The Concept of Motivation

R. S. Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138888234
• eBook ISBN: 9781317496120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1958 with a second edition in 1969, The Concept of Motivation looks philosophically and psychologically at the idea of motivation in order to explain human behaviour. Chapters cover types of explanation in psychological theories, motives and motivations, a look at Freud's theory, drive theories, and regression to hedonism. Despite its original publication date, the book explores topics which are still of great interest to us today.

'This is indeed an outstanding book; perhaps the best study in philosophical psychology to appear since Ryle and a work which […] will remain a classic for many years' Philosophy

CHAPTER ONE TYPES OF EXPLANATION IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES

DOI: 10.4324/9781315712833-1

‘Whether a given proposition is true or false, significant or meaningless, depends upon what questions it was meant to answer.’ R. G. Collingwood

Introductory

EVER since Hobbes was fired by the imaginative idea that all human behaviour might be explained in terms of mechanical principles, there have been sporadic attempts to provide over-all theories of human behaviour. Such theories have been instigated more by the desire to develop an ambitious theory than by puzzlement about concrete problems of human behaviour. This was true of Hobbes who pictured himself doing for psychology what Harvey had done for physiology by extending the new science of motion to the most intimate spheres of human thought and endeavour. It was also true of later theorists who, under the influence of Darwin rather than of Galileo, were excited by the thought that men were animals as well as mere bodies. McDougall, for instance, did not provide any startling answers to concrete questions about human behaviour; rather he concocted a sort of dynamic atomism to show that man’s social behaviour could be explained in terms of biological principles. In fact the inspiration behind theorizing in psychology has been, in the main, the success of other sciences like physiology, chemistry, and mechanics, and the idea that there could be an all-inclusive theory of human behaviour if psychology were to adopt the postulates and methods of other sciences.

A contributory factor, too, has been the understandable determination of psychologists to make their enquiries ‘scientific’. This has led them to cast their theories in a mould dictated by the current conception of scientific method. For a long time this was thought to be the method of induction; and so systems of psychology like introspectionism and behaviourism, developed, which were products of what Popper calls ‘inductivism’—attempts to build up generalisations on the basis of carefully scrutinized data. (Peters, 1951). The methodologists then proclaimed that scientific method was really deductive. So an enormity like Hull’s Principles of Behaviour emerged, scientifically impeccable because it was a hypothetico-deductive system. Hull (1943) boldly proclaimed his programme of starting from ‘colourless movements and mere receptor impulses as such’ and eventually explaining everything in terms of such concepts—

‘familial behaviour, individual adaptive efficiency (intelligence), the formal educative processes, psychogenic disorders, social control and delinquency, character and personality, culture and acculturation, magic and religious practices, custom law and jurisprudence, politics and government and many other specialised fields of behaviour.’

In fact Hull developed some simple postulates which gave dubious answers to limited questions about particular species of rats. He never asked, let alone tried to answer, any concrete questions about human behaviour. He was in love with the idea of a science of behaviour; he was not acutely worried about concrete questions of explaining human behaviour.

Freud was perhaps the great exception. For he was genuinely puzzled about concrete phenomena and developed some very fertile assumptions to explain them. Also, in his early work especially, he was very much aware of the limitations of his assumptions and defined carefully the types of phenomena that could be explained by the postulation of unconscious mental processes. In other words he seemed to be aware of the sort of questions about human behaviour which he was answering. For there are many different sorts of questions which can be asked about human behaviour and the differences, as I shall hope to show, are such that an all-embracing theory is inappropriate. These different sorts of questions are especially confused in theories of motivation. It is this thesis which I now hope to substantiate.

I Types of questions about human behaviour

(a) ‘his reason’ explanations. The over-riding aim of a scientist should be explanation. This sounds rather obvious, but it has many important consequences in relation to psychological theorizing. For the general question ‘Why did Jones do that?’ is capable of being asked and answered in a variety of different ways. The particular formula employed in asking the question usually dictates the sort of answer which is expected and which counts as an explanation.¹ The paradigm case of a human action is when something is done in order to bring about an end. So the usual way of explaining an action is to describe it as an action of a certain sort by indicating the end which Jones had in mind. We therefore ask the ‘why’ question in a more specific form. We ask what was his reason for doing that or what was the point of it, what end he had in mind. If we ask why Jones walked across the road, the obvious answer will be something like ‘To buy tobacco.’ Instead of saying this we could say ‘because he wanted some tobacco’. This is, logically speaking, another way of giving the same sort of answer; for the answer ‘to buy some tobacco’ is only an explanation because we assume in Jones some sort of directive disposition—a general tendency to obtain and use tobacco (Peters, 1952).

¹I am indebted to J. O. Urmson (1952) for some of these distinctions.

