Abstract
Imagine a dog idling in the foreground, a tree in the middle distance, and a turnip lying on the ground behind the tree. Either of two hypotheses, or a combination of them, may be advanced to explain the dog’s inaction with respect to the turnip: perhaps he is not aware that it is there, and perhaps he does not want a turnip. Such is the bipartite nature of motivation: belief and valuation intertwined. It is the deep old duality of thought and feeling, of the head and the heart, the cortex and the thalamus, the words and the music.
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Notes
Bernard Williams, Morality (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 75f, questions the disjointness of these alternatives. I am construing them disjointly.
Moritz Schlick, Fragen der Ethik, (Vienna, 1930).
Nikolaas Tinbergen, The Herring Gull’s World, (London: Collins, 1953).
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© 1978 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Quine, W.V. (1978). On the Nature of Moral Values. In: Goldman, A.I., Kim, J. (eds) Values and Morals. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7634-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7634-5_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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