Neil Roughley, Wanting and Intending. Elements of a Philosophy of Practical Mind

Abstract

This book aims to answer two simple questions: what is it to want and what is it to intend? Because of the breadth of contexts in which the relevant phenomena are implicated and the wealth of views that have attempted to account for them, providing the answers is not quite so simple. Doing so requires an examination not only of the relevant philosophical theories and our everyday practices, but also of the rich empirical material that has been provided by work in social and developmental psychology. The investigation is carried out in two parts, dedicated to wanting and intending respectively. Wanting is analysed as optative attitudinising, a basic form of subjective standard-setting at the core of compound states such as 'longings', 'desires', 'projects' and 'whims'. The analysis is developed in the context of a discussion of Moore-paradoxicality and deepened through the examination of rival theories, which include functionalist and hedonistic conceptions as well as the guise-of-the-good view and the pure entailment approach, two views popular in moral psychology. In the second part of the study, a disjunctive genetic theory of intending is developed, according to which intentions are optative attitudes on which, in one way or another, the mark of deliberation has been conferred. It is this which explains intention's subjection to the requirements of practical rationality. Moreover, unlike wanting, intending turns out to be dependent on normative features of our life form, in particular on practices of holding responsible. The book will be of particular interest to philosophers and psychologists working on motivation, goals, desire, intention, deliberation, decision and practical rationality. Acknowledgements; Contents; Introduction; I; II; Wanting; Intending; Part I Wanting; 1 The Question of Motivational Unity: Historical Preliminaries; 1.1 Practical Mind: Aristotle's Question; 1.2 Plato and the Tripartite Practical Mind; 1.3 Aristotle and the Problems of Motivational Unity; 1.4 Hobbes' Double Reductionism; 1.5 Hume and Hedonic Unity; 1.6 From Stevenson to Davidson: "Pro-Attitudes"; 2 Motivational States; 2.1 Starting Point: The Things We Do; 2.2 Behaviour; 2.2.1 Two Repudiations; 2.2.2 Behaving and Undergoing; 2.2.3 A Causal Criterion; 2.3 Motivation and Representation. 2.3.1 Representational Causes2.3.2 Self-Representation; 2.4 Representational Match and Representational Mode; 2.4.1 Motivated Behaviour: Necessity of Representational Match; 2.4.2 Motivational States: Insufficiency of Representational Match; 2.4.3 The Ideo-Motor Theory; 2.5 The Two Dimensions of Motivation; 2.5.1 Motivational States and Motivational Force; 2.5.2 Motivational Force and Arousal; 2.5.3 Motivational States and Motivated Behaviour; 2.6 Excursus: Motivating Representations in Non-Human Animals; 3 Wanting* and Its Symptoms; 3.1 Wanting*: Factoring Out Believing and Fuelling. 3.1.1 Belief, Wanting and Wanting*3.1.2 Wanting* and Motivation; 3.2 Symptoms of Wanting*; 3.2.1 Agential Symptoms; 3.2.2 Non-agential Symptoms; 3.3 Symptomatic Definition; 3.3.1 Functionalism and Behaviourism; 3.3.2 Two General Objections; 3.3.3 "Purposes"; 3.3.4 "Wishes" and OSI Wants*; 3.4 A Theory of Wanting*: Key Questions and Sketch of Some Answers; 4 Expressive Explication and the Optative Mode; 4.1 Moore's Paradox and the Idea of Expressive Explication; 4.1.1 Expressive Articulation and Assertoric Attitudinising; 4.1.2 Type 2 Cases: Assertoric Incoherence and Irrationality. 4.2 Optative and Assertoric Expression4.2.1 Optative Attitudinising; 4.2.2 Type 2 Cases: Optative Incoherence and Irrationality; 4.3 Axiological Conceptions of Wanting*; 4.3.1 Want* Satisfaction; 4.3.2 Transcontextual Criteria?; 4.3.3 Temporal Specification; 4.3.4 Attitude-internal Standards; 4.4 Wants* as Mere Entailments; 4.4.1 The Case for Non-existent "Desires"; 4.4.2 Requirements and Reluctance; 4.5 Appendix: Direction of Fit and the Internal Normativity of Attitudinising; 4.5.1 Direction of Fit, Functionalist Style; 4.5.2 Direction of Fit as a Higher-Order Attitudinal Property. 4.5.3 Normativity, Subjective and Objective5 Wanting*, Consciousness and Affect; 5.1 Conscious Occurrentism; 5.1.1 CO; 5.1.2 Insufficiency; 5.1.3 Subintentional Action; 5.1.4 Motivated Want* Inaccessibility; 5.1.5 The Auto-Motive Model and Goal Priming; 5.1.6 Extending the Optative Conception; 5.2 Not Really Wanting; 5.2.1 "I want p" as a Fallible Thought; 5.2.2 Four Ways to Not Really Want; 5.3 Wanting* and Affect; 5.3.1 Affect Dispositions; 5.3.2 Expected Pleasure; 5.3.3 Present Discomfort; 5.3.4 Imaginative Pleasure; 5.4 End of Part I; Part II Intending.