1. science
2. social science
3. philosophy

The division of the mind: Paradoxes and puzzles
Vasco Correia
Institute for the Philosophy of Language
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
vasco_saragoca@hotmail.com
1. Introduction
The hypothesis that the mind is in some way divided is often put forward in an attempt
to make sense of irrationality, whether in the cognitive sphere (delusional beliefs) or in
the practical sphere (incontinent actions). In essence, the “divisionist” argument states
that one cannot understand irrational actions and beliefs without assuming that the mind
is composed of different sub-systems. Donald Davidson, for example, explicitly
endorses this methodological assumption:
“I have urged in several papers that it is only by postulating a kind of
compartmentalization of the mind that we can understand, and begin to explain,
irrationality”1.
Likewise, Aristotle introduces the distinction between the “rational” and the
“irrational” part of the soul in reference to the case of akratic action (or “lack of selfcontrol”), in which the agent deliberately acts against his best judgment2. And it is also
the problem of irrationality that leads Plato to argue in The Republic that there are three
components of the soul (nous, thumos and epithumia). Irrational action, he argues,
would result of a conflict between those components. Plato evokes the case of Leontios,
a man who was unable to resist the temptation of staring at a bunch of dead bodies,
despite deeming such a voyeurism morally wrong. The puzzling thing about this sort of
behavior is that the agent seemingly knows it is in his best interest to perform the course
of action A, all things considered, and nevertheless ends up doing B.
In the philosophical tradition, the gist of the question has always been the very
possibility of such attitudes. Can one see the best option, and approve of it, and
nonetheless, in full awareness, chose the worst option? How is that possible? Although
a number of philosophers deny the possibility of akrasia thus described, the proponents
of the divisionist hypothesis argue that it is indeed possible to act contrary to one’s best
judgment, insofar as there are different instances operating in the mind. In the case of
Leontios, for example, it all seemed to happen as though a part of him wanted to stare
at the gruesome scene, while another part of him utterly repudiated such an attitude3.
Many authors make a similar claim with regard to specific cases of cognitive
irrationality, such as self-deception, making the case that this type of phenomenon also
1
Davidson, “Incoherence and Irrationality”, Dialectica, vol. 39 (nº 4), p. 353.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1102b.
3
Hence Plato’s metaphor in the Phaedrus depicting the psyche as a “composite pair of winged horses
(…) one of them noble and of noble breed and the other ignoble and of ignoble breed”, constantly torn
between the impulses of desire and the recommendations of reason (Plato, Phaedrus, transl. B. Jowett,
245ab).
2
requires some sort of differentiation within the mind1. In their view, there is a formal
analogy between self-deception and akrasia insofar as both phenomena seem to imply
some degree of inconsistency between the agent’s attitudes: the akratic agent is
someone who believes that A is the better option and nonetheless decides to do B; and
the self-deceiver, likewise, is someone who believes that p is the most likely hypothesis
and nonetheless decides to believe that not-p. After all, if the self-deceiver did not
initially hold the unwelcome belief that p, he would have no reason to make the effort of
embracing the opposite belief. For example, if John did not know “deep inside him” that
he is an alcoholic, he wouldn’t go to great pains to persuade himself that he doesn’t
have a problem with alcohol. To that extent, as Davidson points out, it would seem as
though the initial belief that p, in concert with the desire that not-p, causally sustains the
contradictory belief that not-p: “Self-deception is notoriously troublesome, since in
some of its manifestations it seems to require us not only to say that someone beliefs
both a certain proposition and its negation, but also to hold that the one belief sustains
the other”2. According to the so-called “intentionalist” account of self-deception, at
least, the self-deceiver must hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously; he must
belief that p is true, while also believing that p is false.
And this is precisely why the divisionist hypothesis is so appealing to many
authors, since it accounts for irrationality in terms of inner inconsistency without raising
the paradox of contradictory attitudes coexisting in the same mind. Assuming that the
mind is indeed divided, it may well happen that conflicts and even contradictions arise
between the different sub-systems. Even at a cognitive level, it doesn’t appear
paradoxical to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, provided that the beliefs
in question belong to different parts of the mind. In this sense, divisionists seem able to
avoid what Alfred Mele calls the “doxastic paradox” of self-deception, that is to say the
fact that the self-deceiver appears to believe that p and that not-p simultaneously3.
