Self-Deception and Internal Irrationality

There are a number of answers that I have either explicitly or implicitly rejected. One is David Pears' suggestion that the self-deceiver must 'forget' or otherwise conceal from himself how he came to believe what he does. I agree that the self-deceiver would like to do this, and if he does, he has in a clear sense succeeded in deceiving himself. But this degree and kind of success makes self-deception a process and not a state, and it is unclear that at any moment the self-deceiver is in an irrational state. I think self-deception must be arrived at by a process, but then can be a continuing and clearly irrational state. Pears' agent ends up in a pleasantly consistent frame of mind... .But the pleasure may be unstable.. .for the pleasing thought is threatened by reality, or even just by memory. When reality (or memory) continues to threaten the self-induced belief of the self-deceiver, continuing motivation is necessary to hold the happy thought in place. If this is right, then the self-deceiver cannot afford to forget the factor that above all prompted his self-deceiving behavior: the preponderance of the evidence against the induced belief. I have by implication also rejected Kent Bach's solution, for he thinks the self-deceiver cannot actually believe in the weight of the contrary evidence. Like Pears, he sees selfdeception as a sequence the end.product of which is too strongly in conflict with the original motive to coexist with an awareness of it. Perhaps these differences between my views and those of Pears and Bach may be viewed as at least partly due to different choices as to how to describe self-deception rather than to substantive differences. To me it seems important to identify an incoherence or inconsistency in the thought of the self-deceiver; Pears and Bach are more concerned to examine the conditions of success in deceiving oneself. The difficulty is to keep these considerations in balance: emphasizing the first element makes the irrationality clear but psychologically hard to explain; emphasizing the second element makes it easier to account for the phenomenon by playing down the irrationality.'