‘I knew all along’: making sense of post-self-deception judgments

• Published in: Synthese (Dordrecht) Vol. 203; no. 5; p. 136
• Main Author: Orlandi, Martina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 22.04.2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Deception; Education; Epistemology; Judgments; Logic; Metaphysics; Original Research; Phenomenology; Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Science; Self concept; Truth; Belief; Self-deception; Motivationism; Hindsight bias; Judgment
• ISSN: 1573-0964; 0039-7857; 1573-0964
• DOI: 10.1007/s11229-024-04563-6

Individuals deceive themselves about a wide variety of subjects. In fortunate circumstances, where those who manage to leave self-deception embrace reality, an interesting phenomenon occurs: the formerly self-deceived often confess to having ‘known [the truth] all along’. These post-self-deception judgments are not conceptually innocuous; if genuine, they call into question the core feature of prominent theories of self-deception, namely that self-deceived individuals do not believe the unwelcome truth. In this paper I argue that post-self-deception judgments do not track a belief, but rather a suspicion of the unwelcome truth. I do this by showing that post-self-deception judgments are themselves instances of self-deception where the individual is self-deceived that they believed the unwelcome truth. I then suggest that the motivational cause of the self-deceit is hindsight bias, specifically the kind known as foreseeability, and that as a result, post-self-deception judgments are not reliable because they do not accurately track previous self-deceptive experiences.