According to Robert Audi, in particular, this is possible because the contradictory
beliefs coexist at different levels: the subject believes that p at a conscious level,
whereas he “unconsciously knows that not-p (or has reason to believe, and
unconsciously and truly believes, non-p”4. To that extent, it seems possible not only that
the subject holds the contradictory beliefs simultaneously, but also that he remains
unaware of the contradiction (the two beliefs “failing to clash”, so to speak).
There are nevertheless two crucial difficulties which seem to undermine the
divisionist postulate. The first was pointed out by Sartre in his famous analysis of the
mauvaise foi (or self-deception) and concerns primarily Freudian-like accounts of the
divided mind. Sartre’s argument is presented as a dilemma, known as the “paradox of
repression”, and questions the idea that a part of the mind (supposedly unconscious)
could somehow perform the complex task of preventing another part of the mind from
contemplating harmful representations. The second difficulty, on the other hand,
concerns all sorts of divisionism, Freudian-like or not. It is commonly referred to as the
“homunculus fallacy” and was initially stressed by Wittgenstein, who argued that the
suggestion that there are relatively autonomous sub-systems coexisting in the mind
utterly compromises the very notion of personal identity.
1
In particular, Donald Davidson, Robert Audi, David Pears, Herbert Fingarette and Sebastian Gardner.
Davidson, “Deception and Division”, in Le Pore and McLaughlin, Actions and Events. Perspectives on
the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985, p. 138.
3
Mele, Alfred, “Two Paradoxes of Self-Deception”, in Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, ed.
by Dupuy, Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998, p. 38.
4
Audi, “Self-Deception, Action and Will”, Erkenntnis, 18, 1982, p. 137.
2
In this paper I shall examine some of the most influent versions of the divisionist
account, namely the models developed by Freud, Fingarette, Pears and Davidson. I
argue that (1) each of these accounts leads to a specific paradox or set of paradoxes, and
also that (2) the divisionist hypothesis is not necessary to explain ordinary cases of
irrationality, such as self-deception, denial, rationalization, wishful thinking, and the
like. This is not to say that it is impossible for our minds to suffer any sort of division –
as it undoubtedly appears to happen in pathological cases of mental dissociation - but
simply that one does not need to assume such divisions to explain ordinary cases of
irrationality. My view is that most cases of irrationality, whether practical or cognitive,
stem from the influence that desires and other emotions are liable to exert upon our
cognitive faculties, and thereby upon our judgments. If this hypothesis is correct,
irrational thought and irrational behavior are typically caused by a conflict between
individual mental states (for example, a conflict between a desire and a belief), and not
from a conflict between differentiated parts of the mind.
2. The paradoxes of the Freudian account
It is worth beginning by examining Freud’s model of divisionism, since it admittedly
inspired Fingarette’s, Pears’ and Davidson’s recent versions of divisionism. As Freud
often stresses, the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory is the claim that a significant
number of our representations remain unconscious or repressed, forming what he
initially calls the Unconscious (das Unbewusste) and later the Id: “the division of
mental life into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise
on which psycho-analysis is based”1. But he also specifies that unconscious contents
remain excluded from the consciousness, not because our consciousness accidentally
neglects to contemplate them, but because they cannot become conscious, insofar as a
given strength represses them: “Analysis of these examples of forgetting reveals that the
motive of forgetting is always an unwillingness to recall something which may evoke
painful feelings”2. In fact, the process of repression needs to be understood in light of
the fundamental principles that rule the psychic apparatus, and particularly the so-called
“pleasure principle”, which implies that the psyche spontaneously seeks pleasure and
avoids pain (caeteris paribus). Thus, a representation is repressed either because it is
deemed too painful to be made conscious or because it constitutes a threat, directly or
indirectly, to the equilibrium of the psychic apparatus as a whole.
