Blackwell Reference Online

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The Humean theory of motivation (hereafter HTM), named after the Scottish philosopher David Hume ( Hume 1975 ), is a theory about the nature of the psychological states that constitute motivations. According to HTM, the psychological states that constitute motivations are pairs of intrinsic desires and means–end beliefs . Intrinsic desires are desires that agents have for things for their own sake; means – end beliefs are beliefs agents have about which of the options available to them (the means) will lead to the outcomes that they intrinsically desire (the ends). According to HTM, an agent who is motivated to act in some way thus has an intrinsic desire for the world to be a certain way and a belief that her acting in the relevant way, a way which represents an option available to her, will result in the world's being the way she intrinsically desires it to be. Motivations, so understood, play an important explanatory role, according to HTM, as they figure in constitutive explanations of actions: that is, explanations whose availability is what makes it the case that certain bodily movements are actions ( Davidson 1980 ). A bodily movement is an action, according to HTM, in virtue of being explicable in the right kind of way by the motivations of the person who performs them: that is, by an intrinsic desire and a means – end belief. Consider a simple example. Imagine that ... log in or subscribe to read full text