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Show Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation 94 because, on the Humean view, even our mental behavior as agents is instrumental to the satisfaction of final and ultimate desires to which we by definition lack access. Thus for both, this presupposition requires a detached, third-person perspective on those desires that is personally invested neither in their frustration nor their satisfaction.29 The remote but attached perspective of future wholeness and sufficiency from which the Humean self regards its present condition of want is not adequate to fulfill this requirement. Under these circumstances, verifiable self-knowledge becomes a theoretical impossibility, the act of trust required for genuine friendship a fundamentally irrational leap of faith, and moral concern and personal honesty objects of desire that seem remote indeed. 4. The Veracity of the Model In this chapter I have tried first to sort out and clarify the conception of desire on which the belief-desire model of motivation - and so the Humean conception of the self - in fact rests. I have argued for the inadequacy of both the orthodox and the revisionist variants on this model, particularly as they find expression in the work of Brandt and Kim, Goldman, and Lewis; and have proposed to replace them with a representational analysis of desire that circumvents their liabilities yet retains their assets. I have then tried to explicate some of the psychological, characterological, and behavioral implications of the representational analysis for actual selves socialized and structured in accordance with the Humean conception. I have concluded that a Humean self is committed to the satisfaction of several Quixotic and structurally impossible higher-order desires: for wholeness and sufficiency, for the avoidance of self-hatred, for status, power, recompense, unlimited consumption, and self-knowledge. Of course the fact that these objects of higher-order desire are impossible to attain does not imply that actual human agents do not desire them nevertheless. And so it may be objected to this critique of the belief-desire model of motivation that the frequency with which these implications are confirmed in actual human behavior within a global consumerist culture redounds to the credit of the Humean conception as a plausible and wellconfirmed explanatory hypothesis, rather than undermines its legitimacy as the critique apparently intends. But recall from the General Introduction to this project that this critique is embedded in a more general one that argues not that the Humean conception of the self is intrinsically wrong, but rather that it is incomplete; that it is inadequate to the full range of psychological facts of human nature, and so often makes false predictions about human behavior; and that its internal, structural and conceptual inconsistencies arise from the See Peter Alexander "Rational Behavior and Psychoanalytic Explanation," in Care and Landesman, op. cit. Note 3. 29 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