In L’être et le néant Sartre famously argues that the Freudian account is
intrinsically paradoxical. The nerve of Sartre’s argument is that the so-called
Unconscious would have to behave as a sort of “second consciousness” to be able to
repress harmful thoughts3. After all, Sartre observes, in order to withhold dangerous
information from the consciousness, the Unconscious would have to perform the highly
complex task of assessing the potential impact of each given representation in the
economy of the psyche. Yet, such a task could not be achieved successfully without the
unconscious being aware of the representations in question, for otherwise it would lack
the means to decide which information is suitable to be made conscious, and which
1
Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), trans. Joan Riviere, Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-analysis,
London, 1927, p. 19.
2
Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), trans. A. Brill, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1914, Chap.
12, p. 332.
3
Sartre, L’être et le néant, Gallimard, 1943, I, ch. 2.
information needs to be repressed. But if that were indeed the case, the unconscious
would have to know the negative representations in order not to know them, which
seems rather paradoxical1.
The second problem with Freud’s account is that it challenges the concept of
personal identity, since it attributes propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires,
representations, memories and emotions to mere parts of the mind, despite the fact that
attitudes of this sort only seem appropriate to describe the person as a whole (the individual, strictly speaking). As Wittgenstein points out, “only of a human being and
what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it
sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious”2. Freud’s description of the
mind’s components often falls into what Anthony Kenny calls the “homunculus
fallacy”, in other words the tendency to describe the alleged parts of the mind as though
they were different persons within the person. In The Ego and the Id, in particular,
Freud develops an anthropomorphic model which depicts the ego, the super-ego and the
id as different “homunculi” coexisting and competing in accordance with their specific
set of demands. Regarding the ego, for example, he writes that “we can see [it] as a poor
little creature subjected to servitude in three different ways, and threatened in
consequence by three different dangers – one posed by the external world, one by the
libido of the id, and one by the harshness of the super-ego”3. Likewise, in An Outline of
Psychoanalysis Freud goes as far as to suggest that the psychoanalyst ought to make an
alliance with one of the mind’s components, namely the ego, in an attempt to protect it
from the demands set by its two rivals: “The analytic physician and the patient’s
weakened ego, basing themselves on the real external world, have to band themselves
together into a party against the enemies, the instinctual demands of the id and the
conscientious demands of the super-ego. We form a pact with each other”4. But this
raises very acutely the problem of personal identity, given that the components of the
psyche do not seem to have much in common. Under such a description, in effect, one
cannot help but wonder what sort of principle would be able to ensure the overall unity
of the several sub-systems. Sartre also stresses this point: “By rejecting the conscious
unity of the psyche, Freud is obliged to presuppose everywhere a magic unity linking
distant phenomena across obstacles”5.
Irvin Thalberg makes a similar objection by raising the “who?” questions
regarding the alleged constituents of the psychic apparatus: “Is our ego awake or asleep
when we sleep?”; “Which ‘self’ does my ego have the duty of protecting?”; “Whom
does my super-ego watch when it engages in ‘self-observation’ – me, my ego, itself?”;
“Whose enjoyment do [my instincts] ‘strive’ for?”; and “Whose interests is the ego
trying to protect in its repressions?”6. Far from solving this serious difficulty, Freud
only seems to aggravate it in his later writings, bringing forward the hypothesis of a socalled “splitting of the Ego” (Ichspaltung). In the posthumous text “The splitting of the
Ego in the process of defense”, remarkably, he claims that the ego itself is liable to
1
In a recent paper, Simon Boag argued that the resolution of this paradox hinges upon the recognition
that the process of repression inhibits knowledge of knowing the repressed (Boag, “Realism, SelfDeception and the Logical Paradox of Repression”, Theory and Psychology, 17 (3), 2007, p. 421-447).
The problem with this solution, however, is that a third degree knowledge would then be required to
determine which knowledge of the knowledge is to be inhibited, and which is not.
2
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953, § 281.
3
Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), Penguin classics, London, 2003, p. 146.
4
Freud, An outline of Psycho-analysis (1940), The Standard Edition, Vintage, London, 2001, p. 173.
5
Sartre, id., p. 89.
