This paper discusses psychological hedonism with a special reference to the writings of Bishop Butler, and Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson. Contrary to philosophical orthodoxy, Sober and Wilson have claimed that Butler failed to refute psychological hedonism. In this paper it is argued: (1) that there is a difference between reductive and ultimate psychological hedonism; (2) that Butler failed to refute ultimate psychological hedonism, but that he succeeded in refuting (...) class='Hi'>reductive psychological hedonism; and, finally and more importantly, (3) that Butler’s criticism of reductive hedonism can be used as a stepping-stone in another argument showing the implausibility of ultimate psychological hedonism as well. (shrink)

Major strands of the history of scientific psychology proposed less mechanistic explanations of behavior than the “series of billiard ball reactions” that Ellis ascribes to them. I tease apart psychological systems based on hedonism and those based on stimulus-response mechanisms-and then tease apart basic hedonism and drive-reduction hedonism, to layout psychological and neuroscientific foundations for the active, dynamic, cognitive, emotive, and "spiritual" dynamics of human nature which Ellis calls us to affirm. I trace these distinctions (...) through the drive-reduction psychoanalysis of Freud, the drive-reduction behaviorism of Hull, and the non-drive-reductive hedonistic system of Skinner. Then I trace the recent neuroscience of reward and punishment circuits and putative narcissistic and altruistic circuits, to conclude that Behaviorism and Neuroscience support broad hedonistic but major non-drive-reduction motivational systems. I affirm Ellis’ contention that emotions are basically “active”, although with some caveats and questions. (shrink)

Willingness to take risk is one of the most important aspects of personal financial decisions, especially those regarding investments. Recent studies show that one’s perception of time, specifically the individual level of Present Hedonistic and Future Time Perspectives (TPs), influence risky financial choices. This was demonstrated for both, Time Perspective treated as an individual trait and for experimentally induced Time Perspectives. However, on occasion, people might find themselves under the joint influence of both, chronic and situational Time Perspectives and little (...) is known about interactions between them. The paper focuses on the interplay between chronic and induced levels of Future and Present Hedonistic TPs in explaining people’s propensity to take investment risks. An experimental study using a Polish national random-quota sample was conducted. The results showed that situationally induced Future TP lowered the preferred level of portfolio riskiness while situationally induced Present Hedonistic TPs resulted in exactly the opposite effect, and that the higher level of chronic Present Hedonistic TP was linked to higher investment risk preferences. The role of the chronic Present Hedonistic TP was moderated by the situationally induced Future (approaching significance) and Present Hedonistic TPs. The induction of these TPs resulted in reduction of the propensity to take investment risks. The study adds to the literature on psychological factors influencing the propensity to take financial risk. The results are also important for researchers who experimentally manipulate variables that might be also considered as chronic traits. They indicate that whether the manipulation is congruent with one’s natural tendencies may have a differential impact on subsequent measures. (shrink)

Understanding the causes of behavior is one of philosophy's oldest challenges. In analyzing human desires, Bertrand Russell's position was clearly related to that of psychological hedonism. Still, though he seems to have held quite consistently that desires and emotions govern human behavior, he claimed that they do not necessarily do so by making us want to maximize pleasure. This claim is related to several being made in today's psychology and philosophy. I point out a string of facts and (...) arguments indicating the weakness of this position, and briefly discuss the possibility of developing a set of assumptions regarding behavioral causation common to students of thinking and behavior. (shrink)

In the second half of their recent, critically acclaimed book Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior , Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson discuss psychological hedonism. This is the view that avoiding our own pain and increasing our own pleasure are the only ultimate motives people have. They argue that none of the traditional philosophical arguments against this view are good, and they go on to present theirownevolutionary biological argument against it. Interestingly, the first half (...) of their book, which is a defense of group selectionism, has received almost all of the attention of those people who have published reactions to the book. No one has published a detailed reaction to the argument of the latter half of the book. In this article, the author explains and critically discusses their evolutionary biological argument against psychological hedonism, concluding that in its current form it is not strong enough to support its conclusion. However, the author goes on to argue that despite recent criticisms of Robert Nozick’s experience-machine argument, it is still a good argument against psychological hedonism. In support of the latter point, the author responds to the objections of Sober and Wilson and to the more recent criticisms offered by Matthew Silverstein. Key Words: hedonism • psychological egoism • evolution • Robert Nozick • Elliott Sober. (shrink)

