Discussion: The Socratic Model of Belief and Desire (INCOMPLETE)
Source: Britannica
In the Apology, Protagoras, and Meno, Socrates’ arguments about the nature of virtue, knowledge, and the good hinge on one important fact that he, or at least the Socrates of Plato and all others engaging in the dialogue, considers indubitable: that it must be the case that no one willingly does bad. This Socratic fact was the subject of debate for our Philosophy, and it was fairly apparent that the side which defended Socrates won with ease over the opponent by tentatively fitting all opposing counterexamples into a demonstrative case of ignorance, such that the subject would do bad willingly only on the account of their ignorance.
The faults of this argument are apparent. In the Meno, Socrates establishes the equivalence of the good with knowledge and the bad with ignorance as follows:
What is pleasant is good (evaluative hedonism)
People often do the bad
No one willingly does bad
People who do the bad willingly must be ignorant that it is the bad
Therefore, the bad is ignorance, and its opposite, the good, is knowledge
From this succinct premise-conclusion form, one sees that the conclusion that one does bad only on ignorance relies on (3), and in a deductive argument, one must not be able to justify a premise with the conclusion.
An interesting question does arise concerning the model of the mind Socrates derives from this reasoning. To put it formally, he asserts that “every intentional action of an agent is at least in part shaped by one’s belief that the action is, in some respect, good, for whatever suffices as a definition of good.” The argumentative step he takes to conclude this comes from a rejection of one being “overwhelmed by emotions,” equating emotions to pleasure or pain and then transitively to the good and the bad by evaluative hedonism. As a result, being overwhelmed by the good or the bad literally becomes a calculated measurement between the good and the bad, the harmful and the pleasurable. Then, on the basis that (3), Socrates asserts that every action must be based on the belief that it will be good for us.
However, we must not be satisfied with this conclusion, and the mistake is again easy to spot. It is problematic to equate the pleasurable with the good, since the pleasurable is an emotional state of affairs that is felt, while the good, by Socrates’ later reasoning, is fundamentally rational knowledge. The equating of these diametrically opposed attitudes of the mind collapses the dimension of being “overwhelmed by emotions” that purports to describe an irrational drive.
Socrates’ initial idea about belief has morphed into a powerful idea of the belief-desire mechanism of motivation and action proposed by David Hume and Donald Davidson. Yet, the more fundamental question is: are these two attitudes jointly sufficient in determining one’s actions? A paradigm case of the belief-desire model is wanting water, in which the desire for water and the belief that there is in fact water in front of me motivates me to bring that water to my mouth. I hope to now construe this model in a different light through proposing several other cases that are helpful additions to this agency model.
First, consider a case of habitual action. I wake up, and reach for the cup next to my bed on autopilot without the explicit belief that there is water there. While I do not hold the explicit belief that water is there, I have been so accustomed to think, or at least to act as if the water were there.
Also consider a case of embodied cognition and action. As an expert in Tennis, I can place my feet in the perfect position, swing my racket at the perfect time, and return the ball without explicitly needing to want or desire to return that serve. In this circumstance, the body is simply responding to environmental stimuli and orienting one’s action towards that response. Embodied action is also distinct from habit in that habit concerns the repetition of one mode of action without necessarily requiring one to have a response to something like, say, the absence of the water bottle on the side of my bed. Meanwhile, embodied action does require me to respond in a very specific way to the motion of a tennis ball given that particular circumstance and position of that ball relative to me.
Third, we can also think about how beliefs can act as a direct motivator of actions. If i say: I do x because x is morally right, then I adopt an anti-Humean motivation for action, in which my beliefs about what I should do directly shape how I act in the moment. A Humean might object to this example by saying that in believing x is morally right, I also must desire moral righteousness, and at the same time believe that I need to perform actions that follow from my moral belief to be morally righteous. It is indeed contested whether the desire to be moral needs to be included in this account of action, for the belief that something is morally right is not a sufficient condition for one to adopt that belief for oneself. However, this additional step to commit oneself to the moral belief might just be redundant if the moral belief were to be framed this way: (i) it is morally right not to kill people; (ii) I am morally righteous; therefore, I am motivated by my beliefs not to kill people. In this case, since (i) is about a particular action, and (ii) commits oneself to (i), then the existence of (ii) is sufficient to motivate one to act in a certain way about the course of action described in (i). Another explanation to the Humean objection to the anti-Humean is to not attempt to explain away the involvement of desire, but to distinguish between the types of desire involved in a typical desire-belief model versus one involved in the anti-Humean case. Concedingly, one way one could think about morality is: (i) x is right, (ii) I desire moral rightness (iii) moral rightness requires that I perform what I believe is right; therefore I do x. However, as with the Socratic argument about the necessity of not willing the bad, the inclusion of (ii) presupposes moral sentimentalism as the foundation of morality in general. Indeed, it is genuinely possible to conceive of someone who acts according to moral principles and does not put desire in the foreground. One may still argue that this perfectly rational person is simply a hypocrite, because he has to commit himself conatively to acting rationally. I do not deny this argument here, but simply say that the desire may not be antecedently motivating, that is, what is motivating the particular action is not a desire about one’s wanting to be good. Instead, the deciding factor of motivation is one’s desire that arises on the account of one’s reasoning that doing x is morally right. Hence, that desire is motivated by the purported moral fact and perhaps other beliefs about one’s moral status or identity. The important difference is that the desire described by one’s wanting water, as something antecedent to the belief or as a primary motivating factor that arises from non-agentic states, is distinct from one that arises from and is a consequence of moral and logical reasoning.
Of course, there are many more instances and variations of the belief-desire model, but we can concede to some extent that at least in the domain of agentic reasoning and action, a belief-desire model is a necessary criteria for agency. But is it a sufficient criteria?...
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