Characterising Self-deception

Mind Association

Characterising Self-deceptionAuthor(s): Anthony PalmerSource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 88, No. 349 (Jan., 1979), pp. 45-58Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2253063 .

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Characterising Self-deception

ANTHONY PALMER

I In the introduction to the second volume of his collected papers Ryle tells us that though he himself was 'not qualified to be a real logician' he had realised that 'advances in Logic would and should result in the re-shaping of the questions, answers and especially the arguments of philosophers'. His view was that 'brokers were needed . . . to facilitate transactions between Logic and the philosophy of mind, between Logic and the theory of Sense/Nonsense and even between Logic and the should-be theory of pedagogy' (pp. vii-viii). Two obvious places in which we can see his brokership in action are his celebrated articles 'Systematically Misleading Expressions' (I932) and 'Categories' (I938). The first is largely an exploration of Russell's idea of an incomplete symbol and the second an application of his notion of a propositional function. It is no less clear that Russell's inventions are operating in the article 'Imaginary Objects' (I933). They generate there a view about characters in literature which, despite the fact that Russell's theory of descriptions is not now much in favour, seems still to be widely held.

In Ryle's view, when a novelist creates one of his characters what in effect he does is to compose a complex description and then maintain that someone of whom it is a description did, or had done to him, whatever in the novel he is supposed to have done, or had done to him.

But of course his propositions contain only pseudo- designations because the list of characteristics by which he pretends to designate someone did not all-or even most of them-belong to anyone. They might have done; for there is no a priori proof that they could not have co-inhered. But we think, in fact, that no such man ever existed. The word 'such' shows that what [the novelist] did was to compound a highly complex predicate and pretend that someone had the characteristics so signified (Collected Papers, Vol. 2, p. 78).

45



46 ANTHONY PALMER:

Philosophers nowadays are more prone than Ryle ever was (they could hardly be less), to use examples from literature in their writings, but when they do the spirit in which they cite them seems to me to be precisely in line with the view of characters in literature expressed by Ryle in I933. Particularly in writing about moral philosophy there is an inclination to use examples from literature as merely well worked out cases, or complex co-inherent predicates, differing from those concocted in their own armchairs only by being thought through in more detail. J. L. Austin used to say that if you find a conceptual distinction hard to see tell a story and it will become clearer. Recall his adventures with a donkey footnoted in 'A Plea for Excuses' (Collected Philosophical Papers) which help us to distinguish between doing something accidentally, doing something inadvertently, and doing something by mistake. Moral philosophers often turn to the stories of novelists in the same spirit; they see them as source-books of well worked out cases. (That different source-books are likely to conflict is played down.) Yet I have no doubt that if Austin had taken to writing novels instead of footnotes to make his point we should have reacted to his work in a very different way. His footnotes were not even budding short-stories.

If you think about literature, and characters in literature, in this way then the views that you hold about truth in literature will naturally be affected. While no doubt it would be ungenerous to suppose that novelists can teach us nothing about human behaviour, we should be clear about what they can teach us, and about the way in which they can do so. The writer of fiction, unlike-say- the psychologist or sociologist, is not, by virtue of his calling, in the business of discovering or propounding general laws of human behaviour. What he can do, however, is to pretend to describe an instance of such a law.

The instance is imaginary, so the propositions professing to be about it are fictions. But the law may seem to find a very clear exemplification, and so the nature of the law may be made much more manifest in this way than in any other. The fact that the examples are faked tends to render them all the better as illustrations of the general principle in question. For irrelevant or conflicting characteristics can be omitted or left in the shade (Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, vol. 2, p. 8o-8I).



CHARACTERISING SELF-DECEPTION 47 My contention in this paper is that this way of looking at the

creation of characters, at literature and the insight it contains, is seriously and systematically misleading. If I am right in this then the broader philosophical moral is that if brokership now needs to be exercised it is in the reverse direction from that envisaged by Ryle. In particular that a consideration of literature, of imagination, of the creation of characters, should result in a re-shaping of questions, answers and arguments of Logicians.

