IT is easy to lose one's way in the subject of self-deceptio n, so I will stay close to actual events as much as possible. To begin with, an example, in which it seems that knowing something is not as simple and unambiguous a condition as one might imagine: A businessman is talking about his partner and friend of many years. He chooses his words carefully. With obvious reluctance, he says that it is "possible" that this man has been cheating him. He is silent for a moment, then he says quietly that he thinks he has known this "in a way" for a long time. Finally, he adds, "But you don't really know it until you say it out loud." Thus we learn that there are two kinds of knowing: knowing "in a way" and "really" knowing. Furthermore, the transition from one to the other occurs upon "saying it out loud." The difference, in other words, is not a matter of acquiring additional information, but of conscious articulation of what was already in some sense known but not articulated. One might call it a process of consciousness raising. The earlier state was one in which the speaker did not know (and did not want to know) what he knew; the final state was one in which he realized what he knew, admitting it to his listener and to himself at the same stroke. It appears, therefore, that there is a distinction between what one feels or believes about something and what one imagines oneself to feel or believe.' A disjunction between these two is wbat we call self-deception.