Expressive Explication and the Optative Mode

  • Neil Roughley
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Philosophical Studies Series book series (PSSP, volume 123)

Abstract

Chapter  4 develops the idea of an expressive explication of the attitudes, which grounds in the claim that there is an essential structural analogy between mental states and linguistic utterances. The strengths of the conception are first demonstrated by showing how it explains the phenomenon of Moore-paradoxical sentences for beliefs. Applied to wants*, it reveals them as essentially optative attitudes, that is, as mental states articulated by utterances of the form “Let it be the case that p”. The optative analysis is then confronted with two competing proposals stemming from the field of moral psychology. According to the first, axiological theory, “desires” entertain the same relation to the good as beliefs do to truth. The main argument for the view, Anscombe’s hermeneutic vertigo argument, is shown to conflate the putative incoherence of a non-axiological concept of wanting with the incomprehensibility of an agent’s reasons for wanting. According to the second proposal, the pure entailment view, which revives the main premise of the Logical Connection Argument, talk of “desires” is, in at least certain important cases, simply a way of characterising an action as intentional, a characterisation that makes no substantial contribution to its explanation. I distinguish three reasons for this view and show why none of them justify the claim that wants* are mere ascriptions.

In an appendix to the chapter, the optative analysis is related to the metaphor of “direction of fit”. I argue against reductive attempts to rid us of the metaphor, claiming instead that it marks an irreducibly normative feature of attitudinising. At the close, the chapter returns to the suggestion at the end of Chap.  2, that there may be creatures that play host to motivational states without being believers. This possibility turns out to be entailed by the conception of wanting* as the setting of subjective standards, which, unlike the objective standard required by belief, don’t require the capacities for full Davidsonian triangulation.

Keywords

Moore-paradoxicality and wanting* Optative attitudes The guise of the good and the pure ascription view Direction of fit and subjective standard setting Wants* without beliefs in non-human animals 
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© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Neil Roughley
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of PhilosophyDuisburg-Essen UniversityEssenGermany

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