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Show Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation 62 the Principle of Rationalization requires the stipulation of final desires to which our behavior is instrumental that are in theory inaccessible to us. But these two features - elusiveness and ubiquity - are precisely what obscure the data supplied by P to our attempts to understand them. The Principle of Charity ensures the elusiveness of P by expropriating it to an account of our own behavior in Ao. The Principle of Rationalization then extends the scope of that account, by stipulating ubiquitous but inaccessible desires to which that behavior is instrumentally efficacious. This renders P as a source of information about Ak and M not just practically but theoretically mysterious - like a noumenal thing in itself, whose sole function is to represent our knowledge of Karl as inherently self-limiting. Now we are in a better position to see why it might be difficult to formulate a companion Manifestation Principle for desire in Lewis' general theory of persons. Such a principle would seem to have to run something like this: (5') Karl's desires, as expressed in his own intentional actions, ordinarily should be manifest in his dispositions to gross physical behavior. However, the attenuated Principles of Charity and Rationalization preclude appeal to Karl's gross physical behavior itself as an independent source of information about Karl's actions and desires, for it is already contained in P. Like P, then, that behavior is admissible only to the extent that it conforms to the two Principles - i.e. only to the extent that it supports the definitional part of the theory. This means that what is to count as intentional action, and what intentional action is understood to have been performed, is also determined solely by the definitional aspect of the two principles - which thus determine what is taken to be manifest in Karl's dispositions to behavior. Now if we think of language use as a special case of intentional action, and speech behavior as a special case of gross physical behavior, then on the Humean conception, speech behavior satisfies the speaker's desire to express her beliefs. So the redundancy of a Manifestation Principle for desire implies the redundancy of the Manifestation Principle for belief, independently of the Triangle and Truthfulness principles (Lewis' third step, above). To be sure, once we assume the Manifestation Principle for Desire, the companion principle for belief is unproblematic, for we thereby implicitly assume criteria for something's counting as speech behavior, and so, implicitly, for something's being expressable in a language. But without the criteria of speech behavior and language implied by the Manifestation Principle for belief, it is difficult to see what use we might make of the Principle of Truthfulness, nor how the Triangle Principle might fail to be satisfied. And it is unclear how we might derive such criteria without prior independent © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
