Pro-Attitudes and Direction of Fit

Abstract

What amounts to a general account of the class of states which have come to be labeled has recently been suggested by Michael Smith (1987). His idea is that we can best understand these as being states which the world must and that we can explicate this of metaphor in terms of certain sorts of dispositions of the person who has the state in question. In this paper I want to examine Smith's suggestion. This account of pro-attitudes comes in the context of a defense of the Humean theory of motivation which, according to Smith, can be expressed as follows: at t constitutes a motivating reason of agent A to 4 iff there is some v such that R at t consists of a desire of A to P and a belief that were he to 1 he would ' (p. 36). If this theory is to be true it must include a method for ruling out the sort of case where it is claimed that it was a person's mere belief that moved him to do it. Smith tries to do this by arguing for two distinct points. First, he argues that explanations of actions in terms of the agent's reasons are essentially teleological explanations, that is, they are explanations which represent the action as an attempt by the agent to achieve some purpose or goal. So the issue is simply whether the Humean theory is better able to make sense of motivation as pursuit of a (p. 44). That this is so, he claims, and this is his second point, will be clear once we understand that only desires, broadly understood, are the right sorts of mental objects to make sense of such teleological explanations. The basic idea is that states can have one of two possible directions of fit.' Beliefs are the exemplars of states with mind-to-world direction of since they aim at being true, i.e., matching the If there is a mismatch between a belief and reality then it is the belief which has failed; it has failed to fit the world. Desires, on the other side, are exemplars of direction of fit. They aim at satisfaction or realization, not truth. If a desire fails to fit the world, that is not any defect in the desire. It merely shows that the world needs to be changed if the desire is to be realized. Smith seems correct in holding that [h]aving a motivating reason is, inter alia, having a goal (p. 55). The idea of direction of of states then lets us see, Smith thinks, that having a is nothing more than being in a state with a world-to-mind direction of fit. [W]hat kind of state is the having of