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Reasons and the ambiguity of ‘belief’

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13869790701772435

1741-5918

María Alvarez,

Political Philosophy and Ethics

Abstract Two conceptions of motivating reasons, i.e. the reasons for which we act, can be found in the literature: (1) the dominant 'psychological conception', which says that motivating reasons are an agent's believing something; and (2) the 'non-psychological' conception, the minority view, which says that they are what the agent believes, i.e. his beliefs. In this paper I outline a version of the minority view, and defend it against what have been thought to be insuperable difficulties – in particular, difficulties concerning 'error cases' (cases where what the agent believes is false); and difficulties concerning the explanation of action. Concerning error cases, I argue that if we are motivated by something believed that is true, what motivates us to act is a motivating reason. By contrast, if we are motivated by something believed that is false, then what motivates us to act is merely an apparent motivating reason. Either way, what motivates us is, as the non-psychological conception says, what we believe and not our believing it. I offer an account of the relation between motivating reasons and the explanation of action, and argue that this account helps bring out two important points. One is that the fact that we often do, and indeed sometimes must, use explanations such as 'He did it because he believed that p' does not vindicate the psychological conception of motivating reasons. The other is that endorsing the non-psychological conception of motivating reasons does not commit one to a non-factive view of explanations of action. Keywords: actionbeliefbelief–desire modelmotivationreasons Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this paper were read by a number of friends and colleagues and presented at several conferences and research seminars. It would be impossible to thank all those who contributed to making the final version better than its predecessors but I should like to thank in particular Aaron Ridley and two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions. I should also like to thank the AHRC for a research-leave award during which I wrote the first draft of this paper. Notes 1. Some of the most influential recent contributions are: Korsgaard (Citation1996, Citation1997), Quinn Citation(1993), Scanlon (Citation1998, especially Part 1), Smith Citation(1994), and Raz Citation(1999) which builds on his influential Practical Reason and Norms (Raz Citation1975). 2. I borrow the labels for each account from Parfit (Citation1997, n28). 3. In this paper, I shall take 'his believing that p' as an expression that can be used to refer to the fact that he believes that p. And I shall use either 'my believing that p' or 'that I believe that p' as variant ways of expressing what the psychological conceptions says motivating reasons are, according to what seems more idiomatic in the context. Some people think that nominal constructions such as 'his believing that p' can be used to refer to mental states of the agent. But even if that is right, it is clear that these nominal constructions can also be used to refer to facts, as I am using them here. (See Strawson, Citation1992, 110, where he explains that 'we use nominal constructions of the same general kinds – nouns derived from other parts of speech, noun clauses, gerundial constructions – to refer both to terms of the natural and to terms of the non-natural relation', i.e. to refer both to events (and, some would add, to states) which, according to Strawson, stand in the natural relation of causation; and to refer to facts, which stand in the intensional, non-natural relation of explanation, respectively.) 4. Among those who have explicitly defended the minority view, on a variety of grounds, are Bittner Citation(2001), Dancy Citation(2000), Stout Citation(1996), Stoutland (Citation1998, Citation2001) and Schueler Citation(2003). Related conceptions, articulated in terms of the first-person perspective, can also found in Kim Citation(1998) and Manson Citation(2004). The minority view about motivating reasons is sometimes called the 'externalist' view. For reasons I cannot go into here I think the label is not very helpful in this context and I shan't be using it. 5. I should also note that in my discussion of motivating reasons I use the term 'belief' as a generic term for a range of epistemic concepts such as suspicions, things known, deductions, suppositions, etc. This is common practice in the literature and I shall follow that practice for ease of exposition. 6. For more detailed discussion of whether an agent's desires provide reasons for action and whether motivating reasons require desires as components see Anscombe (Citation1957, especially sec. 35ff), Quinn Citation(1993), Raz (Citation1999, chap. 3), Scanlon (Citation1998, chap. 1), Dancy (Citation2000, 35ff). 7. My claim is that the agent's reason is something she believes; something which she also believes to make her action appropriate. Her reason is not (or not normally) her believing that thing, or her believing that such a thing makes her action appropriate. 