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

Main authors discussed: Michael Smith, Donald Davidson, Phillip Pettit, Thomas Nagel

Schueler presents a dilemma for the defender of the Humean theory of motivation. First, let’s define the theory. Schueler focuses on the theory as one that explains why a person acted as she did and not as a theory of what a person ought to do (103). According to Schueler, contemporary advocates of the Humean theory, “…agree with Hume in holding that a desire or some analogous motivational state is always needed to move anyone to act” (105). His main example of a contemporary Humean theory of motivation is Michael Smith’s, according to which:

R at t constitutes a motivating reason of agent A to Φ if and only if there is some Ψ such that R at t consists of an appropriately related desire of A to Ψ and a belief that were she to Φ she would Ψ (106).

The first horn of the dilemma arises when we fill in the reason for the phrase “appropriately related to” in Smith’s formulation. Schueler argues that this phrase is necessary to avoid counter-examples in which a person does Φ, has a desire for Ψ, and a belief that if she were to Φ she would Ψ, and yet this particular belief-desire pair has nothing to do with the agent Φing. Schueler develops an example to make this clear. Suppose he knows that the bus that goes by his house goes to the University. One day when his car won’t start and he wants to get to the University, he gets on the bus. However, he got on the bus, not to get to the University, but rather to get to his sister’s office. There he plans to borrow her car and then drive to the University. The reason the belief-desire pair (“I want to get to the University” and “I believe this bus goes to the University”) does not explain his action is because they were not “put together” in the right way by him (108-9). It is analogous to something that happens in theoretical reasoning (107). Suppose someone has two beliefs that entail a third. This person comes to believe the third belief, not on the basis of the two that entail it, but because he heard a rumor that it might be true and he is easily swayed by rumors.

One lesson that Schueler takes from the bus example is that practical reasoning is an activity–it is not the mere presence of the belief-desire pair that explains behavior. Rather, the explanation of the behavior requires that the agent engage in practical reasoning in which the agent “puts them together” (109). But this causes a problem for the Humean. For if the explanation of the action traces back to the activity of an agent reasoning about beliefs and desires, then the actual desire is not what explains the action, and can, in fact, be dropped out of the explanation altogether (110). This is seen more clearly when we consider that an agent can be wrong about what she desires—when, for example, the agent believes she wants to Ψ but actually does not want to Ψ (111). In such a case, the desire to Ψ simply cannot explain what the agent does, for that desire does not exist. And yet, someone might mistakenly believe that she wants to Ψ, reason about how to satisfy this desire, and come to believe that if she were to Φ she would Ψ, and as a result of putting these two things together, Φ. What this shows us, argues Schueler, is that it is the representation of a desire to Ψ that is relevant in the explanation of the action and not the desire itself (112). According to Schueler, this first horn of the dilemma is not strong enough by itself to refute the Humean theory of motivation. But, the “putting together” point discussed here will be relevant when we move to the second horn of the dilemma.

The second horn focuses on the fact that from a phenomenological point of view our practical reasoning often does not take the form of explicitly reasoning about how to satisfy one of our desires. Instead, we often seem to reason about what to do based on what we find to be important, worth doing, or think we ought to do. These are not desires, and yet they are the sorts of the things we “put together” with beliefs in our practical deliberation (117).

Humeans, such as Smith and Pettit, are aware of this fact and respond by introducing the distinction between a desire that exists in the foreground and a desire that exists in the background of a decision. A desire that exists in the foreground of the decision is one that the agent is consciously aware that she has and is one that she is reasoning about how to satisfy. One that exists in the background helps to motivate the action, but the agent need not be aware that it is there–it is not one about which the agent is consciously reasoning. Smith and Pettit claim that the Humean can respond to the objection by claiming that in those cases in which it appears to us that we are not reasoning about how to satisfy one of our desires, we nevertheless have a background desire that is doing the motivational work (118).

Now we can see the dilemma clearly. To accommodate what seems to be an obvious point about the phenomenology of our practical deliberation, the Humean must claim that our desires that motivate us exist in the background. But to avoid counter-examples like the bus case, they must claim that the desires that motivate do not exist in the background. The Humean cannot have it both ways. According to Schueler, the best way to avoid this dilemma is to reject the Humean theory of motivation.

Reviewed by Scott Wilson
Wright State University