I develop a distinction between two types of psychological hedonism. Inferential hedonism (or “I-hedonism”) holds that each person only has ultimate desires regarding his or her own hedonic states (pleasure and pain). Reinforcement hedonism (or “R–hedonism”) holds that each person's ultimate desires, whatever their contents are, are differentially reinforced in that person’s cognitive system only by virtue of their association with hedonic states. I’ll argue that accepting R-hedonism and rejecting I-hedonism provides a (...) conciliatory position on the traditional altruism debate, and that it coheres well with the neuroscientist Anthony Dickinson’s theory about the evolutionary function of hedonic states, the “hedonic interface theory.” Finally, I’ll defend R-hedonism from potential objections. (shrink)

Psychological hedonism is the theory that all of our actions are ultimately motivated by a desire for our own pleasure or an aversion to our own pain. Peirce offers a unique critique of PH based on a descriptive analysis of self-controlled action. This essay examines Peirce's critique and his accounts of self-controlled action and of desire.

Early in the eleventh of his Fifteen Sermons, Joseph Butler advances his best-known argument against psychological hedonism. Elliott Sober calls that argument Butler’s stone, and famously objects to it. I consider whether Butler’s stone has philosophical value. In doing so I examine, and reject, two possible ways of overcoming Sober’s objection, each of which has proponents. In examining the first way I discuss Lord Kames’s version of the stone argument, which has hitherto escaped scholarly attention. Finally, I show (...) that Butler’s stone does something important, which I have not found previously discussed. Butler’s stone blocks an inference, persuasive to many people, which purports to show that we intrinsically desire only pleasure. (shrink)

As far as consideration of man as phenomenon, as appearance, as an empirical self, is concerned, Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing psychological hedonist.

It is widely thought among philosophers that Joseph Butler's criticism of psychological egoism in his Sermons is, in the words of A.E. Duncan-Jones, 'the classic refutation of it.' Indeed, no less a philosopher than David Hume restated and put forth Butler's central argument against hedonistic egoism - without due credit - as part of his own critique. Yet recent commentators have begun to question Butler's arguments, albeit usually with sympathy and in the hope of saving what they take to (...) be his insights. I propose to focus on Butler's main objection to hedonistic psychological egoism, to show how and why it fails to refute plausible forms of the thesis, and briefly to indicate why philosophical attempts to disprove this theory of motivation are misguided. (shrink)

What does a Utilitarian mean by happiness when he says that it is the good? Specifically, pleasure. But how many different kinds of experiences are included under this term? It appears that as the word was used by Bentham, and indeed by almost all other hedonists, it had so wide an extension that it included all experiences not properly termed "unhappiness." Partly, however, because of the identification of happiness with pleasure and the absence of pain, and partly because of a (...) failure to emphasize by frequent explanation the difference between the meanings of terms as used by hedonists and the same terms in common usage, there has existed at all times a disposition to assume that hedonists intended a narrower meaning than they actually did. Even in hedonistic writings there has been a tendency to make a distinction between the usages accorded "pleasure" and "happiness," the former as used more frequently to refer to pleasures of the moment, and the latter to a long continued state of felicific feeling; or a distinction is made between "pleasure" as used when referring to happiness which has an immediately obvious physiological origin and "happiness" to felicific feeling of all types. Nevertheless, the terms are not used consistently in this way, and on the whole it would be better to think of "pleasure" and "happiness" as interchangeable in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and many others. (shrink)

