing something we
know or believe to be false. On the proposed view, we can be held accountable for the
self-deceptive doxastic attitude we form as a result of engaging in pretense.
Finally, it also helps us to distinguish self-deception from nearby phenomena such as
wishful thinking and biased belief-formation (the subject acquires false beliefs due to moti-
vational factors but without engaging in pretense).

5. Implications
I will wrap up our discussion by briefly considering some implications of the view concern-
ing the debate of the nature of self-knowledge and the ethics of pretense.
If pretense does play a role in self-deception in the way I sketched above, then it could
have implications for the wider debate concerning the nature of self-knowledge. We are
generally authoritative about our own mental states (at least with respect to a restricted
class of them, e.g. phenomenal states such as “I am in pain”).22 Being mistaken requires
some explanation. The above account of pretense’s role in self-deception provides an expla-
nation for some cases.
Take S who is self-deceived about p. My account of self-deception allows two ways in
which S can make a mistake about her mental state. First, S can make a mistake about her
mental state as a by-product of engaging in pretense. Second, S can make a mistake about
her mental state as a product of self-deception. Let me explain.

1. Failure of self-knowledge as a by-product of immersive pretense. False second-order

beliefs could be by-products of immersing in pretense leading to self-deception. For
instance, when Lena is immersed in her pretense, and taking pleasure in the emotion-
al responses, she could mistakenly take that pretense as a genuine belief (as the
boundary between pretense and reality becomes implicit or suppressed). She
might take herself as believing that her last novel is a success when she is merely
pretending so. Her false second-order belief about her first-order attitude – the
false belief that she believes (as opposed to pretends) that her novel is a success,
is therefore a potential by-product of immersing in pretense.
2. Failure of self-knowledge as a product of self-deception. Another way one might be
wrong about one’s own mental state is when the product of self-deception is an inap-
propriate doxastic attitude about one’s own mental state. Consider Ida who works in
a law firm. Her boss often behaves inappropriately towards her female colleagues.
She is frightened and in great pain (mental stress). But she pretends that this is
not the case, because doing so helps her to concentrate on her work and avoid con-
frontations. It may be a kind of coping mechanism. In their interactions, she acts as if
she knows nothing about his sexual misconduct and as if he is a respectable col-
league. Ida might start to pay more attention to the incidents where her boss
 The Role of Pretense in the Process of Self-deception 11

seems amiable and respectable. She avoids looking into the office when her boss is
alone with the new intern. She averts the topic when she notices the new intern wants
to discuss his behavior. Ida interprets his placing hands on her waist as an innocent
avuncular gesture. She switches forth and back between believing truly about her
feelings of pain and discomfort and believing falsely that she feels no pain or dis-
comfort. Eventually, Ida may succeed in deceiving herself that she feels comfortable
working with her boss, she is neither frightened nor in pain. Her mistake about her
own mental state, e.g. her feelings, is the product of her self-deception. My account
therefore offers another plausible explanation as to how one might be wrong about
one’s mental state, namely, through self-deception that involves pretense.

