| OCR Text |
Show Chapter VII. Nagel's Internalism 278 action of taking the LSATs is not my desire to take the LSATs, but rather my prior desire to go to law school plus my beliefs about how best to get there. Nagel's point is that whenever we invoke a desire to perform act A in order to explain why someone performs act A, we have not really explained the performance of act A until we have an explanation for why the person desired to perform act A. And when we have that latter explanation, adverting to the desire to perform act A itself becomes irrelevant. Thus Nagel's claim constitutes an attack on the belief-desire model principle that we can explain a person's pursuit of a certain goal by ascribing to her a desire to pursue that goal. His argument is that it is trivially true, by definition of pursuing a goal, according to the belief-desire model, that the agent has a desire to pursue that goal; the presence of that desire is a conceptual truth. As we have seen in Chapter II, this is my complaint exactly about the beliefdesire model. Therefore, Nagel goes on, in achieving a substantive understanding of why someone does something, we can effectively disregard her desire to do that thing as redundant, and concentrate on the antecedent conditions - the reflection, deliberation, beliefs, judgments, or prior motivated or unmotivated desires - that cause the action: That I have the appropriate desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me; if the likelihood that an act will promote my future happiness motivates me to perform it now, then it is appropriate to ascribe to me a desire for my own future happiness. But nothing follows about the role of the desire as a condition contributing to the motivational efficacy of those considerations. It is a necessary condition of their efficacy to be sure, but only a logically necessary condition. It is not necessary either as a contributing influence, or as a causal condition (2930). Now if motivated desires are only conceptual truths, then they have no motivational efficacy; and their antecedents are doing the only real causal work in precipitating action. Since unmotivated desires need not be present as causal antecedents of action, certain occurrent cognitive events - believings, considerings, recognizings or acceptings of principles or judgments - would seem, by a process of elimination, to suffice to motivate some actions. This possibility, if developed, would constitute an attack on both premise 2.2.(2) and premise 2.2.(3) of the belief-desire model. For by furnishing motivationally effective antecedent psychological events other than desire, it would not only challenge the thesis that desire must cause action (premise 2.2.(3)), but dispute the thesis that belief by itself cannot (premise 2.2.(2)). However, even if motivated desires are not only conceptual truths but identifiable mental events as well, other such occurrent cognitive events would still have motivational efficacy as causal antecedents of action. For where unmotivated desires are absent, these motivated desires themselves would have to be the effect of prior acts of deliberation or evaluation. I show © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
