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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 91 The instrumentalization dilemma is generated, then, not by Dick's moral interests, nor even by his strategy for achieving them. For if we and he were inclined to take his words and deeds at face value, we could each simply decide whether or not it was a good project, whether he should go through with it, and whether we wanted to participate or not. Rather, Dick's difficulties are engendered by his - and our - presupposition of the beliefdesire model of motivation in formulating and assessing it. By conceptually nesting his behavior, and his and others' responses to that behavior, within a scheme relative to which all such events are instrumental to the satisfaction of an ultimate desire he is assumed to have, we collaborate with him in effectively obviating the possibility that that desire will be satisfied; or, if it is, that anyone will be able to recognize it as being so. For the self that desires that satisfaction itself remains, by hypothesis, impervious to the transforming effects of our common scrutiny. And so it must, again by hypothesis. For whatever occurs, either in Dick himself or in us, are at best instrumental or constitutive means by which his ultimate desire is satisfied; they are not themselves direct expressions of that desiring. Thus yet another infinite regress arises in response to the express desire for self-knowledge or self-assessment, which is entirely familiar, predictable, and self-defeating: For any proposition P that I (or you) may entertain about my self as true, it is equally true that perhaps I (or you) believe P only because of my (or your) desire Q. But my (or your) belief in my (or your) desire Q may be explained entirely by its efficacy in satisfying my (or your) further desire R. And so on. This schema may deny us the Olympian satisfaction of irrefutable self-knowledge; but it simultaneously affords us an endless series of "perspectives" and "insights" on our actual behavior, with which we may entertain ourselves endlessly, from the perspective of that hypothesized desire we currently acknowledge as final. In actual fact, we need not pursue the regress doggedly, in order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of a person's behavior; and, unless we are feeling particularly perverse or powerless, we usually don't. Rather, we accept that explanation that best coheres with our other beliefs about her, and call it into question only with the acquisition of further beliefs with which it may fail to cohere. In these commonsense cases, the explanation in question need not invoke a "deep" desire or other motive. An agent's absentmindedness, insensitivity, or naiveté often suffices to explain behavior that the desire model of motivation encourages us unendingly to probe. In Volume II, I develop an alternative model of motivation that tries to better respect these ordinary psychological facts about us. For now it should be noted just that the belief-desire model of motivation as stated encourages us to regard any attitude or desire we currently ascribe to the agent as instrumental to a further one. Thus our suspicion of Dick's insincerity, and that we are being manipulated by his stated moral program, are built into the Humean © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
