In this essay, I shall deal with self-deception in its most literal sense, namely "to deceive oneself intentionally into believing what one knows to be false". Admittedly, this phenomenon has long been recognized to be psychologically perplexing and philosophically paradoxical. How could one person knowing the truth get himself to believe the opposite and, as a result, simultaneously hold the contradictory beliefs ? Moreover, the knowledge of one's own intention to deceive oneself should make the project self-defeating because no one can be deceived if he knows the deceiver's intention and motives whether or not they are one and the same person. What follows is an attempt to resolve these problems and clarify the nature and etiology of self-deception. Examining carefully a variety of ways in which desire can influence beliefformation by biasing our cognitive processes, I propose a coherent description of self-deception which is real and common in our daily life. In due course it will be shown that our ability to know our own mental states is limited and we can be mistaken about and unaware of the reasons on which we act.

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