Agency after the fact: self-deception as retrospective explanation
Agency after the fact: self-deception as retrospective explanation

Summary/Abstract: The limitations of both intentionalist and motivationalist accounts suggest that the central difficulty in theorizing self-deception does not lie in whether intention is present, but in how beliefs are reorganized and reassessed within the agent’s broader epistemic framework, and in how these beliefs are employed by explanatory reasoning. Intentionalist models over-intellectualize self-deception by positing goal-directed strategizing, while motivationalist accounts deflate the phenomenon by redescribing it as biased belief formation assessed against an external standard of rationality. Both approaches are naturally read as presupposing that agents operate on beliefs, in the first instance, with a primary aim towards truth, and that deviation from truth therefore requires special explanation, whether in terms of unconscious intention or motivational interference. I propose instead that self-deception be understood against a more general account of belief reassessment, one that takes the agent’s epistemic perspective as primary and treats explanatory coherence, rather than truth-tracking, as the organizing principle of belief organization. On this view, what requires explanation is not why agents sometimes fail to revise false beliefs in light of evidence, but how belief systems reorganize themselves to preserve stability while accommodating that evidence. This reframing allows us to retain the motivational insights of deflationary accounts while explaining why patterns of belief reassessment are often interpreted, by agents and observers alike, as intentional or strategic only in retrospect.

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