| OCR Text |
Show Chapter XI. Brandt's Instrumentalism 470 Ultimately Brandt's "independent justification" of rationality reduces to a variant on the time-tested tack described earlier. Having adopted an instrumental model of rationality, he then offers an instrumentally rational justification of it. However, this variant is less robust than the traditional one, because one can counter Brandt's defense by simply rejecting Instrumentalism itself as a metaethical strategy. Given the defects already noted, there is independent reason to do this. 3. Desire Brandt identifies his view as falling within the Humean tradition with respect to the model of motivation he adopts. Revising somewhat his analysis in the seminal article (co-authored with Jaegwon Kim), "Wants as 2 Explanations of Action," that we scrutinized in Chapter II.1, Brandt defines a desire for something O as follows: [A] person 'wants' something O, ... if his central motive state is such that if it were then to occur to him that a certain act of his then would tend to bring O about, his tendency to perform that act would be increased" (26; cf. 30). Desire, then, is defined by stipulating what an agent would do, were certain conditions to obtain: I want or desire a soufflé if, were it to occur to me that cooking one would get me one, my tendency to cook one would increase. On Brandt's view, if I desire an end, it is not possible for me think about acting to achieve it without tending more strongly to perform that action. If I can think about acting to achieve it without becoming more strongly inclined to so act, then I cannot be said to desire the object I am envisioning as the outcome of that action. Desire, for Brandt, equals thought plus increased tendency to act. Thus a desire is a thought-activated physical disposition to act in the service of an end (27, 56). This disposition is activated by the occurrent thought that the act will effect that end. The disposition may be activated without being realized if the thought disposes me more strongly to act without actually causing me to act. In that case, in which the disposition gets stronger but not strong enough to exert sufficient motive influence on my action, the action will not occur (26). The disposition, that is, is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and a contributing cause, of action. Similarly, the action will not occur if the thought does not occur, because the tendency or 2 Richard Brandt and Jaegwon Kim, "Wants as Explanations of Actions," The Journal of Philosophy LX (1963), 425-35; reprinted in N. S. Care and C. Landesman, Eds. Readings in the Theory of Action (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1969), 199-213. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
