Self-deception, intentions, and contradictory beliefs José Luis Bermúdez Philosophical accounts of self-deception can be divided into two broad groups – the intentionalist and the anti-intentionalist. On intentionalist models what happens in the central cases of self-deception is parallel to what happens when one person intentionally deceives another, except that deceiver and deceived are the same person. 1 In the classic case of self-deceiving belief formation, the self-deceiver brings it about that they themselves acquire (or retain) a particular belief that p – just as in other- deception one person intentionally brings it about that another person acquires a belief. In neither case is the (self-)deceiver motivated by convic- tion of the truth of p. The interpersonal deceiver wants it to be the case that his victim forms the belief that p, while the self-deceiver wants it to be the case that he himself forms the belief that p. Both the self-deceiver and the interpersonal deceiver act intentionally to bring it about that the relevant desire is satisfied. 2 According to anti-intentionalist accounts, in contrast, self-deceiving belief formation can be explained simply in terms of motivational bias, without bringing in appeals to intentional action. Self-deception is not structurally similar to intentional interpersonal deception. Whereas in- tentionalism is generally defended by arguments to the best explanation, anti-intentionalism is often argued for indirectly, through attacking alleged incoherences in intentionalist accounts. Many of the arguments appealed to by anti-intentionalists suffer from failing to specify clearly enough what Analysis 60.4, October 2000, pp. 309–19. © José Luis Bermúdez 1 Some theorists have taken the view that it is pleonastic to talk of intentional decep- tion, since non-intentional deception is a conceptual impossibility (e.g. Haight 1980). This seems wrong. From a purely lexical point of view it seems perfectly possible to describe situations in which there is no intention to deceive as instances of deception. If, for example, one person transmits to a second person a piece of information that they know to be false and that they know will be passed on, then it seems right to say that when the false information is passed on by the second person to a third party an act of deception takes place. One might wonder, however, who is deceiving whom here. Is it the second person deceiving the third? Or is it the first person deceiving the third by means of the second? Only the first interpretation is fully non-intentional, since the second effectively includes the first person’s intention in the description of the episode, even though the first person is not directly involved. There are plausible arguments for both interpretations, but there is no need to arbitrate between them here since intentionalist accounts of self-deception model self-deception on inten- tional interpersonal deception, rather than on interpersonal deception in general. 2 I discuss further below why this counts as a form of deception.