Radically self-deceived? Not so fast

We don’t know our own mental states and we don’t have free will. These are Pelham et al.’s central claims in a nutshell. In principle, these two claims are independent: if one lacks free will because, say, all of one’s actions are controlled by an evil demon, it’s still possible for one to know that one believes it’s Friday or that one wants a cup of coffee. Conversely, it’s possible to have free will and to be radically self-deceived or ignorant about one’s mental states. The authors seem to take the two topics together because of their focus on “knowing why”. If we don’t know why we think what we think, we lack self-knowledge; if we don’t know why we do what we do, we lack free will. In this paper, we argue that Pelham et al. fail to acknowledge that “knowing why” one believes or does something is ambiguous between rationalizing and non-rationalizing explanations. The two dramatic claims do not follow in any straightforward sense once this ambiguity is properly recognized, or so we claim