Self-deception raises complex questions about the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. In this book, Alfred Mele addresses four of the most critical of these questions: What is it to deceive oneself? How do we deceive ourselves? Why do we deceive ourselves? Is self-deception really possible?

Drawing on cutting-edge empirical research on everyday reasoning and biases, Mele takes issue with commonplace attempts to equate the processes of self-deception with those of stereotypical interpersonal deception. Such attempts, he demonstrates, are fundamentally misguided,...

In A Dialogue on Free Will and Science, renowned philosopher Alfred Mele explores the experiments in neuroscience and psychology that have been said to pose the greatest challenges to free will. He uses an imagined dialogue among several characters to make what is typically a complex topic more accessible and engaging for students. Guided by the question "How much power do these scientific challenges have?," the characters first consider what having free will means and then react to well-known experiments that question its existence, including work by Libet and Milgram and the...

Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion.

In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong...

Mele's ultimate purpose in this book is to help readers think more clearly about free will. He identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will and meets them head on. Mele clarifies the central issue in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will - one for readers who are convinced that free will is incompatible with determinism (incompatibilists), and the other for readers who...

People backslide.They freely do things they believe it would be best on the whole not to do -- a judgment developed from their own point of view, not just the perspective of their peers or their parents. The aim of this book is to to clarify the nature of backsliding - of actions that display some weakness of will -- using traditional philosophical techniques that date back to Plato and Aristotle (whose work on weakness of will or "akrasia" he discusses) and some new studies in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. Mele then attacks the thesis that backsliding is an illusion because...

People backslide.They freely do things they believe it would be best on the whole not to do -- a judgment developed from their own point of view, not just the perspective of their peers or their parents. The aim of this book is to to clarify the nature of backsliding - of actions that display some weakness of will -- using traditional philosophical techniques that date back to Plato and Aristotle (whose work on weakness of will or "akrasia" he discusses) and some new studies in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. Mele then attacks the thesis that backsliding is an illusion because...

This volume showcases cutting-edge scholarship from The Big Questions in Free Will project, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and directed by Alfred R. Mele. It explores the subject of free will from the perspectives of neuroscience; social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; and philosophy (both traditional and experimental).

The volume consists of fourteen new articles and an introduction from top-ranked contributors, all of whom bring fresh perspectives to the question of free will. They investigate questions such as: How do children conceive of free will and...

Does free will exist? The question has fueled heated debates spanning from philosophy to psychology and religion. The answer has major implications, and the stakes are high. To put it in the simple terms that have come to dominate these debates, if we are free to make our own decisions, we are accountable for what we do, and if we aren't free, we're off the hook.

There are neuroscientists who claim that our decisions are made unconsciously and are therefore outside of our control and social psychologists who argue that myriad imperceptible factors influence even our minor decisions to the...