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Show Chapter III. The Utility-Maximizing Model of Rationality: Informal Interpretations 122 conscious utility such actions fail to maximize become mere opportunity costs that are by definition outweighed by the unconscious utility they succeed in maximizing. Moreover, the point has been made often that there are no firm theoretical constraints on when we are justified in invoking unconscious 31 desires to explain action, nor even on what those desires must be. This means that whenever an action appears to be destructive or self-defeating for the agent who performs it, an unconscious desire it satisfies can always be found. So interpreting (U) to include unconscious as well as conscious desires does not circumvent the charge of vacuity. Quite the contrary. 4.3. The Behavioral Interpretation The phenomenological and psychoanalytic interpretations of the concept of utility both rely on the background concept of a phenomenal mental state. It may seem that this background concept is to blame for failing to block the charge of vacuity. Of course a mental state-conception of utility is vacuous, the argument might go. Since we never experience another's conscious (or our own unconscious) motivation first hand, we are free to speculatively attribute to an agent any conscious or unconscious motive we like in order to explain 32 his behavior. Action," The Monist 56 (1972), 444-464. Alexander's thesis is augmented by Harvey Mullane, "Psychoanalytic Explanation and Rationality," The Journal of Philosophy LXVIII, 14 (1971), 413-426. 31 To my knowledge, the first argument to this effect is to be found in B. F. Farrell, "The Criteria for a Psychoanalytic Interpretation," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXXVI (1962). Also see Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 37-38; Frank Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," in Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi, Explanation in the Behavioral Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 471-499; Adolph Grünbaum, "How Scientific is Psychoanalysis?" in Raphael Stern, Louise S. Horowitz, and Jack Lynes, Eds., Science and Psychotherapy (New York: Haven, 1977); "Is Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory Pseudo-Scientific by Karl Popper's Criterion of Demarcation?" Americal Philosophical Quarterly XVI, 2 (April 1979), 131-141; "Epistemological Liabilities of the Clinical Appraisal of Psychoanalytic Theory," Nous XIV, 3 (September 1980), 307-385; Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, "Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes," Psychological Review LXXXIV (1977), 231-259; Edward Erwin, "The Truth about Psychoanalysis," The Journal of Philosophy LXXXVIII, 10 (October 1981), 549-560. 32 This argument appears explicitly in Joel Feinberg, "Psychological Egoism," in Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau, Eds., Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998), 493-505; and in James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (New York: Random House 1986). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