Even in this very simple sort of explanation in terms of a man’s reason for doing something there are, as a matter of fact, concealed assumptions. We assume, for instance, that walking across the street is an efficient way of getting to the tobacconist. This counts as an explanation not simply because Jones envisaged walking across the street as a means to getting the tobacco but because it really is a means to getting it. We assume, too, that a man who has this information will act on it if he wants some tobacco. We assume that men are rational in that they will take means which lead to ends if they have the information and want the ends. ‘His reason’ is an explanation in terms of what Popper (1945) calls ‘the logic of the situation’.

But it is not only norms of efficiency and consistency that are implicit in the concept of ‘his reason’. There are also norms or standards of social appropriateness. After all Jones might have crawled or run across the road. But ‘to get some tobacco’ would be a very odd answer to the question ‘Why did Jones run across the road?’ Yet running would be quite an efficient way of getting across the road. It would, however, be socially odd as a way of crossing the road to get some tobacco. Man is a rule-following animal. His actions are not simply directed towards ends; they also conform to social standards and conventions, and unlike a calculating machine he acts because of his knowledge of rules and objectives. For instance, we ascribe to people traits of character like honesty, punctuality, considerateness and meanness. Such terms do not, like ambition or hunger or sexual desire, indicate the sorts of goals that a man tends to pursue; rather they indicate the type of regulation that he imposes on his conduct whatever his goals may be. A man who is ruthless, selfish, punctual, considerate, persistent, and honest, does not have any particular goals; rather he pursues whatever goals he has in particular sorts of ways.

This simple purposive model of a man taking means to bring about an end is further complicated by the fact that norms enter into and often entirely define the end. Ends like passing an examination, getting married, becoming a professor, and reading a paper, explain quite adequately a great deal of the goings on in the precincts of a university; yet they are defined almost entirely by social convention. It is a gross over-simplification to think of ends merely as terminating points of activity. Actually even a rat, after eating or achieving some other end, will continue being active in a variety of ways—sniffing, preening, and so on. If eating can be regarded as an end this is not because it is a definite terminating point of activity but because activity previous to it varies concomitantly with changes in the conditions necessary to define it as an end. The concept of means is just as necessary to bring out what is meant by an end as the concept of end is to bring out what is meant by a means. Ends are not given as natural terminating points like a chain of oases distributed across a desert. And, to a large extent, what counts as falling within a means-to-end explanatory framework is determined by convention. Even those ends, like eating and sexual intercourse, which are universal and which have an obvious biological basis, can scarcely be specified without recourse to norms. For there are countless ways of performing the acts which can be regarded as ends and in every culture a few particular ways are stamped with the hallmark of conventionality. Eating is not just getting food into the stomach. Jones’ movements across the road are classifiable as means to the end of buying tobacco because of a vast system of norms defining ‘buying tobacco’ as an end as well as a system of norms regulating what is an efficient and socially appropriate way of attaining it.

My reasons for stressing this rule-following purposive pattern into which we fit our common-sense explanations are twofold. In the first place I want to insist that most of our explanations are couched in terms of this model and our predictions of people’s behaviour presuppose it. We know what the parson will do when he begins to walk towards the pulpit because we know the conventions regulating church services. And we can make such predictions without knowing anything about the causes of people’s behaviour unless we include under ‘causes’ things like the parson’s training and grasp of the rules, which are things of a different order from ‘causes’ in the sense of antecedent movements. Man in society is like a chess-player writ large. Requests for explanation are usually reflections of our ignorance about the particular rule or goal which is relevant to the behaviour in question. We usually know the general pattern but are unsure which part of it is relevant. Sometimes, of course, we are in the position of a free-thinker at a Roman Catholic mass. The question ‘Why did X do that?’ is then usually a request for an elucidation of the whole pattern of conventions. In explaining human actions we, like anthropologists, must all, in the first place be structuralists. Indeed I would go so far as to say that anthropology or sociology must be the basic sciences of human action in that they exhibit the systematic framework of norms and goals which are necessary to classify actions as being of a certain sort. They both—like classical economics—presuppose the purposive, rule-following model; in this respect they are quite unlike sciences which imply a mechanical model of explanation.

In the second place this rule-following purposive pattern of explanation must be sketched in some detail because a proper understanding of what is meant by a human action has very important logical consequences. It shows, for instance, as I shall argue, that human actions cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of causal concepts like ‘colourless movements’. Indeed to claim that we are confronted with an action is ipso facto to rule out such mechanical explanations, as being sufficient.

