Abstract
The three-factor conception of motivational states opens the way for a move that severs any necessary connection that may be thought to exist between the “modal” and representational features of motivational states, on the one hand, and the physiological mechanisms brought together under the functional concept of motivational force on the other. It also allows us to see that other attitudinal features, specifically beliefs, are generally involved when we say someone is “motivated” to do something. Factoring out both “energising‘ and doxastic components allows us to abstract a “purified“ concept I label wanting*. This is the attitudinal core also present in those compound states generally referred to by everyday terms such as “want”, “desire”, “concern” and “interest”. Chapter 3 argues, firstly, that wants* are not merely motivational states, as they are also responsible for a whole syndrome of characteristic effects, “the optative syndrome”, and secondly, that they don’t necessarily motivate. Against functionalist positions in the philosophy of mind I argue that any attempt to define wanting* in terms of motivational or other effects distorts the primarily first-person and irreducibly practical character of desire’s attitudinal core. These points of criticism prepare the ground for a formulation of the requirements on a constructive theory of wanting*. The following two chapters attempt to meet them.
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- 1.
There actually seems to me to an element of tension here, an element that disappears if the sentence is transposed to the third person. This suggests that the tension is pragmatic, rather than semantic.
- 2.
The precise details of the explications here offered exemplarily are not important for my central claim.
- 3.
The developmental psychologists Bartsch and Wellman (1995, 96) report that children in their second year of life begin to attribute “desires” at least 7 months before they start ascribing beliefs. Further, they found (1995, 70–72) that in their sample 97 % of all references to “desires” were accomplished by means of the word “want”, which was also employed where the children took some object to be unobtainable.
- 4.
What kinds of entities we should see as motivating reasons is a further question. The answer depends on the correct understanding of the concept of a reason, in particular whether it is unitary notion (Dancy 2000, 2) or two different categories covered by one term (Smith 1994, 96f.). For the record: I don’t think that motivational states themselves are reasons, as I take reasons to be necessarily propositional in form. That an agent yearns for something may be a reason, as may non-psychological facts, for instance, concerning people’s living conditions. My claim here is that such reasons will only be able to do motivational work if they are framed as contents of motivational states.
- 5.
Aristotle (NE 1111b22-24) introduces the paradigm of spectator sport cases to distinguish between “boulēsis” and “prohairesis”. It is, admittedly, difficult to see how the “wish” that a particular athlete win a race can qualify as the specifically “rational” attitude “boulēsis” is supposed to be (Sect. 1.3). More importantly, it is also unclear in what sense the desire that something happen over which one has no influence can itself be a form of “striving” or “orexis”.
- 6.
Note that this is not because stretching is a “basic action”. Stretching is something I do by doing something else, namely moving both my arms in a particular way.
- 7.
This has the advantage of avoiding difficulties in providing a positive explication of the notion of intrinsic wanting*. If a child’s wish to play is a paradigmatic intrinsic want*, is intrinsic wanting* really distinguishable from wanting* something for the sake of pleasure? Or if an agent’s desire for global justice is an intrinsic want*, how are we to reconcile this with the idea that the agent is likely to justify this desire by referring to his intrinsic valuing of the want’s* content? (cf. Roughley 2010).
- 8.
- 9.
This doesn’t mean that, according to the fine-grained theorist, one of the actions cannot finish before the other. The point is, rather, that the performance of neither can begin after that of the other. Even if the person shot by A doesn’t die until several days later, it would be wrong to say that A first shot her “and then” killed her.
- 10.
Following Grice, a number of authors took the perspective-relative doubt about the success of an action characterised as a trying to be a mere pragmatic implicature (Grice 1967/87, 43). However, I agree with Severin Schroeder that this conclusion presupposes an overly narrow conception of what can belong to the meaning of a term. Schroeder argues plausibly that perspective-relative doubt is a component of the meaning of “try” (Schroeder 2001, 219ff.). That this is a semantic presupposition and not a mere pragmatic implicature is shown by the incoherent character of Moore-paradoxical utterances such as “Tracy is trying to sit down, although there is no psychological or physical factor preventing her from sitting down and she doesn’t believe that anything might prevent her from sitting down”.
- 11.
Notoriously difficult cases of trying are those in which there are problems specifying what it is an agent does in order to φ, for instance, in trying to get up in the morning, to concentrate or, somewhat less usually, to move his arm when it is paralysed or anaesthetised (James 1890, 1101ff.; Hornsby 1980, 40ff.). There are grounds for doubting whether in such cases what an agent does counts as an action and a fortiori whether the structure of action subordination is realised.
- 12.
I will sometimes use “to be averse* to p” and “to be averse* to φ-ing” as alternative formulations for “to want* ¬p” and “to want* not to φ”.
- 13.
- 14.
Perhaps involuntary attending should be thought of as a form of subintentional mental action (cf. Sect. 5.1.3): although Jenny has not “switched on” intentionally, it seems that she nevertheless finds her attention suddenly focused because this facilitates something she wants* to do, viz. think about Jimmy.
- 15.
E.T. Higgins (1996, 156) has suggested that “salience” be only applied to entities easily perceived as a result of their objective properties. As there is no general acceptance of this suggestion within cognitive and social psychology and as it is useful to have a term for the perceptual phenomenon that is independent of its cause, I shall stick to the more general concept of salience specified in the text.
- 16.
- 17.
This has also been denied. Cf. Brandt (1979) 40f; Brandt and Kim (1963) 429, where “pleasure” is defined as whatever experience causes us to want its continuation. On conceptions of this kind, see Roughley (1999 and unpublished a).
