Main authors discussed: Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft, David Velleman, Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich

Some philosophers (e.g., Currie and Ravenscroft, Velleman) have recently argued that pretense provides a counterexample to the standard Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM). Pretense behavior is a novel kind of mental state, namely, an imaginative analogue of desire, that motivates action. For example, when a child pretending to be a Jedi Knight swings a tree branch in his hand, his action is motivated by his imaginative desire to destroy his opponent with his “lightsaber.”

Funkhouser and Spaulding (F&S) reject this anti-Humean explanation of pretense action.  Although they are willing to grant the existence of imaginative desires (302), they deny that such states provide the motivation for pretense. On their view, we need not reject the spirit of Humeanism about psychological motivation to explain the pretender’s motivation; rather, we need only reject the traditional and overly narrow HTM. Their own account of pretense is given by their Guider-Motivator Thesis: “For every intentional action, there is a guider-motivator pair that both causes and rationalize that intentional action” (307).

Before making their positive case for this thesis, F&S respond to objections against the standard Humean account of pretense (most notably associated with Stich and Nichols). One class of such objections suggest that, by explaining all of a pretending child’s actions in terms of a desire to pretend, such an account over-intellectualizes the pretense behavior, leaves the pretending child outside the pretense, and denies the child’s creativity. In response, F&S argue that a child who is motivated by the desire to pretend need not have the concept of pretense. Children need only have a behavioral, not a mentalistic, understanding of pretense in order to engage in pretend behavior, i.e., “their desire to pretend that p is simply a desire to behave, loosely as if p were the case” (300). Relatedly, a child motivated by the desire to pretend may engage in pretend behavior without consciously consulting or being cognizant of that desire (301). Though Velleman suggests that a Humean account of pretense makes a child who pretends seem depressingly adult-like, F&S astutely counter that “It is not depressing, but rather comforting, that pretending children retain a relatively firm grip on reality” (301-2); otherwise, their pretend actions would be hard to distinguish from the delusional actions of a schizophrenic. With respect to creativity, F&S note that the Humean’s denial that imaginative desires motivate pretense is comaptible with the claim that children who pretend “have a genuine desire to act out their imaginings,” and this means that their creativity is limited only by their imagination (302).

In addition to defending Humeanism against these objections, F&S offer criticisms of the anti-Humean account of pretense. For reasons of space, I will here consider just one of these criticisms, namely, their worry that imaginative desires are not intrinsically motivational and hence cannot be motivational at all. As they argue, “Motivation is typically an intrinsic and essential feature of motivating states. For example, the motivational component of a desire is, at least typically, intrinsic to it” (303). But the imaginative desires that we experience in contexts other than pretense, such as when we engage with fiction or daydream, do not seem to have motivational power at all. Thus, the anti-Humean must claim “that imagination has distinctive motivational powers in the context of pretense” (303), and F&S find this claim implausible.

Here I worry a bit about their argument. In a footnote, F&S consider examples of various kinds of desires that seem not to be motivational. What should we think about desires that the agent believes are impossible to satisfy, such as the desire to square the circle or to travel to a distant galaxy? F&S note that they are inclined to deny that such states are really desires; rather, they are mere wishes. Dealing with such counterexamples by terminological fiat seems to me unsatisfying. Moreover, I doubt that the anti-Humean must deny that imaginative desires are intrinsically motivating. Our desires only move us to action in the context of the appropriate background beliefs, and one might think the anti-Humean could suggest something similar about imaginative desires.

After making their case against the anti-Humean view, F&S attempt to spell out their own view of the role of imagination in pretense in their defense of the Guider-Motivator Thesis. Rather than seeing intentional action as caused or rationalized by belief-desire pairs, F&S see it as being caused by a guider-motivator pair, where “motivators provide the thrust or pick the destination, and guiders direct or tell us how to get there” (307).

F&S thus part from traditional Humeans by broadening the class of mental states that can cause or rationalize action; on their view, imaginings as well as beliefs can serve as guiders. Importantly, this claim is also compatible with the views of their anti-Humean opponents who tend to claim not only that some imaginings can serve as guiders, but also that some imaginings can serve as motivators. It is this latter claim that F&S argue against in their paper. According to F&S, imagination can serve only a guiding role when it comes to pretense.

In the final part of their paper, F&S introduce the notion of a script for the class of guiders that provide a model for action: “A script, unlike the typical belief used in means-end reasoning, is something that can be imitated or enacted. Significantly, these scripts can sometimes guide action without being mediated by a belief or knowledge state” (309). Imagination can be one such script, but others can also guide action, and some of these might be external to the agent, such as when an actor’s behavior is guided by her reliance on a physical script, or when children’s pretense behavior is guided by the behavior of other children or various social norms. In accepting the existence of external scripts as well as internal ones, F&S commit themselves to a version of the extended mind thesis advanced by Chalmers and Clark.

On the whole, I find the arguments that F&S make against the anti-Humeans compelling, and I wholeheartedly agree with their claim that Humeanism is best defended by adopting a pluralistic rather than unitary account of the motivation for pretense. Though I find less satisfying their own positive view of imagination which considers it on analogy with a script, I nonetheless found their discussion of scripts to provide some important insights into the complexities of the interplay between imagination and pretense, and I recommend this paper as a must-read to anyone thinking about pretense, the imagination, or the Humean theory of motivation.

Reviewed by Amy Kind
Claremont McKenna College