To be clear, nothing in my account requires that the self-deceived agent to have second-
order beliefs about her first-order false beliefs. That is to say, the agent need not have a
belief about what she first-orderly believes when she is self-deceived. Lena is self-deceived
in believing falsely that her last novel is a success, and there need not be a second-order
belief about the belief that her last novel is a success, though a false second-order belief
might arise as a by-product of immersive pretense. So self-deception, on my account, is
not necessarily a failure of self-knowledge. My point here is that my account of self-decep-
tion offers two ways in which the failure of self-knowledge about the restricted class of
mental state (beliefs and phenomenal states) might occur.
If this is plausible, then pretense’s role in self-deception helps to explain how one might
form a false belief about one’s mental states, to which we are supposed to have privileged
access. Of course, this is not a direct challenge to the privileged access thesis per se. But if
we can show the mechanism how one might easily arrive at false beliefs about one’s mental
states through pretense, either as a by-product of immersive pretense or as a product of self-
deception, then the privileged access thesis loses part of its allure.
Another important implication is that there might be an ethics of pretense. While many
philosophers think there is an ethics of belief, not many think pretense or imagination is
subject to norms. Pretending something is true while knowing it is false might seem inno-
cent. After all, what’s the harm in merely imagining that climate change is not happening,
that racist nationalism is not on the rise or that the company I work for is not a sexist insti-
tution? Confronting ourselves with reality day-in and day-out might be exhausting and
depressing. Pretending that the world is a better place may be comforting.
However, if the above account of self-deception is correct, pretending p is true, in con-
junction with motivational factors for a p-world could easily lead to self-deception. The
emotional responses and practical benefits one enjoys as a result of pretense may lead to
a process of epistemic deterioration. My epistemic position is undermined as I ignore or
misinterpret evidence, or even actively seeking misinformation. Suppose that as a result
of deceiving myself that climate change is not real, some conspiracy websites become
my only sources of information, how many more false beliefs would I end up with? All
these may begin with pretending that climate change is fake news.
It should be fairly uncontroversial that, apart from the epistemic dimension, there is a
moral dimension to the ethics of pretense. I want to just raise some common-sense
points. When it comes to truths of significance, in particular truths that have moral and pol-
itical implications, it is plainly wrong to pretend. It is morally wrong to pretend that climate
change is not happening, or that racist nationalism is not on the rise. Indulging ourselves in
pretense can lead to apathy and inaction. Thinking is also costly. We only have limited
amounts of time and mental energy. If we spend more time pretending some unpleasant
truths are false, we waste the resources we can otherwise use to make a change. Instead
12 Xintong Wei

of retreating to our private world of pretense, sometimes actions are called for and we need
to confront the unpleasant truths for the truth does not go away. The harm pretense may
cause during the process of socially embedded self-deception is even more notable. Perfor-
matively pretending that climate change is not real may mislead others into believing false
claims and help to create a social narrative that denies climate change. It could lead to col-
lective or joint self-deception, which is far more consequential than individual self-decep-
tion as it tends to influence public discourses and politics.

6. Conclusion
In this paper, I argued that Gendler’s pretense view of self-deception requires revision. I
sketched an account of pretense’s role in self-deception, which draws on Gendler’s
insight but avoids her anti-doxastic conclusion. I argued that this proposed account
advances our understanding of self-deception on several fronts: it provides a framework
for theorizing the importance of social context in self-deception; it highlights that self-
deception is a diachronic and dynamic process; it solves the static and dynamic puzzles
of self-deception and it accommodates the agential aspect of self-deception.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Philip Ebert, Crispin Wright, Alan Millar, Jonathan Ichikawa, Madeline Hyde and two
anonymous referees of this journal for their thoughtful and invaluable comments on earlier drafts of
this paper. I would also like to thank the audience of the KBNS Self-knowledge Seminar where the
paper was presented for their helpful questions and suggestions.

Funding
I am grateful to John Templeton Foundation for funding my research [grant number 58450].

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Xintong Wei is a PhD student at the St Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme in Philosophy
(SASP); and a member of the Knowledge Beyond Natural Science research project based in the Phil-
osophy Department at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on epistemology, the nature of
belief and theories of normativity.

Notes
1. One’s doxastic attitude about p may include a belief that p, a disbelief that p and a lack of
opinion of p. It is also widely accepted that beliefs come in degree, that is, beliefs come with
various certainty about the truth of the proposition. I will assume that we endorse a proposition
as a belief with a high degree of confidence. For an overview of various issues concerning the
relation between degrees of belief and outright belief, see, Ebert and Smith (2012). More will be
said concerning the relevance of degrees of belief to self-deception in Section 4.
2. These two points are merely meant to offer some reasons why doxastic construal of self-decep-
tion is a position worth defending. A fuller defence of the doxastic view is developed throughout
the paper.
3. Gendler’s pretense view has drawn some critical attention in the literature, e.g., Porcher (2014).
Another anti-doxastic view (which will not be discussed in this paper) is proposed by Audi
 The Role of Pretense in the Process of Self-deception 13

