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Show Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation 86 desires. It may be that a different set of beliefs, combined with less reflective and deliberate behavior, may be more efficacious in satisfying my desire than acting on true beliefs about the most efficient actions to take to satisfy that desire. It may be more efficaciously rational for me to hold veridically irrational beliefs about the satisfaction of my desires. For example, satisfying my desire to improve the human condition may require false and overly sanguine beliefs about my capacity for satisfying it and about what counts as satisfying it. Or my accurate, detailed, lengthy plan for learning Sanskrit as efficiently as possible may prove to be so boring and pedestrian that it kills my enthusiasm for doing so. The requirements of the Humean conception subordinate veridical rationality to efficacious rationality, because the requirement that I achieve my end as efficiently as possible outweighs the requirement that my beliefs about how to do so be as accurate as possible. Hence in the end, beliefs are truly rational within the Humean conception only to the extent that they are efficaciously rational. Veridically accurate beliefs have no special, noninstrumental value in the belief-desire model of motivation. This holds not just with respect to beliefs about the various components of the self, but about these components considered independently. Take the emotion of resentment. If I desire to participate more fully in the political process, and find that such activism provides a satisfying outlet for this emotion, which is a pervasive one for me, then it may be rational for me to cultivate and dwell extensively on my feelings of resentment, in order to satisfy my desire to participate politically. In such a case, I use my emotions to motivate me to satisfy a prior, but motivationally ineffective desire. Or take the aural perception of traffic sounds on the street outside my window. If I desire to solve a conceptual problem subliminally, by freeing my imagination from its habitual intellectual constraints, and find that temporary aural distraction enables me to do so, I may attend deliberately to this aural perception in order to solve the conceptual problem subliminally. Here I utilize a perception to satisfy a desire I would be unable to satisfy by attending to the object of the desire directly. As we have already seen, desires themselves are equally susceptible to this brand of instrumentalization in the service of a further desire, as when I recruit my long-term desire to master a chunk of philosophical material in order to satisfy my immediate desire to finish preparing a lecture. These cases, and others like them, are not unusual because they are unfamiliar or infrequent, but rather because they are rationally prescribed by a model of motivation that stipulates the satisfaction of desire as the only motivationally effective source of intentional behavior, and that behavior itself - any behavior - as reflecting the agent's beliefs about how best to go about this. It is rationally prescribed because, as we have seen in Subsection 2.1, above, no instrumental resources, whether internal or external to the © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