II When literary critics talk about the work of playwrights and novelists they often refer to their success or lack of it with regard to characterisation, that is to say with regard to their creation of characters. They say, for example that such and such a character does not come alive, or remains unreal or is not true to life etc. But what is it for a fictional character to be real or true to life? What has an author successfully done if he has had this sort of success in characterisation? Is it, for example, like the kind of success that a good newspaper or radio reporter who gives a commentary on a current scene often has? The good commentator can make the scene come to life in the listener's or reader's imagination. Raymond Baxter at the Investiture of the Prince of Wales or Richard Dimblebey at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II succeeds in describing the scene in such a way that it is as if the listener were there. Third rate commentators are unable to bring this off, even though all the things they say about the scene they describe are true. They do not falsify the situation but neither do they bring it to life or make it real. Now often something like this, although of course not quite like it, does occur in novels. A Balzac or a Defoe can describe a scene in such a way that it is as if you were there. To create this effect they will utilise a variety of techniques, the description of minute details, for example. Recall the description of Vautrin in Pere Goriot, detailed even down to the tufts of hair on the backs of his fingers. Schoolboys are taught to call this 'verisimilitude'. Both the novelist and the commentator are characterising a scene or a person. The difference between them is that one describes or characterises a real scene while what the other describes is imaginary or invented. Could a character be created in this way? Should the creation of a character be viewed as the acme of verisimilitude? I think that the answer to both of these questions is 'no).



48 ANTHONY PALMER:

First of all notice that many creative writers do not indulge in this sort of thing at all. This is true even of those who are often singled out for their ability to create characters. The minute descriptions of Balzac have no counterpart in the work of Andre Gide or Jane Austen. Gilbert Ryle himself was later given to pointing out that after reading Emma we feel that we know the heroine of the story very well but we would be unable to answer questions about the colour of her hair or the colour of her eyes, while, conversely, the characters for whom we could provide such descriptions, for example Jane Fairfax, are precisely those whom we would be inclined to say are not fully drawn and who do not come to life. Novelists sometimes do succeed in creating characters without indulging in the techniques of description. How do they do this?

One way, though by no means the only one, is to allow the reader to hear or rather overhear a character's conversations with others. The characters are allowed to speak for themselves. Again, we are sometimes permitted to eavesdrop on their internal monologues. To come back for a moment to the commentator at the coronation, it is as if he had stopped speaking and the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury are heard. We are allowed to hear the Archbishop speak rather than be told what he said. In allowing us to overhear these things the commentator has ceased to describe. The difference is like that between the printing verbatim of a political speech and the reporting of it. The report can be biased or sympathetic, accurate or inaccurate, whereas the verbatim reproduction of what is said can be none of these. When we hear what Jane Austen's heroines say or read the diary of one of Gide's characters it is more like listening to the Archbishop speak than it is like listening to the commentator's description.

Of course it is not exactly like this, and I can imagine those who are pushed in the opposite direction. The Archbishop is a real person. He does not need to have words put into his mouth by the commentator. But every word that Emma speaks is put into her mouth by Jane Austen. Would it not be better to view the novelist's technique of letting the character speak for herself as just another descriptive device? Indeed cannot one in fact imagine a situation in which an author while writing his novel is confronted with the choice of saying what he has to say in reported speech or of letting the character speak for himself? The commentator is not presented with such a choice. He sets the scene, but the scene



CHARACTERISING SELF-DECEPTION 49

is independent of his setting. Not so with the novelist. He sets the scene all right, but there is no more to the scene than what he sets. Given this, should we not rather say that characters in novels are the result of sensitive description, they are, that is to say, technical achievements. Neither the Queen nor the Coronation (except in a rather different way) are technical achievements, but a commentator's characterisation of the Queen's Coronation is, and so are an author's characters. The creation of a character is the ultimate achievement of the describer's art.