6
Thalberg, “Freud’s Anatomies of the Self”, in R. Wollheim, and J. Hopkins, (eds.), Philosophical
Essays on Freud, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 253-254.
suffer an inner division. When the conflict between the ego’s desires and what reality
demands becomes unbearable, Freud writes, “The two contrary reactions to the conflict
persist as the center-point of a splitting of the ego (…) The synthetic function of the
ego, though it is of such extraordinary importance, is subject to particular conditions
and is liable to a whole number of disturbances”1. Although Freud initially confines this
hypothesis to the specific cases of fetishism and psychosis, he later extends it to
neurosis in general2. But, of course, if the components of the mind may themselves be
sub-divided into sub-constituents, the paradoxes of divisionism become all the more
difficult to surmount.
3. Fingarette: “ego” and “counter-ego”
In spite of these difficulties, Herbert Fingarette’s analysis takes up Freud’s idea of a
splitting of the ego. Nevertheless, he gives it an ingenious twist by suggesting that the
ego’s inner conflicts lead to the formation of what he calls a “counter-ego”. According
to the author, this instance is formed during the emergence of the person’s self and
coexists with the ego in the mind throughout live: “The defensive outcome, then, is to
establish what we may call a counter-ego nucleus, this nucleus being the structural
aspect of counter-cathexis”3. Aware of the dilemmas that Freud’s theory seems to face,
Fingarette explains that “such paradoxes as this arise because both earlier and later
versions [of Freud’s theory] are parallel in insisting correctly on the fact that there is a
split in the psyche, but fail in defining the nature of the split adequately”4. The adequate
adequate way to define de nature of the split, in the author’s view, would be to suggest
that every ego is essentially divided (and not just the neurotic or the psychotic ego), and
also that the upshot of such a division is the formation of two basic sub-systems, the ego
and the counter-ego.
Furthermore, Fingarette contends that the origin of such a split is not the process
of repression, but a process of “disavowal” through which the counter-ego is split off
from the ego. He illustrates this process by evoking the example of a man who resents
his employer’s attitude toward him, but is unable to accept (or avow) his own
resentment because he considers it immoral to feel such an anger toward someone else.
As a result, Fingarette argues, the subject refuses to identify himself to the attitude in
question and claims: “It is not ‘I’ who am angry; from henceforth I will dissociate
myself from it; it is repugnant to me”5. The process of split off would begin at an early
age, through the constraints of education and social interactions. Negative feelings such
as shame and guilt, in particular, would play an important role in causing the person to
“disavow” certain emotions and desires, progressively inducing the creation and
development of a counter-ego nucleus in the mind.
1
Freud, “The splitting of the Ego in the process of defense”, The Standard Edition, Vintage, The Hogarth
Press, London, vol. XXIII, p. 276.
2
Cf. Freud, Outline of Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition, Vintage, The Hogarth Press, London, vol.
XXIII, p. 202: “The view which postulates that in all psychoses there is a splitting of the ego could not
call for so much notice if it did not turn out to apply to other states more like the neuroses and, finally, to
the neuroses themselves”.
3
Fingarette, “Self-deception and the splitting of the ego”, in R., Wollheim, & J., Hopkins, (eds.),
Philosophical Essays on Freud, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 224.
4
Fingarette, id., p. 223.
5
Fingarette, id., p. 218.
The advantage of Fingarette’s account is that it seems to avoid the paradox of
repression, given that the phenomenon of disavowal, unlike Freud’s mechanism of
repression, is both a conscious and deliberate act performed by the person’s Ego: “the
defensive process is a splitting of the ego which is not something that ‘happens’ to the
ego but something the ego does, a motivated strategy”1. There is however a fundamental
dilemma in Fingarette’s account: assuming that the counter-ego is not repressed (nor
unconscious) but merely “split-off” from the ego, it follows that the same consciousness
must serve the purposes both of the ego and of the counter-ego. But how could the Ego
and the counter-ego remain effectively dissociated if they share the exact same
consciousness? Here lies the paradox: on the one hand, the subject’s consciousness is
meant to deny the set of beliefs and emotions which seem unacceptable to the ego; but
on the other hand, as part of the counter-ego, the consciousness must be aware of such
beliefs and emotions. In the previous case, for example, the subject has to be aware of
his anger toward his boss, for otherwise he wouldn’t bother to deny it. But if the
subject’s ego knows about the unacceptable emotions, how can it not recognize them as
its own? And what sense does it make to say that the subject’s consciousness
acknowledges certain attitudes as a counter-ego, but not as an ego?
