A Peculiarly Philosophical Pleasure
Occasionally, I'll read something that clearly expresses a thought that I've had a partial grasp of before, but never been able to adequately articulate myself. It's both satisfying and depressing to see one's previously inchoate thought put clearly and concisely. Sometimes, however, the other person's articulation of the thought is so perfect, one immediately realizes that as much as one could've tried, one never would've been able to put it so well. That's how I felt when I read the following passage by Maggie Little, from her essay "Virtue as Knowledge":
"Crudely speaking, there are three main camps of how to account for motivational failure: the Aristotelians place the failure in cognition, Kantians locate it in a failure of will, Humeans attribute it to the absence of a functionally-understood pro-attitude. Fancy as each may sound, they are all of them invocations of some rather empty variable until they are developed into detailed accounts. (Worse yet, think of the all-purpose modern explanation of what bridges motivational failure: the 'drawing of a practical inference'. Rarely is the advocate of this answer asked what it is to draw a practical inference, other than to become moved--much less whether those criteria satisfy relative independence constraints.)"
"Crudely speaking, there are three main camps of how to account for motivational failure: the Aristotelians place the failure in cognition, Kantians locate it in a failure of will, Humeans attribute it to the absence of a functionally-understood pro-attitude. Fancy as each may sound, they are all of them invocations of some rather empty variable until they are developed into detailed accounts. (Worse yet, think of the all-purpose modern explanation of what bridges motivational failure: the 'drawing of a practical inference'. Rarely is the advocate of this answer asked what it is to draw a practical inference, other than to become moved--much less whether those criteria satisfy relative independence constraints.)"
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 10:44 PM
2 Comments:
Why do you think this pleasure is "peculiarly philosophical"? It seems I could have the same pleasure if I were a scientist, say, and found that someone had already elegantly proved some hypothesis I had a vague sense was true.
But I know the feeling.
Well, you're right about what I wrote, but my motivations for that title are more complicated. When I first wrote the title, I planned to write about how finding Little's passage satisfying presupposes that one has previously been frustrated by the emptiness of debates about motivational failure--and I take the sort of emptiness that characterizes those debates to be a peculiarly philosophical sort of emptiness. So that where the "peculiarly philosophical" business came from. But, that said, your point probably applies to my original intention as well. After all, empty pseudo-explanations aren't only found in philosophy.
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