8. Although, as some authors have pointed out, it may take the psychological form: for instance, my reason for visiting a psychiatrist might be that I believe that I'm being pursued by the Security Services. See Hyman (Citation1999, 444). 9. Stout (Citation1996, chap. 2) makes a similar point. 10. In his paper 'How Knowledge Works', John Hyman Citation(1999) argues that a reason for which someone acts must be something known, rather than something merely believed, suspected, etc. I cannot examine this issue here but, if Hyman is right, my version of the minority view would have to be modified accordingly (i.e. that a motivating reason is something one knows, rather than one's knowing it, etc.). 11. For further discussion of this point see Dancy (Citation2000, 127ff). 12. Compare these with Moore's paradox: 'I believe that p, but not p' and 'She believes that p, but not p', where only the first-person statement is paradoxical. The reason why in our examples of reasons both first- and third-person statements have the air of paradox is that 'because' is 'factive': a 'because' statement implies the truth of both the statements linked by the connective 'because'. And this, unlike cases of Moore's paradox, holds even when we put the statements in the past tense: 'My reason was that he was in need, although he wasn't' has an air of paradox that 'I believed that p, but not p' doesn't. 13. Note that resort to the psychological form won't work, at least not in a straightforward way, with first-person present-tense forms. 'I'm giving him the money because I believe he needs it, although he doesn't'; 'My reason is that I believe he needs money, although he doesn't' still have the air of paradox. The explanation of why these statements won't do is, simply, that they involve clear-cut instances of Moore's paradox about belief. 14. So long, that is, as one conceives of propositions roughly along the lines of Frege's notion of a thought, and not in Russell's terms, i.e. as being composed of objects, relations, etc. 15. This point also helps to see that the claim 'His reason was his false belief that p' does not imply that a false belief is a reason (as opposed to an apparent reason), just as 'His Vermeer was a fake' does not imply that a fake Vermeer is still a Vermeer. 16. This is a necessary and not a sufficient condition for a motivating belief to justify the action it motivates. And it should also be noted that although a false belief cannot justify an agent's action, something else might, even when the agent acts on a false belief. Thus, what motivates me to take my umbrella might be my false belief that it is raining. This false belief does not justify my taking the umbrella. But if someone had played a practical joke on me and made it look as though it was raining, then, since I might be justified in believing that it was raining, I might also be justified in having taken my umbrella – though not by my false belief, but by the fact that someone made it look as though it was raining. 17. These psychological explanations are often called 'Humean explanations'. Or, to be precise, Humean explanations are thought to have the form 'He did it because he wanted to … and believed that …', however, I am here only concerned with the belief part of explanations. 18. Other explanations explain also by reference to some psychological feature of the agent, e.g. 'He ran because he is a coward'. However, unlike the psychological explanations under discussion, these do not mention the belief that motivated the agent. 19. Note that the speaker could be the agent who may simply want to acknowledge that the belief that motivates her is controversial: 'I don't pay taxes because I believe that taxation is a form of theft'. 20. See Note 5. 21. To endorse the truth of a reason statement is not to endorse the reason as a good reason for that agent to do what he did, i.e. to judge that the agent did what he did for a good reason. 22. See Dancy (Citation2000, 131–7, 146–7). I agree with much of what Dancy says there. For instance, I agree that there is 'a way of explaining an action by laying out the considerations in the light of which an agent acted without committing ourselves to things being as the agent thought' (2000, 132). But this is a very different claim from the idea that 'a thing believed that is not the case can still explain an action' (2000, 134). When the thing believed is false, what explains the action is, rather, that the agent had that false belief. 23. One may wonder whether the distinction between 'He ran because he was late' and 'He ran because he thought he was late' should be understood in terms of the difference between oratio recta and oratio obliqua. One reason to think that it shouldn't is that both oratio recta and oratio obliqua reports of what someone said or thought may be true regardless of the truth of their subclauses. Thus 'He said: "It is a beautiful day"'and 'He said that it was a beautiful day', which are oratio recta and oratio obliqua reports of what he said, respectively, can both be true regardless of whether what he said was true. However, 'He ran because he was late' or 'His reason for running was that he was late' can be true only if he was late, as both imply that he was late, and that suggests that this is not a form of oratio recta. If he wasn't late, we need to resort to 'His reason for running was that he thought he was late' or 'He ran because he thought he was late'.