An additional problem with Fingarette’s account lies in the assumption that
people are capable of disavowing inconvenient realities both consciously and
voluntarily. This philosophical hypothesis, known as doxastic voluntarism, is in fact
ruled out as a psychological impossibility by most philosophers and psychologists, who
argue that no one seems to be able to decide at will, hic et nunc, what to believe or not2.
As Jonathan Bennett points out, although it may not be conceptually impossible to
cause oneself to believe something at will, it seems de facto impossible to achieve such
a task:
“There could be simpler, quicker, more reliable means for causing beliefs in people
without giving them evidence. I passionately want to spend the evening in a state of
confidence that the whether will be fine tomorrow (I have my practical reasons), so I
give myself the thought of tomorrow’s whether being fine while snapping my fingers in
a certain way, and sure enough I end up convinced that the whether will be fine
tomorrow. We have no such fast, reliable techniques for producing belief without
evidence, but they are not conceptually ruled out”.3
Finally, one could also question the very existence of a so-called “counter-ego”,
much like Freud’s opponents have questioned the existence of an unconscious. Even
assuming that the process of denial may occur intentionally, it seems indeed doubtful
that it should result in the formation of a counter-ego which most of us would be
unaware of.
4. Pears: the rival “centers of agency”
In a sense, one could describe David Pears’ version of divisionism as a compromise
between Freud’s founder model and Fingarette’s sophisticated account. On the one
1
Fingarette, id., p. 224.
See for example Pascal Engel, “Volitionism and Voluntarism About Belief”, in A. Meijers (ed.), Belief,
Cognition and the Will, Tilburg University Press, 1999.
3
Bennett, “Why is Believing Involuntary ?”, Analysis, 50, 1990, p. 96.
2
hand, Pears agrees with Fingarette to say that the divided mind is essentially composed
of two sub-systems, instead of the three Freud describes, which he generically refers to
as the “main” and the “secondary” sub-system. But one the other hand, Pears adopts the
Freudian assumption that one of those sub-systems must remain unconscious:
“There is then one centre of activity in the subject’s contemporary consciousness and
another in the reservoir (…) We have to suppose that each of these two centres includes
any information needed to give its desire a line of action (…) This extremely economic
hypothesis is based on Freud’s fundamental concept of a boundary dividing the conscious
from the preconscious and the unconscious”1.
Pears suggests that this is “the most economical form of the hypothesis of the
divided mind”2, not only because it refrains from engaging in an anthropomorphic
description of the mind’s sub-systems, but also because it does not postulate that such a
division is an essential feature which characterizes each and every mind. According to
Pears, we only need to assume that the mind suffers this kind of differentiation in the
case of subjects who are prone to some degree of irrationality, whether cognitive or
practical. In principle, the cause of the division is the emergence of a strong desire
which turns out to be incompatible with the subject’s predominant preferences. For
example, the desire of having an extra-marital affair with an attractive person is of
course incompatible with the aspiration to remain a faithful partner and a moral person3.
If strong enough, the desire in question may eventually form what Pears calls a “rival
centre of agency”, which is able to compete with the main sub-system and liable to
induce irrational behavior and irrational thinking.
The interest of Pears’ account is that it avoids the homunculus fallacy, given that
the secondary sub-system of the mind is described as a purely functional entity. To
begin with, it is not an essential feature of the mind, but a characteristic which only
applies to irrational minds; secondly, it is not defined idiosyncratically, given that any
type of desires could in principle characterize the rebellious sub-system; and finally, for
that very reason, it may actually differ from one person to the other (unlike Freudian
sub-systems, which are supposedly universal).
Nevertheless, Pears’ model seems unable to avoid the paradox of repression.