(b) ‘the reason’ explanations. But, of course, as psychologists will be the first to point out, people often invent reasons for doing things or delude themselves into thinking that the reasons they offer for their actions are operative reasons. We therefore often say of a man that his reason may have been x but the reason why he acted like that was y. For instance we might say that Jones said that he crossed the road in order to buy some tobacco but the reason why he did it was not really his desire for tobacco; it was sex. There was a pretty girl looking in the window of the tobacconist. This explanation may of course be erroneous. For instance a psychologist once told me that I delayed crossing the road to College because of an aversion to getting down to work. I replied, and I think more convincingly, that I stayed on the other side in order to look at the row of glistening cars drawn up opposite. But whether the explanation in question is correct or incorrect does not much matter; the point is that to speak of the reason why a person does something is different in that it is a way of calling attention to the law or assumed law that a given case actually falls under. His reason may coincide with the reason. The reason why Jones crossed the road might in fact be his desire for tobacco. He might also be aware that he wanted to inspect the girl at close quarters, but was concealing this by the camouflage of buying tobacco. This would then be his real reason. But whereas his reason—whether real or not—entails that a man is conscious of his objective, the reason why he did it does not.¹ The reason why he did it might well be sex or aversion to work; yet the individual might be quite unaware of pursuing or avoiding the relevant goals. And whereas to say that he had a reason for doing something is more or less to rule out a causal explanation, to give the reason why he did it is sometimes to subsume it under a law-like proposition of a causal kind. This is not necessarily so. For we can say that sex or aversion to work was the reason why he did it and simply be insisting that a different directive disposition is being exercised. But the reason why he did it might also be that he was pushed or assailed by an attack of giddiness. These would be causal explanations which would rebut the suggestion that he had a reason for crossing the road. Causal explanations, in other words, can count as the reason why a person does something; but they are only one type of answer to the question ‘What was the reason why he did it?’

¹ Hamlyn has pointed out to me the use of “the reason for his action” as well as “the reason why he did it”. “The reason for” seems to be similar to “his reason” but to imply a coincidence between “his reason” and “the reason why he did it”. I am not here concerned with the use of “reason” in the context of justification as when we say that a reason for giving up smoking is that it causes lung cancer. “His reason” and “the reason for” can be used in contexts both of justification and of explanation. Needless to say “the reason why he did it” is reserved for contexts of explanation with which I am here concerned.

(c) causal explanations. There are, however, other questions about particular goings on—I omit to say actions on purpose—to which answers in causal terms are appropriate. Instead of the omnibus question ‘Why did Jones do that?’ we often ask what made, drove, or possessed him to do it. These are usually cases of lapses from action or failure to act—when there is some kind of deviation from the purposive rule-following model, when people, as it were, get it wrong. This may be in respect of an efficiency norm—for example, when a person refuses to take the only quick route to his destination by underground train, or when he can’t remember a well-known name when he is performing an introduction. Or the behaviour may go wrong in respect of a norm governing social appropriateness—as with a business man who runs to work when he is not late or a tutor who crawls round the room sniffing while listening to an undergraduate essay. Or behaviour may go wrong by being deflected towards a peculiar goal as with a married man who suddenly makes an advance to a choir boy. In such cases it is as if the man suffers something rather than does something. It is because things seem to be happening to him that it is appropriate to ask what made, drove, or possessed him to do that. The appropriate answer in such cases may be in terms of a causal theory

These cases of particular goings on which look like breakdowns of action are very similar to a whole class of general activities which seem to have no point or a very odd point—dreams, hallucinations, obsessions, anxieties and perversions. In such cases the Greeks suggested that the gods intervene and take possession of the individual’s mind. Very often recourse is made to crude physiological explanations. It was not till the advent of Freud that any systematic explanation of such goings-on was offered in psychological terms. Indeed Freud claimed in 1913 that the main contribution of psycho-analysis to general psychology was to link together and to give psychological explanations for happenings which had previously been left to physiology or to folk-lore. Many have claimed that Freud, by reclaiming these phenomena for psychology, was in fact extending the model of purposive rule-following behaviour to cover the unconscious. He showed, it is argued, that we have reasons for acts which were previously only explained in terms of causes. I shall argue later that this thesis is mistaken. Freud showed, perhaps, that the concept of ‘wish’ has a wider application than was previously thought. But his account of the working of the primary processes creaks with causality. In maintaining that in the unconscious there is no sense of causal or logical connexion he was ipso facto denying that the model of ‘his reason’, implying norms of efficiency and social appropriateness, was relevant. Freud, I shall argue, provides the classic case of giving quasi-causal explanations where causal explanations seem prima facie appropriate.

I shall also argue that Freud in fact only intended to explain by reference to unconscious mental processes cases where the purposive rule-following model breaks down or is inappropriate. He did not think—and often explicitly denied—that this sort of explanation can be appropriately given for everything—for cases where a man acts as well as for cases where something happens to a man. In this respect Freud was, from the point of view of my argument, on the side of the angels. For my case is not simply that causal explanations are otiose when we know the point of a person’s action in that, life being short and time limited, we no longer feel inclined to ask ‘why’ once we have accommodated a piece of behaviour within the rule-following purposive model. It is also that if we are in fact confronted with a case of a genuine action (i.e. an act of doing something as opposed to suffering something), then causal explanations are ipso facto inappropriate as sufficient explanations. Indeed they may rule out rule-following purposive explanations. To ask what made Jones do something is at least to suggest that he had no good reason for doing it. Similarly to asc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• 1 Types of Explanation in Psychological Theories
• 2 Motives and Motivation
• 3 Freud’s Theory
• 4 Drive Theories
• 5 The Regression to Hedonism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index