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Show Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation 54 attitude," or "appetition" - between us and the behavior we perceive as normatively appropriate. More generally, to stipulate any such desire or interest that necessarily intervenes between the awareness of what a situation requires and the resulting action is both counterintuitive from the point of view of commonsense introspection, and methodologically messy. For the stipulation of such a desire as necessary in all cases is based on the selffulfilling hypothesis that there must have been a desire present in order for one to act at all. So if my performing the action makes it true by definition that I desired its end, yet I find no evidence of such a desire when I examine carefully my own motives, then the concept of a necessarily motivating desire must be relegated to the explanatory status of a "theoretical construct." But this is to abandon the orthodox for the revisionist view of desire. Now some may find it difficult, if not impossible, to examine their own motives without coming upon a desire somewhere in the mix, and it is worth asking why, and for whom this ontological ubiquity actually obtains. For example, among the operative social norms which govern our behavior are to be found, first, prevailing linguistic practices which, since the seventeenth century, have relied increasingly on a psychological vocabulary of individual desires and interests that in the twentieth century was extended even beyond the scope of conscious awareness. Second, these linguistic practices are mutually interdependent with a globally disseminated economic explanation of human motivation that gives prime emphasis to the pursuit of individual gratification, rewards, and advantages. Third, these practices and explanations are the expression of an optimistic and future-oriented system of political and social institutions that accords central recognition to individual freedom and autonomy - specifically, the freedom and autonomy to pursue the gratification of individual desires. The belief-desire model of motivation, and the Humean conception of the self more generally, has had a central place in the intellectual history of Western culture of the last three centuries.7 So it is hardly surprising that we buy into it. We conceive ourselves individualistically, define ourselves in terms of personal desires, and esteem ourselves to the extent that we satisfy them. Among the Tabwa of West Africa, on the other hand, observers' queries as to what an agent "wants" or "desires" are typically answered by elaborate descriptions of what normally obtains under such circumstances. Pressing the question meets with incomprehension. The Tabwa do not seem to have our concept of a desire at all.8 Here the problem is not that the revisionist view has been mistaken for the orthodox view. It is that the concept of desire, even on See Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 8 Here I am indebted to Kit Roberts for making available to me some results of her field research. 7 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