After all, how could the secondary sub-system, which is unconscious, be able to assess
the impact of each mental state on the psychic apparatus? It seems indeed difficult to
conceive that an unconscious instance should possess the awareness and the
discernment required to predict the positive or negative impact of every belief, every
desire and every representation upon the subject’s mental equilibrium. Aware of this
difficulty, Pears argues that the act through which the mind excludes a given content
from consciousness is not only unconscious but also “self-reflective”: “The only
possible reply is that the suppression of the consciousness that normally accompanies a
particular type of mental event may itself be unconscious without having succumbed to
a previous act of suppression. To put the point in another way, suppression can be selfreflective”4.
1
Pears, “Motivated irrationality, Freudian theory and cognitive dissonance”, in Wollheim R. and Hopkins
J., (eds.) Philosophical Essays on Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 269.
2
Pears. Id., p. 268.
3
It is worth noting, however, that the rebellious desire could in principle be of any type: not just a sexual
drive, as in many of Freud’s analysis, but also professional ambition, desire of fame and glory, desire to
get rich, and so forth, depending on the type of preferences and moral values which are specific to the
subject.
4
Pears, id., p. 275.
Ingenious as it may sound, Pears’ solution seems insufficient to neutralize
Sartre’s criticism, for even if we accept the idea that there are self-reflective acts of
repression, remains to be answered the question of how exactly such mental acts are
able to perform the elaborated task of separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak,
sorting out what might be beneficial and what might be harmful for the mind. As Mark
Johnston rightly points out, this would imply that an unconscious sub-system of the
mind should be able to manipulate the main system in the best interest of the mind as a
whole:
“The question arises how the protective system could do all this without being
conscious of (introspecting) its own operations. After all, it has to compare the outcome
it is producing with the outcome it aimed for and act or cease to act accordingly. Any
consciousness by the protective system of its own operation is “buried alive”, i.e., is not
acceptable to the consciousness of the main system”1.
An additional problem is that Pears’ definition of the secondary sub-system
remains somewhat vague. He writes that, for the mind to be divided, “there must be two
conflicting desires which set up rival centers of activity”2, but neglects to specify which
other conditions must be combined for the division to occur. In particular, the reader is
left wondering whether there are as many secondary sub-systems of the mind as there
are strong conflicts between desires. In the book Irrationality Alfred Mele stresses this
point with an amusing analogy: “Explaining doxastic irrationality in Pears’s fashion is
rather like explaining how a football team held another scoreless by saying that the
former strategically rendered all of the latter’s scoring attempts ineffective. The football
fan wants much more than this. He wants to know how team A rendered team B’s
attempts ineffective”3.
5. Davidson: the mind’s “compartments”
Although Donald Davidson extensively acknowledges to what extent his account of
irrationality is inspired by Freud’s analysis, the divisionist hypothesis he puts forward is
actually much weaker that Freud’s, and arguably even more minimal than Pears’. To
begin with, he doesn’t assume that there is such a thing as an unconscious part of the
mind which the subject’s consciousness would be unable to access. He doesn’t go as far
as to deny the existence of an Unconscious, but clearly states that we do not need to
presuppose the existence of contents inaccessible to the consciousness to be able to
make sense of irrationality. All we need to presuppose, he argues, is that there are
different “territories” or “compartments” in the mind which the consciousness cannot
survey simultaneously.
In addition, while Pears and Fingarette suggest that the secondary sub-system
emerges in the mind as an organized centre of action, competing with the main system
and aiming at distinct goals, Davidson refuses to speculate about that aspect; and, to that
extent, seems to avoid the homunculus fallacy. All that is required, Davidson suggests,
1
Johnston, “Self-Deception and the Nature of Mind”, in Rorty and McLaughlin (eds.), Perspectives on
Self-Deception, Berkeley, L.A., London, University of California Press, 1982, p. 82.
2
Pears, id., p. 268.
3
Mele, Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Self-Control, N.Y., Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1987, p. 143.
is that “within each [department of mind] there is a fair degree of consistency, and
where one element can operate on another in the modality of non-rational causality”1.
