自欺的确切定义是什么?
Where do the dreams and fantasies that motivate us end and self-deception begin?
History and everyday life are populated by individuals who achieve overwhelming and awesome things against seemingly insurmountable odds. How do they do it? Certainly a lot of luck is involved, many contingent events occur whose absence would have annihilated any chance of realizing their dream--but I believe that a certain kind of positive self-deception is often the key that unlocks their potential.
As Lance Armstrong cycles his way to a possible 7th Tour victory this month, one has to wonder how a man who was sentenced to die of cancer, who doctors worried would never recover, could have ever survived, trained, and conquered the most grueling athletic event around. Yes, yes, of course, he has amazing genes, the heart of an ox and blood cells that attach to oxygen like jellyfish to skinny-dippers. But when he was lying there staring at the hospital ceiling as they pumped poison into his body to kill his cancer, wasn't he deceiving himself by imagining ever getting back on a bicycle? When he did get back on the bike, wasn't it just a pipe dream, an irrational and illogical fantasy that he could win a stage in the Tour de France, much less the entire event? After all, before cancer, he had never won a single yellow jersey! No one would have ever believed that Lance would come back and win the Tour. Would anyone bet money on it? NO! That would be irrational, against the prevailing facts, preposterous! But Lance did--he dared to deceive himself, to dream, and look what happened.
If self-deception is the denial of the facts, the lies we tell ourselves against our better judgment and trained rational minds, then it seems that outlandish hopes and dreams fall into this category.
I argue that our wildest dreams and fantasies are positive motivators in our lives, that self-deception can be transformative, and that believing in the irrational is what gets us through our day jobs, our lonely nights, and our limitations.
There is room in the world for both the epistemically courageous and the blind dreamers.

Self deception! A person deceives themselves because it will give them temporary comfort. In fact they may not know they are deceiving themselves for a long time. They could be in a strong denial (not having past this stage), just don?t know any better, need this self deception to give them mental stability, or have been taught not to think in a way that will lead to opposite conclusions from those they currently hold.
你怎么知道你正在使用的头脑现在并没有欺骗你呢?有人声称，最初来自外界的外部力量或想法可能会欺骗你，但心灵本身呢?也许人类的思维在其基本结构上必须保持某些概念是真实的，这可能是谎言，只是为了让人类生活得舒适。人的身体首先要保持内稳态，也许人的心灵要欺骗自己来保持平衡。
I have been taught not to be deceived by hope. I remember reading the ancient Greek story of how Pandora was created in Hesiod ?Works and Days.? During the story one is taught the futility of the idea of Hope. Hope will not get you anything, but will eat up your time. It will give you pleasure and comfort, but will not produce anything.
It will only be experience that will conquer self deception. There may come a time when the lie will no longer work. There are some self deceptions that are necessary as in the case of Plato?s noble lie. Another would be the idea that all men are created equal. No one is really equal, each person is different. There are many ideas that we hold true to keep society stable.

Neil, I am very interested in this line of interest and what its consequences might be for understanding and managing conflict. In particular, on the side of the guilt value of the transgressed moral component and how an agent might be married to the responsibility for having chosen. When I think of such a person who acts on self-deception in a way that I find distasteful, I think of a man in armor pulling out a large piece of fashioned steel from another man's corpse, having dispatched his foe largely because he just can't stand to live in a world wherein his peculiar higher power doesn't reign supreme. Of course, it's been quite awhile since this basic but blatant example served as a timely reference, but an updated one might be a person with TNT strapped to their body boarding a railway passenger car...
我同意，自欺似乎是消极的，特别是当它“免除”代理人对他人实施不法行为的责任(或……在配偶虐待的案例中……一个人的自我)。此外，我认为任何鼓励人类反思的事情都是好事，但我不知道是否有一种方法表明，这种对自我欺骗的厌恶是人们应该培养的……在某种程度上不同于康德(如果我没有误解的话)简单地断言存在这样一种东西，作为一种道德义务，个人必须，句号……故事结束了。