I say that I can imagine people who are pushed in this direction, but I think it is a direction that should not be taken. To bring this out, consider the case of failure in characterisation. Imagine someone who has no experience of sailing boats or of life at sea who writes a story set in that background. His story is read by a member of the yachting fraternity, whose reaction is that no boat could be sailed in the way described, that it would have sunk. A similar case would be one of a commentator who knows nothing about yachting sent, no doubt by mistake, to cover Cowes week and who, because he knows nothing about the subject, mis- describes it. He could have saved himself from failure by seeking expert advice, or by taking a course in yachting before he wrote the book. His descriptions were minute and detailed. He just got them wrong. The knowledgeable critic will no doubt comment upon this adversely. Now imagine that, as well as this, the critic is tempted to say that the author's characters do not ring true; he thinks that nobody could or would behave in the way in which the author describes them as behaving. The question is are we here dealing with failures of the same order? If we are then we ought to be able to imagine similar remedies that might be recom- mended. If the author had studied yachting then the background to his novel might have been more authentic. What would he have had to study for his characters to be more authentic? Certainly we can study various aspects of human behaviour, we can study the development of skills and so on, but pace the intro- ductions to psychology text books there is no such thing as the study of human behaviour full stop. The critic who suggested that novelists should take courses in psychology to help them make the characters they create more authentic would be one whose views were rightly ignored, unless he were suggesting this for novelists who write books about psychologists. Our imaginary novelist is no doubt a complete failure, but he fails on two quite



50 ANTHONY PALMER:

separate characterising accounts. He not only fails in his descriptions but he fails also to create characters, he produces instead only puppets or caricatures.

There is, then, a distinction between the characterisation which is the giving of a description and the characterisation which is the creation of a character. A created character is not or is not merely the purported or pretended instantiation of a complex predicate. And if he is not then perhaps the insights that are imparted by his creation are not merely those of made up (and hence unencum- bered by irrelevancies) exemplifications of general psychological or sociological laws. Perhaps there are things which can be made intelligible to us by the creation of characters that resist attempts at understanding which take the form of seeing them as instances of general laws; perhaps literature can help us to understand what psychology and sociology in their law-like versions cannot.

III

Consider the phenomenon which might almost be considered the preoccupation of modern literature, that of self-deception. Now it is notable that attempts by philosophers to understand self-deception have not met with great success. Some indeed have doubted whether there is or could be such a phenomenon. Its very description seems to involve a contradiction. Under analysis it tends to disappear or to turn into something for which 'self- deception' would be an inaccurate label. A person who deceives is one who knows something but who keeps it from the person he deceives or who misleads him about what he knows. But how can a person keep what he knows from himself or mislead himself about what he knows? To do this he would have to be described as both knowing and at the same time not knowing something, which is contradictory. If the contradiction is removed by the suggestion that what the self-deceiver knows about is something other than what he is said to be ignorant of, while this describes a possible phenomenon it is hard to see how it merits the title of 'deception'. Philosophers have seen their task as one of showing how such a concept is possible, how, that is, while it looks contradictory, when unravelled it is not. Self-deception presents them with a logical conundrum and an industry of solutions and resolutions, counter-solutions and counter-resolutions has grown up around the notion. In contrast, when one moves from their



CHARACTERISING SELF-DECEPTION 5I

work to that of novelists and other creative writers, while self- deception remains problematic all right it is so in a way in which the philosopher's puzzle is not. Novelists do not struggle to understand how self-deception is possible but are concerned with its reality in different ways. They may wonder how the reality of it can fail to engulf all human behaviour, how, that is, that being self-deceived can fail to be the natural condition of reflective man; how the capacity for being honest with oneself can withstand the recognition of such an idea. The novelist explores by the creation of characters problems the exploration of which in the hands of philosophers has become conundrum mongering: a situation encouraged if not engendered by a conception of created characters as complex predicates, incomplete symbols, or pseudo- designations.

Self-deception is a persistent theme in the work of Andre Gide. One of his recits, La Porte Etroite (references are to the edition by M. Shackleton, Harrap, 1958), is a striking illustration of the point that the exploration of one form it takes is a very different affair from the invention of co-inherent characteristics. The form the work takes is that of a diary written by Jerome which tells of his love for Alissa and of Alissa's love for him. Alissa dies and Je6rome receives one of her diaries. We see the affair through two diary angles. Now there is nothing spectacular or novel about the use of a diary form. It has been employed by many writers. Indeed part of the trouble is that critics of the work have tended to say the same sort of things about its use here as about its use in other places, i.e. a general mixture of points about verisimilitude and an avoidance of the obtrusion of the author's personal views. But with regard to Jerome and Alissa our understanding of them is enhanced not just by what they write down but by the fact that they write it down. Jerome is not just the character who felt such and such and did so and so he is also the character who wrote an account, this account, of what he did and felt. The fact of his giving an account and not just what we think of the account he gives affects our view of him. It is not merely that there are dangers in accounting which have to be avoided but that, in certain circumstances, in the very act of accounting you are already ensnared. Jerome is not called upon to write this account. Nobody is accusing him of anything. And yet he writes it. The inclination to give this account is part of the state of affairs of which it is an account. We know this of Jerome as soon as we start reading what he writes,