Thus, if an agent holds contradictory beliefs, as in the case of self-deception, one should
assume that there is a subsystem of mental states consistent with the belief that p, and
another sub-system of mental states consistent with the belief that not-p. More
specifically, Davidson suggests that the partition of the mind occurs whenever a nonrational causality arises, i.e. whenever a mental state A causes a mental state B without
being a (good) reason for B. For example, Jack’s belief that Jane is in love with him is
irrational in case it’s caused by his feelings for Jane (instead of objective information),
to the extent that his desire to be loved by Jane is surely not a good reason to believe
that Jane is in love with him. If Jack’s irrational belief stems from a genuine process of
self-deception, and not from sheer wishful thinking, this would mean that a
compartment of his mind believes that Jane is in love with him, while another
compartment of his mind believes the opposite. And in a sense, Davidson explains, it’s
precisely because Jack believes that Jane probably doesn’t love him (and because he
cannot bear that reality) that he is motivated to embrace the belief that she does - the
former belief causally inducing the later.
Despite the advantages of Davidson’s account relatively to other divisionist
models, it seems to encounter a new set of problems. The first difficulty is that it
undermines Davidson’s own holistic theory of mind, which contends that an individual
mental state can only be understood in light of the whole set of attitudes constitutive of
the subject’s mind, and that there must be a large degree of consistency between those
attitudes. Davidson highlights himself the difficulty:
“There is no question but that the precept of unavoidable charity in interpretation is
opposed to the partitioning of the mind. For the point of partitioning was to allow
inconsistent or conflicting beliefs and desires and feelings to exist in the same mind,
while the basic methodology of all interpretation tells us that inconsistency breeds
unintelligibility”2.
A second insufficiency lies in the fact that Davidson’s description of the mind’s
sub-systems remains too vague. As Pears points out, “[t]he drawing of a fault-line
through a point at which internal irrationality occurs is only the beginning of the theory,
and it is not enough to identify a sub-system”3. As a matter of fact, Davidson states that
whenever irrational causality occurs in the mind one must assume that a correlative
partition is consumed; but he doesn’t specify how that partition comes about, or the
terms in which the sub-systems co-exist and interact. Besides, as Pascal Engel rightly
suggests, the vagueness of Davidson’s analysis extends to the very dynamic underlying
the mind’s alleged differentiation: “[Davidson’s model] would need the equivalent of
what Freud calls the dynamic aspect of the unconscious to account for the interactions
between the sub-systems”4. In other words, what Davidson’s model seems to lack is a
descriptive account of irrationality, rather than a merely normative one.
And finally, many authors have questioned Davidson’s claim that ordinary cases
of irrationality, such as weakness of will and self-deception, necessarily involve some
sort of inconsistency between the agent’s mental attitudes (which, in turn, would justify
1
Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality”, in R., Wollheim, & J., Hopkins, (eds.), Philosophical Essays on
Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 182.
2
Davidson, id., p. 184.
3
David Pears, “Self-Deceptive Belief Formation”, 1991, Synthese, vol. 89, nº 3, p. 395.
4
Engel, Avant propos à Davidson, Paradoxes de l’irrationalité, p. 16.
the claim that such cases necessarily presuppose a partition of the mind). With regard to
weakness of will, authors such as George Ainslie and Jon Elster convincingly argue that
one needs not to conceive the phenomenon as the result of an action contrary to the
agent’s own judgment, as if the action and the intention to act were strictly opposed.
More plausibly, what seems to happen when an agent yields to temptation in spite of a
previous decision is that he revises his initial judgment in a sudden and ill-considered
fashion under the pressure of an urging desire. Thus, for example, my strong desire to
eat a dessert is liable to affect my judgment temporarily and lead me insidiously to
revise the decision to loose weight. Even if, all things considered, the option of loosing
weight might be the one which maximizes my well-being, the craving for a more
immediate reward induces a biased perception of my preferences and causes me to
believe, for a short and decisive instant, that it is preferable to eat the dessert. Ainslie
calls this cognitive effect “hyperbolic discounting bias”, which he defines as a sort of
myopia regarding preferences over time: caeteris paribus, people tend to overrate the
value of immediate rewards and to underrate the value of future rewards1. In light of this
hypothesis, the agent who chooses to go on a diet and eventually fails to act accordingly
does not act against his own judgment, strictly speaking, for at the time he eats the
dessert his (biased) judgment assesses that option as being preferable. In this sense,
there is no inner inconsistency in the agent’s mind (no simultaneously contradictory
intentions to act), but simply an evolution in time of the agent’s preferences; in other
words, a revised decision, however irrational and temporary it may turn out to be. Now,
the consequence of this analysis is that divisionism is not required as a presupposition to
understand irrational action, given that a diachronic inconsistence of preferences does
not raise the paradox of contradictory attitudes.
