Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Was Lance Armstrong Self-Deceived?

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

I’ve gotten some nice responses on my previous blog on Self-Deception and Moral Dilemmas. I argued there that self-deception in the context of a moral dilemma has morally negative consequences, because it undermines our ability to minimize damage on whichever side of the dilemma we break a moral requirement.

Two major questions arose in the comments. First, what’s the definition of self-deception? Second, was Lance Armstrong self-deceived in thinking he could beat cancer and come back to win the Tour? The idea the second question suggests is that self-deception might be good insofar as it can help people have a positive outlook that facilitates overcoming the odds. As one commentator, calling himself Anaxagoras, put it, “self-deception can be transformative, and . . . believing in the irrational is what gets us through our day jobs, our lonely nights, and our limitations.” Of course, the answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first, so I’ll handle them in order. (Warning: the definition stuff is technical; feel free to skip the next three paragraphs to get to the discussion of Lance, which can still be pretty well understood without reading the definition.)

Here’s the definition I’ve come up with.

An agent is in a state of self-deception if and only if she holds a belief (i) that is contrary to what her epistemic norms in conjunction with what evidence she has would usually dictate and (ii) a desire for a certain state of affairs to obtain, or to have a certain belief, causally makes the difference what belief she holds in an epistemically illegitimate fashion.

“Epistemically illegitimate fashion” in the second clause means here illegitimate according to the usual epistemic norms of the agent. I relativize in this fashion because it isn’t psychologically interesting when an agent believes contrary to epistemic norms she doesn’t actually have; it’s when the agent’s own better standards of belief are subverted that you get a bizarre and interesting epistemic upheaval. Of course, it can’t be just any desire that plays the role of the deceptive element; it must have a content relation to the resulting self-deceptive belief. So I add a content restriction to complete the definition.

Content Thesis: in order for the definition of self-deception to be satisfied, the first-order content of the desire that brings about the belief must be identical to the content of the belief or its negation, or the higher-order content of the desire must be the content of the belief.

I won’t parse my definition at length (email me if you want a more thorough discussion). But there’s one important thing to notice. It’s not necessary for a belief to be false in order for it to be part of a state of self-deception. The reason falsity is not required is that, from a psychological perspective, it’s possible to be in the same mental state as someone who’s self-deceived, even though your belief comes out true accidentally. Take the following case: an abused spouse in denial counts as being in a state of self-deception about whether her husband will beat her again even if he gets hit by a bus the next day and never does beat her. Her belief that he wouldn't was still self-deceptive, even though it turned out accidentally true.

This is a good place to turn to the second question. Was Lance Armstrong self-deceived? If you require falsehood of the belief as a necessary condition on being self-deceived (as philosophers like Al Mele and Robert Audi do), then he wasn’t. But the better question is, I think: was he in a state of self-deception? It’s perfectly possible for him to have been in a state of self-deception with respect to the belief that he could come back and win, even though that belief ultimately was true. (Seven times!)

Let’s distinguish a few questions for the sake of precision.

Alpha: Was Lance in a state of self-deception in believing he could come back (and win)?

Beta: If he was in a state of self-deception, did that causally contribute to his success in coming back?

Gamma: If Lance’s hypothetical self-deception did in fact contribute to his later success, is that a good example to follow in that we should allow ourselves to become regularly self-deceived?

The first two questions are empirical and would best be answered after a lengthy personal interview with Lance himself. But the deeper ethical question is the third, Gamma, so I think it’s still a good idea to hazard some speculations about the first two with an eye to considering the third.

On Alpha, we need to distinguish between believing in the unusual and believing in the irrational; for it’s only the latter that is tantamount to self-deception. Lance believed in the unusual in believing he could come back, but it wasn’t irrational. Lance had already shown evidence of unusual abilities before his cancer; if he did overcome cancer, it would be not irrational to take prior success as evidence that he would still be capable of the unusual. Believing in your ability to achieve the unusual is only self-deceptive if you’re a usual person. Lance Armstrong clearly isn’t. So I answer Alpha in the negative.

On Beta, my answer to Alpha makes the issue moot. But let’s imagine in general what effect self-deception might have on athletic performance. The tempting thought is that it can enhance performance by increasing confidence. But convincing yourself that you have an ability increases confidence in a helpful way only if you actually have that ability. In short, it’s only helpful to convince yourself in a confidence-building way if it’s not really self-deceptive to do so. Convincing myself I can jump the ditch is only helpful if I actually have it in my legs to jump it. It won’t help me jump the Grand Canyon. You might object that there are many situations where it’s uncertain whether you can actually do something but it can’t hurt to try, and in those situations it’s helpful to be self-deceived. I don’t think so, because being self-deceived could decrease your awareness of what needs to be done to increase your chances. A documentary I saw on Michael Jordan made the point that he was originally thought to be a mediocre defender. He later won the NBA award for Defender of the Year. I believe that only by being honest with himself--not self-deceived--could Michael Jordan zero in on exactly what work needed to be done to make him a top defender. Self-deceptive overestimation of your abilities can cause you to do less work, not more. In situations of uncertainty, determination and self-honesty are in the recipe for success; self-deception isn't.

It should be clear by now what I think the answer to Gamma is. But let me just say one thing. Even if Lance Armstrong was in a state of self-deception and was helped by that, that’s the exception among self-deceivers, not the rule. For every Lance, there are 1,000 drunk drivers who think they’re sober, 1,000 abused spouses in denial, 1,000 dropouts who won’t face up to reality, and 1,000 bad relationships in which people won’t face up to their problems. Having something good happen because of self-deception is like winning the lottery: very unlikely, and there are much better routes to success. I conclude that it is still best to cultivate the kind of mind that is as little susceptible as possible to self-deception.