- 18.
Block (cf. 1980b, 271) distinguishes the position thus labelled, and which he also calls “a priori functionalism”, from the “empirical functionalism” or “psychofunctionalism” of Putnam and Fodor, for whom functional analyses represent empirical hypotheses. It is only with the former that I shall be concerned here. Brandt/Kim and Audi do not characterise their proposals as “functionalist”, but refer to them as “theoretical construct” analyses (Brandt and Kim 1963, 427; Audi 1973a, 36; but cf. Kim’s later remarks in his (1993), 191ff.). There is nevertheless a sense in which their holistic approaches are more strictly functionalist than Armstrong’s single factor, neo-behaviourist analysis of “purpose” and “wishing”.
- 19.
The fact that this may seem a natural way to approach “desires”, whereas beliefs appear more easily definable by their causes, has itself been elevated within this perspective to the status of the defining difference between the two kinds of state. See the discussion of Smith’s interpretation of the direction of fit metaphor in Section 4.5.1.
- 20.
Skinner’s scepticism about the capacities of even future neurophysiological research to explain behaviour (1953, 27ff.) is untypical.
- 21.
Skinner and Watson differ as to whether they accept non-overt physiological reactions as part of the criteria for emotions. Watson, who does (1924, 165), is in this respect close to Logical Empiricists such as Carnap (1935, 89f.) and Hempel (1935, 17f.), who, interpreting psychological statements on the basis of the verification theory of meaning, saw both overt behaviour and experimentally observable physiological changes as constitutive of the referents of such statements.
- 22.
This point is due to Gottfried Seebass. For a discussion of the motivation and cogency of so-called “mediation theory” in second-generation behaviourism, see his (1981/82).
- 23.
- 24.
Cf. Lewis (1978, 124), where the Lewis-Armstrong philosophy of mind is straightforwardly characterised as “behaviorist or functionalist” (my emphasis).
- 25.
This is the myth suggested by Sellars (1956, 178).
- 26.
Richard Moran believes, I think correctly, that there is an intimate connection between an agent’s first-person perspective and the perspective she takes on in deliberation. However, he conceives that relationship as too intimate, seeing the first-person perspective as constituted by the normative reasons an agent has for deliberatively forming attitudes with particular contents (Moran 2001, 65; 113ff.). We can express our wants* outside deliberative contexts. Moreover, we need not take those wants* to be backed by sufficient reasons for them to be expressive of our practical point of view. I return to this topic in Section 8.5.
- 27.
David Velleman denies this. According to Velleman (1989, 90–101, 1996, 188ff.), practical reasoning turns out to be a peculiar, self-referential form of theoretical reasoning. Wondering what to do, the question that initiates a practical reasoning episode, is, he claims, a matter of wondering what one is going to do as a result of the belief that one will acquire in answering the question. Any plausibility that Velleman’s view may be thought to have results from his distinguishing this self-referential, predictive kind of thought from the explanatory enterprise normally seen as constitutive of the theoretical. Velleman’s “theoretical” take on practical reasoning thus offers no support to the claim that the attitudes are entities postulated in the service of a fledgling explanatory science of human behaviour. I return to Velleman’s doxastic conception of intention in Section 6.3.1 and to his particular take on practical reasoning in Section 8.5.1.
- 28.
What someone with a purpose is aware of according to Armstrong has notable similarities with what Hull calls “the purpose mechanism”, namely “a persisting core of sameness in the [internal] stimulus complexes throughout successive phases of the reaction sequence” (1930, 519).
- 29.
Compare Skinner (1953, 262): “‘I was on the point of going home’ may be regarded as the equivalent of ’I observed events in myself which characteristically precede or accompany my going home’”. In spite of Skinner’s insistence on the causal inefficacy of the relevant events, the epistemic relation he sees an agent as entertaining to those events is precisely that assumed by Armstrong.
- 30.
I thus second Finkelstein’s Wittgensteinian critique of “detectionism” (Finkelstein 2003, 9ff.). Bizarrely, Moran’s insistence that the first-person perspective is constituted by the deliberative weighing of reasons leaves him with a phenomenology of reason-insensitive wants* that is very close to that of the behaviourists: “A brute desire”, he thinks, “ is a bit of reality for the agent to accommodate, like a sensation, or a broken leg, or an obstacle in one’s path” (Moran 2001, 115).
- 31.
- 32.
This is Davidson’s notion of “rationalization” (Davidson 1963, 8f.), a relationship between a person’s motives and her actions that, although it doesn’t guarantee justification, nevertheless involves more than mere causation. See on this point Mele (2003a, 75f.; 2007, 113). The argument that “desires” understood as mere functional states could not “rationalise” actions is advanced by Warren Quinn (1993, 246). What Quinn takes to be missing in such a conception is an axiological dimension (see below Sect. 4.3).
- 33.
Compare the similar suggestion made more recently by J. Dancy (2000, 87f.) in a different context.
- 34.
This was suggested by an anonymous reviewer.
- 35.
Assuming that the correct theory of personal identity allows us to make sense of this counterfactual.
- 36.
It turns out, as I shall argue in Section 5.2, that there are actually four such notions.
- 37.
I thus agree with Nick Zangwill’s claim that “the essence of a mental state” – at least in the basic cases of wanting* and believing – “explains its causal powers; it is not constituted by them” (Zangwill 1998, 179).
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Roughley, N. (2016). Wanting* and Its Symptoms. In: Wanting and Intending. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 123. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7387-4_3
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