ABSTRACT
I n his book Self-Deception Unmasked (2001), Alfred Mele sets his readers a challenge: to present convincing evidence that there are cases of self-decep-tion in which the self-deceiver simultaneously believes that p and that ~p. This chapter is a response to Mele’s challenge; it demonstrates that there is at least one real case of self-deception that satises what Mele calls the dual-belief requirement. Before I begin sketching the case, however, some background is necessary. Why does responding to Mele’s challenge matter? I shall argue that showing that the dual-belief requirement is at least sometimes satised makes an important contribution to the debate over self-deception: It helps buttress the case for (something like) the traditional conception and weaken the case for accounts that, like Mele’s, are explicitly deationary. There are, I think, no decisive arguments on this topic-no cases, thought experiments, or intuition pumps that would refute one side or the other. All we can do, here, is to change the balance of the evidence. Traditionalism about self-deception has been on the defensive lately; demonstrating that there are cases that satisfy the dual-belief requirement is an important step toward seizing back the initiative for traditionalism.
