Self-Deception, Deception, and the Way of the World

This chapter argues against the usual ways of understanding self-deception on the grounds that such ways operate with too thin a notion of truth and true belief. It outlines a more adequate way of understanding truth, deception, and self-deception through an account of sociohistorical truth and sociohistorical deception developed out of Kant and Hegel. Crucial to the story is the division between first-order belief formation and second-order belief formation: the space between these two is, the chapter argues, the space of self-deception. It uses Heidegger to bolster this account, and concludes with a strikingly original analysis of the relationship between self-deception and Sartre's notion of bad faith.