52 ANTHONY PALMER:

and are consequently brought to see what he writes in a particular way. Alissa, more sensitive than he, has glimpses of this situation with regard to her own writing. In the diary which Jerome receives she writes, and it is important to notice that she writes it:

Combien cette analyse de ma tristesse est dangereuse! Dej"a je m'attache 'a ce cahier. La coquetterie, que je croyais vaincue, reprendrait-elle ici ses droits? Non; que ce journal ne soit pas le complaisant miroir devant lequel mon Ame s'apprete! Ce n'est par desoeuvrement, comme je le croyais d'abord, que j'ecris, mais par tristesse. La tristesse est un e'tat de peche', que je ne connaissais plus, que je hais, dont je veux ddecompliquer mon ame. Ce cahier doit m'aider 'a reobtenir en moi le bonheur.

La tristesse est une complication. Jamais je ne cherchais a analyser mon bonheur (p. 145).1

In this passage Alissa seems to realise that the very act of describing her state of mind is dangerous, for the state of mind which she describes is one which includes the inclination to give just the description she gives. Hence there is something inherently contradictory in attempting to describe it. The state of mind for which she wishes to provide an account is one for which she cannot provide an account, for such an account would simultaneously have to account for itself. Hence the state of mind which incorporates such an inclination to analyse, the state which Alissa calls 'une complication' is, just because of that, 'un etat de peche'. The very act of writing these things down shows us, in Alissa, not just the possibility of self-deception of which she is aware, but its actuality. A little later it crops up in the form of a self- referential paradox when she writes:

Comme si dans ce cahier que je n'ai commence que pour m'aider "a me passer de lui, je continuais "a lui ecrire.

J'ai dechire toutes les pages qui m'ont paru bien ecrites.

'How dangerous this analysis of my own sadness is! Already I am beginning to depend upon this notebook. Is the vanity I thought I had overcome re-establishing itself here? Let this diary not be the complacent mirror before which my soul bends. It is not out of idleness, as I first thought, that I am writing, but out of sadness. Sadness is a sinful condition which I no longer acknowledged, which I hate, from which I want to uncomplicate my soul. This notebook should help me to regain my happiness.

Sadness is a complication. I never sought to analyse my happiness' (p. I45).



CHARACTERISING SELF-DECEPTION 53 (Je sais ce que j'entends par la.) J'aurais dfu tout dechirer ... Je n'ai pas pu (pp. 15I-2).'

At least this is so if you take the final 'tout' to refer to the diary of which it is itself a part. The diary form which Gide uses to create these characters enables us to understand self-deception, in that we can see it at work. We are shown by the creation of a character something which could not be given by means of a description, even the description of such a created character.

In a recent contribution to the joint sessions of the Mind Association and Aristotelian Society (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 197I) David Hamlyn describes a form of self-deception very similar to that explored in Gide's recit. It is interesting but not by now, I hope, surprising that his fellow symposiast H. 0. Mounce took him to task on the grounds that the description of self-deception he provided was either as inherently contradictory as those which he rejected or not a case of deception at all. Hamlyn argued that:

one form of self-deception . . . may involve not just a failure to spell out correctly one's engagement with the world, . . . but something that is in a way the reverse of this. The falsity lies in what is to all appearances a super honesty with oneself; it is false because it involves employing 'rationality' and 'sweet reasonableness' where and in a way in which these may, in a sense, be inappropriate ... The person concerned may be so intent upon spelling out his engagement with the world that he ceases to be truly so engaged (p. 50).

The sort of case Hamlyn envisaged was that of a man unfaithful to his wife, who is quite open about his infidelity, but who yet is dishonest with her in another and perhaps more fundamental way. His openness with her is combined with claims that his infidelity makes no difference to their relationship; he behaves as if his affairs with other women could be hived off from his relations with his wife. Hamlyn, rightly in my view, sees this as a misconstrual of the husband-wife relation. Mounce's response was to wonder where the self-deception is in all this. He claimed that what we have here is not a case of a man who is both honest

'As if in this notebook which I had only begun in order to help me to do without him, I was still continuing to write to him.