谢谢你的评论。以下是一些回应的想法——没有特别的顺序。
First, I won't give a precise definition of self-deception. (I do have a definition. E-mail me if you want to discuss this further.) But here's a general characterization. People have epistemic norms--norms that govern how they form beliefs in response to input or evidence. Self-deception is when someone forms a belief contrary to what their epistemic norms and evidence would dictate, and the process of forming this belief is causally influenced by a desire with a content related to the belief in question.
E.g., the abused wife wants P (P=my husband won't beat me); this causes her unjustifiedly (even by her own lights) to believe P. There's debate about the content of the desire, but that's more or less what I think.
About Lance Armstrong, whom I greatly admire, I have two questions:
1. Is he really self-deceived?
2. Is self-deception really the most helpful thing for someone like him to make a comeback?
On 1, remember: he had plenty of evidence in the past that he was a good cyclist, and many people survive cancer. Maybe he thought, "Hey, I've got a shot. I'll give it my best."
On 2, is self-deception really the key psychological ingredient to overcoming the odds, or *determination*? I'd go with determination.
On the topic of cultivating an aversion to self-deception, I can't come up with any moral or practical knock-down arguments for why we should do it (cultivate an aversion). But that's true for most things in the moral sphere. In general, though, I think that having as accurate of representations of the world as possible is best for our ability to interact with the world and others for the purpose of accomplishing what we want to do. That includes acting morally.
但是，如果你想在道德上开脱呢?无知一点会有帮助吗?我不这么认为，至少如果它是由自我欺骗引起的。我认为，在自我欺骗的情况下做坏事，在道德上与醉酒时做坏事是一样的。它仍然是坏的。如果我们是负责任的认知者，我们可以在很大程度上避免自我欺骗。这让我们对在它的影响下所做的事情负责。
How to avoid being self-deceived? I've put a lot of thought into this and come up with the following 3 principles:
1. Attend also to evidence that makes you feel uncomfortable, and don't resist it.
2. Imagine situations analogous to the one in question about which you're disinterested and see what you believe about them.
3. Find out more evidence, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
当然，当你自我欺骗的时候，你可以做这些事情，因为如果你是，你不知道。所以我们应该一般地做，避免很多自欺的情况会是一个很好的副产品。

What an interesting discussion -- thanks for this.
I think the Lance Armstrong example is a trickier one than you might be giving it credit for, Neil.
If indeed Lance said to himself, "Hey, I've got a shot, I'll go for it," we might claim that this comes AFTER the self-deception, because in order to be motivated to give it a shot, you have to believe that you can overcome the odds, which, without self-deception, appear insurmountable. I think this points to the idea that we're always playing percentages when making decisions, even decisions about being self-deceptive. That is, if anybody really *only* looked at the odds, then there would be no Lance Armstrongs, so to speak.
And if the answer is 'determination, rather than self-deception,' I'd have to say again that it seems to me that deciding to be determined about accomplishing something for which there is little reason to believe it can be accomplished (the odds are bad) involves ignoring what you would normally accept as your 'accurate representations of the world'.
Perhaps it's important that one's 'accurate representations of the world' also need to include that sometimes people do overcome great odds to accomplish things...? Still, what makes ME so special that I think I'M going to be the one to overcome the odds?

Neil,
你提到你对自我欺骗有一个定义。你能把它寄出去吗?
We seem to be using the loose definition for self-deception of "not facing up to the facts." And by facts we mean knowledge, do we not? And if we mean knowledge then we can apply the three criteria for knowledge:
1) It is true
2) I really believe it to be true
3) I am justified in believing it is true
Now to the case of Lance Armstrong. It is said that Lance committed self-deception, but did he? What he thought came to be true; he did recover and go on to great things; So criterion 1 is met. He really believed what he thought (I assume); so criterion 2 is met. The criterion in dispute is "was he justified in his belief that he would recover and go on to great things?" If the answer to criterion 3 is yes, then he did not deceive himself. If the answer to this third criterion is no, then he did deceive himself. He was given a non-zero probability of recovery, wasn't he? And if he did recover, then I don't see any compelling reason why he would not attain his former physical conditioning. So Lance was (chose one):
A) Not guilty of self-deception
B) Guilty of just a bit of self-deception
C) Guilty of profound self-deception
D) None of the above

And even this assumes that Lance was lying there in the hospital bed thinking "I'm going to win the Tour de France". What evidence do we have that this is the case?
更可能的情况是，他躺在那里想:“该死，我还会再骑自行车的，不管这些医生怎么说!”医生说:“当然，我们认为你可以!”当他第一次骑自行车时，他想:“我要恢复好身材，再次有竞争力地骑自行车!”当他第一次参加比赛时，他想，“我要为环法自行车赛而努力!”当他和其他参赛者站在起跑线上时，他想:“我要赢了!”
What's self-deception here, and what's self-motivation? Where do you draw the line? I'd say that the odds of Lance accomplishing each individual step weren't bad at all (except for the last one), it's only when multiplied together that they becoming vanishingly close to zero. But he could have changed his goals at any point and successfully accomplished something else.

我喜欢这个讨论，但它似乎忽略了特里夫斯的伟大贡献:自我欺骗是与生俱来的——我们对此没有“选择”。兰斯·阿姆斯特朗不是一个很好的例子。有1000个更好的例子:那些认为自己有机会，但甚至没有获得资格的人。试试这个:试着在自我欺骗的时候抓住自己。非常困难的。当我对自己说“我要再来一杯啤酒”时，我想我已经喝了。但这是真的——我是这样做的——基于我身体的瘾。吸烟，饮食，性以及赢得这场辩论也是如此。从达尔文的观点来看，那些选择这样辩论的人将会被……