The Anosognosic's Dilemma

[Robin Landseadel]

Started wandering over to the Op-Ed Blogs at the NYT, ran across this  
Perfectly Pynchonian analysis of Anosognosia or ". . . The apparent  
unawareness of or failure to recognize one's own functional  
defect  . . ." In the case of these blogs by Errol Morris, this is a  
blindness of one's intellectual limitations:

	DAVID DUNNING:  People will often make the case, “We can’t
	be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out
	as a species a long time ago.”  I don’t agree. I find myself
	saying, “Well, no.  Gee, all you need to do is be far enough
	along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the
	calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce.  And
	then, that’s it.  You don’t need a lot of smarts.  You don’t have to
	do tensor calculus.  You don’t have to do quantum physics to be
	able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.”  One
	could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would
	say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering
	idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still 	
	make it through the day.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/

	In one of his first e-mails, David Dunning wrote to me about the
	mediocre detective who is unaware of significant clues littered
	all around him.  A thousand unnoticed purloined letters easily
	within reach.  Cluelessness could be just another way of
	expressing our relationship to the unknown unknowns.  We
	don’t know what questions to ask, let alone how to answer
	them.  I sent an e-mail to Dunning:  “If you were to make a Venn
	diagram of cluelessness, self-deception and denial, what would
	it look like?”

	Shortly afterwards, Dunning responded.

	I’ve attached a PDF with how I see it.  Cluelessness is clearly
	the biggest circle, in that there is so much knowledge and
	expertise that lies outside everybody’s personal cognitive event
	horizon.  People can be clueless in a million different ways,
	even though they are largely trying to get things right in an
	honest way. Deficits in knowledge, or in information the world is
	giving them, just leads people toward false beliefs and holes in
	their expertise.

	That is not to dismiss or belittle self-deception.  A caveat to
	begin:  The traditional academic definition of “self-deception” is
	technical and a little stodgy.  It requires that, to self-deceive, a
	person both know “X” and deceive himself or herself into
	believing “not-X.”  But how can a person both believe and
	disbelieve “X” at the same time?  This is for philosophers to
	argue about (and they have, for centuries) and for experimental
	nerds like me to try to figure out how to demonstrate decisively
	in the lab (so far, we haven’t).

	But if we imbue self-deception with a looser definition, we have
	a lot to talk about. Psychologists over the past 50 years have
	demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing
	themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of
	inconvenient ones.  You can call it self-deception, but it also
	goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive
	processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a
	robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what
	they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done
	describing the shape or the size of that catalogue.  All this
	rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps
	more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they
	should really reconsider.


	Denial, to a psychologist, is a somewhat knuckle-headed
	technique in self-deception, and it is to merely deny the truth of
	something someone does not want to confront.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-5/