Arc One · The Unreliable Narrator
There Is No Vault
Try to lie to yourself. Right now, deliberately. You can’t. And yet you’re doing it about something. Either there’s a hidden room, or self-deception isn’t what we think.
The first three episodes all assumed you can keep something from yourself. This one asks whether that’s even possible. To lie you have to know the truth; to be deceived you have to not know it. Self-deception needs you to be both.
The traditional answer is that the mind has parts: a room where the truth is kept and a room where you live. Freud built a system on it and Davidson made it rigorous. Alfred Mele’s account takes it away: no rooms, no censor, no plan. Just wanting, which tilts the floor, and fifty small moments where you could have looked and didn’t.
Which is worse, not better. The objection section is where I catch myself preferring the theory that lets me off, and episode one comes for me.
Sections
- The pour
- Try to lie to yourself
- Two paradoxes and the room with the door
- Mele: there is no vault
- The objections: surgical avoidance, and where the blame went
- What haven’t you checked
Reading
- Alfred Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (2001), chapters 1 to 3.
- Donald Davidson, “Deception and Division” (1985).
- Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (1969). A third option.
- Sartre’s objection to the Freudian censor is in Being and Nothingness, Part One, Chapter Two.
Transcript
Available on release.