I have torn out all of the pages which seemed to me to be well written. (I know what I mean by that.) I should have torn it all up ... I could not' (pp. I5I-I52).



S4 ANTHONY PALMER:

and dishonest about the same thing but a case of a man who is honest about one thing and dishonest about another.

The man in Hamlyn's example is faced in fact not with one issue but with two. The first issue is whether or not he is being unfaithful. On this issue he is honest admitting that he has indeed been unfaithful. The second issue is whether being unfaithful will affect his marriage. On this issue he is dishonest, denying it will have an effect. What we have therefore is not someone who is both honest and dishonest about the same thing, but rather one who is faced with two issues, being honest about the first and dishonest about the second (p. 70).

If we do not see the issue in this light and claim, for example, that the man is being dishonest with himself about the effect that his infidelity will have on his relations with his wife, then all the difficulties about putting that in a non-contradictory way will once more arise. Hamlyn himself says of some of Sartre's examples that they are too underdescribed for any firm conclusions to be drawn from them and the case which Hamlyn himself describes might be thought to suffer from the same defect. Yet however minutely detailed a case may be we shall still be faced with the the dilemma that it will either turn out to be a case not of self- deception but of dishonesty on separate issues or it will involve an explicit contradiction. The paradox is one of self-reference where the contradiction is one engendered by the simultaneous double reference to oneself as the person who is to be objectively accounted for and as the person who is doing the accounting. This may baffle description but as we have seen there is a sense in which it does not baffle characterisation.

Now problems of self-reference have haunted philosophers in a variety of guises, and a variety of ways of dealing with it have been devised. I am thinking, for example, of the doctrine of orders of discourse. Wh-iat would be out of place in a single-storied philosophical establishment is made possible by split-level living. From the background of Gide's Re'cit the parallel with which Ryle in The Concept of Mind seeks to resolve what he calls the 'systematic elusiveness of the "I" ' is revealing.

An ordinary reviewer may review a book, while a second order reviewer criticises reviews of the book. But the second order review is not a criticism of itself. It can only be criticised



CHARACTERISING SELF-DECEPTION 55 in a further third order review. Given complete editorial patience, any review of any order could be published, though at no stage would all the reviews have received critical notices. Nor can every act of a diarist be the topic of a record in his diary; for the last entry made in his diary still demands that the making of it should in its turn be chronicled (Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. I69).

No doubt when he wrote this passage Ryle had in mind Hume's celebrated search for something which is not a perception but whatever it is which has perceptions. That is to say an attempt, dictated by a philosophical theory, to discover something which that theory required. It was, and still is, salutary to point out that in such a case the failure could have been predicted on logical and not empirical grounds. But unlike Hume's difficulties Alissa's troubles will not be resolved by pointing out to her that self- commentary, like self-ridicule and self-admonition are 'logically condemned to eternal penultimacy'. No doubt Alissa, in attempting to give an account in the way in which she does, is trying to do something which cannot be done, but unlike Hume she is not in a logical muddle. The contradiction is in her state of mind and not in her opinions. It is this, with regard to self-deception, that we have to accept, and it is this which the novelist can show us, but which neither he, nor anyone else can as a matter of logic describe.

I think it was something like this point which Stuart Hampshire was making when he wrote in Thought and Action:

There are points in our discourse at which we are compelled to think dialectically, that is, to acknowledge the possibility of an objective contradiction, which arises when two lines of thought, each legitimate within their limits, are pressed too far beyond these limits. The contradiction is objective, in the sense that it does not arise merely from carelessness or ignorance in the use of words. The contradiction here arises from the situation of a speaker speaking about himself as he would commonly speak about others, and simultaneously making a double reference to himself; first as the observer of himself, who is the author of the statement, and, second, as the independent agent observed (p. 174).