Likewise, several philosophers and psychologists have argued that selfdeception does not imply neither some sort of inner inconsistency in the subject’s mind.
Alfred Mele and Ariela Lazar, in particular, have argued that self-deception does not
entail the subject holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time, but simply a hiatus
between what the available evidence clearly suggests, on the one hand, and what the
subject is lead to believe, on the other hand. In their view, the self-deceived subject does
not initially know the true proposition that p and at some point decides to believe the
false proposition that not-p. Instead, what happens is that the subject’s judgment is
biased by some desire (or other emotion) which induces a distorted perception of the
reality. If Jack believes that Jane is in love with him in the teeth of evidence, for
example, the problem is not that Jack intentionally decides to believe what seems more
convenient, as Davidson suggests, but rather that his feelings for Jane surreptitiously
bias his interpretation of her attitudes toward him. A sheer sign of friendship will then
appear as an unquestionable proof of love. But, again, if there are no contradictory
beliefs in the agent’s mind, if the irrational belief simply results from a biased
perception of the reality, there is no compelling reason to assume that his mind is
divided and that one part of the mind is aware of the truth while the other one is being
deceived. Furthermore, as Mele observes, it would be paradoxical to suggest that one
part of the mind is able to employ a deceptive strategy upon the other, given that a
“potential self-deceiver’s knowledge of his intention and strategy would seem typically
to render them ineffective”2.
1
2
See Ainslie, Break-Down of Will, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Mele, Irrationality, op. cit., p. 121.
6. Conclusion: toward a unitary solution
In essence, our critical analysis brings about two significant conclusions. First, (i) that
each version of the divisionist account appears to lead to a certain number of paradoxes.
This is not to say that the divisionist view is intrinsically paradoxical, but simply that, to
my knowledge, no consistent model of divisionism has been developed so far. Second,
and perhaps more importantly, it would seem (ii) that it is not necessary to postulate the
division of the mind in order to account for the vast majority of cases of irrationality. As
we have seen in the last section of this paper, the vast majority of cases of cognitive and
practical irrationality can be accounted for in unitary terms, without appealing to the
divionist postulate.
Crucially, my claim is that both irrational behavior and irrational reasoning can
be explained as the result of a conflict between individual mental states, and not from a
conflict between differentiated parts of the mind. We have seen it regarding cognitive
cases of irrationality, such as self-deception, denial, rationalization, wishful thinking,
and the like, which seemingly stem from the influence our desires and emotions are
liable to exert upon our judgments. And we have seen it regarding practical cases of
irrationality, and particularly akrasia (or weakness of will), which can also be
understood as the result of a biased judgment, given that the very same phenomenon of
motivated irrationality is susceptible to affect the evaluative judgments upon which we
base our choices. Here too, it’s simply an individual mental state, generally a desire,
that induces an irrational assessment of the feasible options and subsequently an
irrational action.
Having said that, the fact that the hypothesis of mental partitioning is not
required to explain ordinary cases of irrationality does not mean that it does not apply to
extreme cases of irrationality, and particularly to pathological cases of “dissociative
identity” (DSM IV) or “multiple personality disorder” (ICD 10). This is the reason why
it would be wrong to rule out the idea that the mind may be divided as a paradox per se.
Instead, it seems fair to suggest that divisionism remains a puzzle to be solved. From
that perspective, it would be interesting to examine what exactly makes the difference
between “normal” and “pathological” cases of irrationality with regard to identity
disorders.
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