Few would be so harsh or so openly moral (let alone so confidently theological) today, but we deceive ourselves if we think the issue before us is qualitatively different.
We deceive ourselves if we claim that more than a small fraction of students in institutions of higher education would be where they are if there were no significance for their future careers in what they hear and read; and it is a mistake to suppose that there is anything discreditable in this".
One is that Obama was never a great liberal, and that we deceive ourselves if we think that he ever was or could be.
However, there seems to be a more attractive reading: We accept a fallacious argument only if we are deceived about its logical form.
Augustine (Against the Academics; Confessions) acknowledges the dream problem, but tries to contain it by arguing that even if we are deceived while dreaming, we can at least distinguish dreams and illusions from actual perception retrospectively (see Matthew 2005: chapter 8 for discussion).
Passing, like prettiness, is a privilege; passing, like prettiness, can also be a peril, if someone believes we are deceiving them.
If they deceive us in this way, then it is at least possible that they also sometimes deceive about the existence of bodies.
Here we will focus on a weaker principle that addresses the kind of justification we can get from perceptual experiences: Epistemology-Mind Link8 If experiences sometimes deceive us, then experiences at best give us inferential justification for beliefs about the external world.
According to Rand, as we've seen, our senses cannot deceive us; and in forming conceptual judgments on the basis of sensory evidence, we can be deceived only if we allow ourselves to fall into inattention or evasion.
If you can deceive the predator seeking to kill you, your genetic code gets passed on to the next generation.