Ryle in Dilemmas had already made us familiar with the idea of situations in which two lines of thought, each legitimate within



56 ANTHONY PALMER:

their limits are pressed beyond those limits, but he had contented himself with seeing these as logical or conceptual dilemmas, the dissolution of which was the philosopher's job. Hampshire saw them as descriptions of states of mind, and their resolution not just an escape from intellectual puzzlement but as a growth in self-consciousness. By developing the idea of the inherent con- tradictoriness of simultaneous double reference involved in a person predicting what he himself will do, he sought to under- write a conception of human freedom against the encroachment of a determinism characterised in terms of increased predictive power. There are limits to predictive power just because in one's own case attempts to predict what in some future situation one will do become indistinguishable from decisions to behave in that way in such a situation. The 'I' evades a predictive account, it is systematically elusive, but its elusiveness is not just a logical mirage engendered by attempting to do at one level what can only be done at two. But if it is true that one cannot predict one's own actions, it is also true that the state of mind in which one is tempted to do so is a possibility which needs to be understood. And this might seem particularly so if the well-ploughed field of the contemplation of one's own future deeds is put alongside the not so well worked points about the contemplation of one's own past and present deeds. Hampshire's point is that you cannot predict your own actions, my point is that there is a sense in which you cannot retrodict them either. Put together they form a general difficulty over self-accounting. Prospective accounting comes unstuck over the concept of decision. Perhaps the self- deceived person is one who is best described as being in relation to his own past deeds as the person who tries to predict his future deeds is to them. Perhaps there is something which could be described as deciding what your own past was.

Enthusiasm for objective contradictions can, of course, be taken to excess. Even if there is something that might be described as deciding what one's own past was, this it must be agreed surely is not inevitably so with retrospective accounts. No doubt it is a matter of logic that there could be no prospective autobiographies but as a matter of fact there are plenty of ordinary ones. Are people who write autobiographies attempting to do what cannot be done? Are they necessarily deceiving themselves? Is there no such thing as sincerity in an autobiographer? No doubt there are plenty of insincere ones, but to suggest that this is so as a matter



eHARACTERISING SELF-DECEPTION 57

of logic might seem only a way of covering up one's own cynicism with a logical facade. If my thesis about self-accounting leads to this, then so much the worse for the thesis. However, the view that I am putting forward does not involve such an absurdity. What I am talking about is not so much the writing of autobiographies but a certain state of mind which incorporates an inclination so to write. Autobiographies and diaries can be written for all sorts of purposes and from all sorts of motives; to help you remember, to set the record straight, or, if you have lived through affairs which people are prepared to pay money to hear about, for financial gain. Being written from all sorts of motives they can be used to illustrate various states of mind. Consider, for example, the case of Newman's autobiography. Newman wrote it in response to a charge of lack of integrity, and he produced what has come to be regarded as a monument to sincerity. But suppose that it had not been produced in such circumstances. Imagine that it was written as a diary, not meant for publication, and not as a refutation of any charges that had been laid at his door. Imagine, that is, that it sprang directly from his spiritual and intellectual career and was in fact an integral part of that career. Would we not then read it in a quite different way, in fact in such a way that if Kingsley's charge had not been made it would have had to be invented? No doubt the Apologia would remain a monument, but not to sincerity or integrity. In the Book of Common Prayer there is a remark to the effect that if we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If this is true perhaps it is so not so much because we are all sinners, which of course might also be true, but because of a certain feature of saying things about ourselves and in particular of 'saying that we have no sin'.

I have been maintaining a distinction between two senses of characterisation; that in which it is equivalent to description and that which relates to the creation of characters. If we operate in the descriptive mode our aim has to be the elimination of contradiction. We could not say of an illogical world what it would be like. Contradictions will not bear stating; they lack sense. It would be wrong, however, to draw from this the conclusion that we can only be led to understand that which is not contradictory, or that which bears stating; for this would be to suppose that the descriptive mode of characterisation is the only one open to us, which is not so. In their efforts after understanding, human beings are not only describers and staters, they are also



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creators, and in that way can come to understand, and lead others to understand, things which would otherwise be closed to them. Such a view is not novel, even if it is not part of a current orthodoxy. Artists throughout history have claimed that there is truth in art that cannot be captured in any other way. Philosophers, in particular the tough-minded analysts of recent years, beneficiaries of the brokers' transactions Ryle advocated, have found such a claim hard, to swallow. They have been inclined to think that little weight should be placed upon truths which cannot be stated, and rightly so when such claims are decked out in talk almost mystical in nature about things which only those possessors of sensitive souls known as artists have the wherewithall to penetrate. But stripped of its mystical aura the artist's claim not only makes sense, it is valid. In this paper I have tried to show it to be so in the case of self-deception.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON



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Characterising Self-deception