(1982, 1997) and Rey (1988), according to which self-deception does not consist of a belief but
an avowal. For criticism of the avowal view, see, Van Leeuwen (2007).
4. The passage is also cited in Gardner (2007).
5. Although most philosophers do agree that there is a general norm of truth that governs the atti-
tude of belief, there is an ongoing debate about how to analyze this truth-aiming feature and
whether it is an essential feature of belief. For a recent survey on the latest debates on the nor-
mativity of belief, see, McHugh and Whiting (2014). For more discussion on the aim of belief,
see a recent volume edited by Chan (2013).
6. Many thanks to two anonymous referees of this journal for pressing me on several issues regard-
ing (P2), which helped me greatly to improve my arguments.
7. As Cassam (2014) rightly points out, we are not homo philosophicus – our actual beliefs often
do not conform to what we rationally ought to believe.
8. Note that this is not to say pretense is not criticizable. A pretense may be criticized for its role in
bringing about false beliefs. I explore the issues concerning the ethics of pretense in Section 5.
9. Van Leeuwen (2009) argues that pretense can be distinguished from belief on the basis of their
different motivational profile. On his view, beliefs that represent the practical setting we are in
are the practical ground of imagining – we will not act on the basis of an imagining in the
absence of those beliefs.
10. Of course, there could be examples of pretense constructed in such a way that they have exten-
sive motivational effects. But I believe that the phenomena in general is relatively clear: in so far
as the majority of cases of pretense are concerned, they do seem to have limited motivational
effects.
11. For empirical studies on cognitive quarantine see, for instance, Taylor (1999).
12. Note that to say that pretense has the quarantining feature is not to say that pretense state is
necessarily transparent. I am not committed to the transparency thesis that, if one pretends
that p, then necessarily one knows or is aware that one pretends that p.
13. Imaginative immersion is a phenomenon discussed in Schellenberg (2013) and Liao and
Doggett (2014). It has motivated some philosophers to argue that belief and imagination
exist on a continuum. For further discussion, see, for instance, Langland-Hassan (2012).
14. Note that, I do not claim that every case of self-deception involves pretense. My point is, first, in
cases where pretense does play a role in self-deception, it should be located in the process of
self-deception, rather than be identified as the self-deceptive state. And second, it is plausible
to think that many cases of self-deception are cases where pretense plays such a role.
15. I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for raising many thought-provoking suggestions, which
helped me greatly to develop my account in this section.
16. See also, Baumeister and Cairns (1992).
17. My account therefore connects self-deception to interpersonal deception through the instrumen-
tal role performative pretense plays in the process of both kinds of deception.
18. Here I understand collective or joint self-deception in a minimal sense, that is, a group of people
acquiring the same self-deceptive doxastic attitude regarding p. For a recent discussion of col-
lective self-deception, see, Deweese-Boyd (2017).
19. A point of interest for further research is the effect of the use of social media on self-deception.
Social media may facilitate both individual and collective self-deception as it creates a social
context that makes the loop of pretense easier to operate and harder to break, e.g., it is easier
for one to situate oneself among likeminded people and it is harder to detect whether a user
is merely pretending something to be true or not.
20. Degree of belief is roughly understood as one’s confidence in p, tracking the perceived strength
of justification one has for that proposition. There is a large debate between traditional and
formal epistemologist about the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief in
general, which I will bracket here. See also, footnote 1.
21. Typically, S fails to conform to the norm of evidence – S ought to believe that P if and only if P
is well-supported by the evidence available to S. S’s beliefs should be responsive to the changes
in the body of evidence in the sense that S ought to revise her beliefs in light of new evidence.
Motivational factors can be broadly understood along the Williamsian line, as what figure in
one’s subjective motivational set, including desires, feelings, hopes and so on (1981, 105).
Different theories of self-deception might have different views about what motivational
factors are relevant in self-deception.
22. For discussion of the privileged access thesis, see, for instance, Wright (1998, 2015).
14 Xintong Wei

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