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Show Chapter XI. Brandt's Instrumentalism 486 if he were to do this, Brandt still would seem to be conflating the associative, psychological process of cognitive conditioning with the rational, deliberative process of cognitive intellection. What he offers is not a substantive, philosophical conception that enables us to distinguish rational from irrational desire. Rather, Brandt offers a substantive psychological conception that enables us to distinguish psychologically healthy from unhealthy desire. Essentially, then, cognitive psychotherapy involves the attempted modification of idiosyncratic childhood associations, learned through contiguity conditioning and stimulus generalization (103), through training in perceptual discrimination and heightening one's awareness of the differences between events formerly associated (107-108). It is the process of searching out and evaluating the empirical accuracy of the associative links between what we instinctively desire, what we are taught to desire, and what we believe. If as infants we associated satisfaction of the instinctive desire for nurture with satisfaction of the learned appetite for condensed milk, we may as adults indulge an overwhelming craving for condensed milk, to the exclusion of friendship and other sources of emotional support. This craving would count as irrational, on Brandt's view, because it mistakenly assumes an exclusive and necessary connection between nurturing and condensed milk, ignoring the role of friendship, affection, and sympathy. Similarly, if we as children associated the desire to play with the thought of parental disapproval or punishment, we may develop into joyless, unhappy and inhibited adults who have an aversion to relaxation and humor. Brandt would regard this aversion to play as similarly irrational, because it falsely presupposes a general rather than a contingent and idiosyncratic connection between play and punishment that leads us to abjure play altogether. The difficulty this account creates for Brandt is that according to it, just about every conditioned desire may count as irrational. [H]ow many responses would turn out to be irrational if one affirmed that any response is irrational if conceivably, according to the theory of extinction, it could narrow in its scope or partially extinguish if one repeatedly reminded oneself of the difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned stimulus? A liking for Christmas carols, affection for one's mother; desire for things one likes, desire even for one's own happiness. So, ruling out likes/desires as irrational on so broad a basis would imply the irrationality of virtually all learned likes and desires (144). Since each particular desire is different in some of its details from others, each can be distinguished from the inductively generalized class to which it belongs. And since each is the consequence of conditioning that is equally © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