Beyond the Cartesian Moment?

posted by Ken Taylor

I'm finally back from Australia and New Zealand.    Thanks to all who invited me to speak and hang-out in various locales down under.  It was a grand trip and I'm eager to go back again sometime in the near future.  About the only thing that I won't miss is getting up at  3:30 am on cold winter mornings to do Philosophy Talk    Now that I'm back stateside,  I hope to resume regular blogging.  I probably could have blogged more from down under.   But I was pretty busy with other things, both philosophical and non-philosophical, during my stay there.   

Anyway,  let me  go back a couple of episodes to our show on Descartes.  I've been gathering some thoughts about whether we've managed to move beyond  what  I called  "The Cartesian Moment" on the air.      Ron Rubin, our guest, didn't really want to  attribute the moment I have in mind to Descartes in particular,   He's probably right.   He's the historical scholar, after all.   Still,  I like that designation and will stick with it at least for the nonce.

By the Cartesian moment,  I mean that moment in Western philosophy when the individual knowing subject and the contents  of the subject's own mind  were elevated into the first and  most secure objects of knowledge.   At that moment,  knowledge of everything outside of the thinking subject  --- god, other minds, the physical world --  came to be problematic.  Once we're in the Cartesian moment,  questions about  "how possibly"  we can know anything at all  about the external world, including our own bodies,  or about other minds or about god gain a certain philosophical, if not practical urgency.   

As we mentioned all too briefly on the show,   Descartes's  own solution to the philosophical pickle he articulated turned on his argument that god exists and on the additional conclusion (one we didn't really discuss) that god must be  non-deceptive.  That's because god must be, according to Descartes, the sum of all perfections.  Deceptiveness  would  be a kind of imperfection.  So god, the sum of all perfections,  must not be deceptive.   

Of course, the fact that god is not a deceiver doesn't mean that we never make mistakes.  We do.  But the mistakes are in a sense our own fault, not god's.  Because god is not a deceiver, according to Descartes,  then  certain of our ideas and judgments are "guaranteed"  to track the true.   In particular, he thinks that if we base our judgments only on what he calls "clear and distinct" ideas,  then the non-deceptive nature of god guarantees that we will judge truly and never falsely.  So the trick to advancing our knowledge  is to  discipline our minds so that we judge only on the basis of clear and distinct ideas and  refrain from judging when we lack such ideas.     This is complicated and somewhat murky stuff.    I won't go into it deeply here. 

Not  too  many philosophers have been convinced by Descartes's  appeal to a  non-deceptive god to guarantee that   clarity and distinctness are  guides to truth and certainty.  But  if we reject Descartes argument for the existence of a non-deceptive god, while accepting the reasoning that leads to the Cartesian moment,  we're in a real pickle.  We're seemingly trapped inside our own minds, with no clear path out. 

Descartes wanted to blaze a path out by finding inward marks that distinguish  truth-tracking judgments from judgments that fail to track the truth.Personally,  I doubt that there are any such inward marks.  We simply can't tell, merely from the inside, whether we're judging truly or judging  falsely.   Some false judgments can feel so inwardly compelling, so irresistible, that we could never imagine giving them up.  On the other hand, some true judgments can feel so feeble and inwardly uncompelling that we could easily imagine giving them up.    If this is right, then the Cartesian search for an "inner mark" of certainty and knowledge is probably misguided from the start.

To say that the Cartesian quest for  inward marks of certainty and truth is misguided is not to say that we should give up the pursuit of truth altogether.  Truth is a darned  good thing.  Unfortunately, though,  truth often hides its face amid the clouds.   That means that  our claims to know the truth are always contestable,  always subject to debate and argument.   Descartes professed aimed (if not his actual practice) was to try to  put the sciences on a secure and certain path that would enable us to accumulate ever more and ever deeper truths,  without even the possibility of ever having to retreat and start over,  apparently.  But it seems doubtful that there are any such antecedent guarantees.  The absence  of guarantees is not, however, the absence of the possibility of scientific progress or the accumulation of  ever greater and ever deeper knowledge.  But our path to such knowledge is bound to be  more precarious, less secure than Descartes longed for it to be. 

Rejecting  the  Cartesian quest for certain foundations does not in itself get us  entirely beyond the Cartesian moment.    Dropping that quest still leaves untouched  the supposedly problematic nature of all knowledge other than knowledge of our own mind and its contents.  I will offer just a brief word on this score for now.   I tend to think that Descartes misdescribes the epistemic situation from the very start.  On my view, it is a mistake to think that the  mind is immediately epistemically given only itself and its own inner contents.   I tend to think instead that the mind is epistemically given itself as an object of knowledge only simultaneously with its being epistemically  given the external world as an object of knowledge.   To cognize myself and my own inner states is already  to cognize myself as a being in and over against a  world that is distinct from me.  It's true enough that being epistemically given either myself or the world is partly  a matter of my having certain inner representations.  With my inner representations I cognize both the external world and my own inner life.  This makes my inner representations vehicles of my thought and knowledge.   But those inner vehicles need  not themselves be immediately epistemically  given objects of thought and/or knowledge.   I  won't even try to make a philosophical case for this claim here.  I will say that  Descartes failed to fully appreciate the difference between a vehicle and an object of thought.  The vehicles of thought are "inner" in a robust sense.  Some of the objects of knowledge are inner too.  But not all are.  Nor is it clear that our epistemic hold on the inner objects of knowledge is any more or less secure than our epistemic hold on the outer objects of knowledge is.

My hunch is that  by keeping the distinction between vehicle and object always in mind we may be able to do  full justice to much of what is truist in Descartes -- his  representational theory of mind -- while avoiding some of his most consequential errors.