In this paper we present a modern version of the classic theory of “ultimate psychological hedonism” . As does the UPH, our two-dimensional model of metatelic orientations also postulates a fundamentally hedonistic motivation for any human action. However, it makes a distinction between “telic” or content-based goals of actions and “metatelic” or emotional reasons for actions. In our view, only the emotional reasons for action, but not the goals of action, conform to the UPH. After outlining our model, (...) we will elucidate the similarities and differences between our model and classic UPH. In this context we will clarify several basic misconceptions regarding classic UPH. In a next step, two major criticisms of the theory of ultimate psychological hedonism will be discussed, that is the statement that the hedonistic principle has no motivating effect at all and the argument that the hedonistic motivation is only one of many motivations of human actions. We believe that both of these arguments can be refuted. Finally, we will discuss the compatibility of our model with evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Sober and Wilson argue that neither psychological evidence nor philosophical arguments provide grounds for rejecting psychological hedonism, but evolution by natural selection is unlikely to have led to such a single source of motivation. In order to turn their piecemeal discussion of into a serious argument, Sober and Wilson need a general procedure for mapping alternative accounts of motivation into egoistic hedonistic accounts. That is the only way to demonstrate that there will always be an available hedonistic (...) account no matter what the psychological evidence. But such a general procedure, if available, must block their argument for . So, the more persuasive the case for , the less persuasive the case for. (shrink)

To the question ‘Why do you try to realize this?’ your answer may be ‘Because I desire that and I think that the realization of this would involve the realization of that.’ Or your answer may be ‘Because I desire this.’ If ‘Why?’ is interpreted as ‘Desiring what?’ the question ‘Why do you desire this?’ is improper. The word ‘desire’ is, however, frequently used in such a way as to countenance the impropriety. It is so used not only when what (...) is pursued only as a means is said to be desired, but also when a desire for what possesses one character is said to be a desire for what possesses a a concomitant character. Strictly, perhaps, an object of desire is describable in terms only of the character immediately relevant to the desire. The expression ‘to desire what is X qua X’ is perhaps redundant; and the expression ‘to desire what is X qua Y’ is perhaps self-contradictory. But those who think, so must admit that such expressions are current among even careful speakers. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the debate about eudaimonism started by Kashdan, Biswas-Diener, King, and Waterman in a previous issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology. We point out that one thing that is missing from this debate is an understanding of the problems with subjective theories of well-being that motivate a turn to objective theories. A better understanding of the rationale for objective theories helps us to see what is needed from a theory of well-being. We then argue (...) that a suitably modified subjective theory can provide what is needed and that this is the theory that ought to be favored by psychologists. Keywords: well-being; happiness; hedonism; eudaimonia; subjective well-being; theory; values.. (shrink)

University Abstract Philosophers have sought to improve upon the logical empiricists’ model of scientific reduction. While opportunities for integration between the cognitive and the neural sciences have increased, most philosophers, appealing to the multiple realizability of mental states and the irreducibility of consciousness, object to psychoneural reduction. New Wave reductionists offer a continuum of comparative goodness of intertheoretic mapping for assessing reductions. Their insistence on a unified view of intertheoretic relations obscures epistemically significant crossscientific relations and engenders dismissive conclusions about (...) psychology. Richer, more sensitive accounts of explanatory pluralism and mechanistic explanation in science advocate multi-level approaches in cross-scientific settings and criticize the distance of the standard philosophical objections from working scientists’ practices and discoveries. The Heuristic Identity Theory, a new, scientifically informed version of the psycho-physical identity theory, incorporates these insights, showing how multiple realizability is an argument for (not against) identities in science and why, therefore, consciousness is not irreducible. (shrink)

Este artículo sostiene que el tipo de hedonismo que se encuentra en la ética de Epicuro no es de tipo psicológico sino ético. Asimismo, este ensayo se opone a la utilización de reportes doxográficos como una base para desarrollar una interpretación de la filosofía de Epicuro si existen materiales de referencia primaria disponibles, y afirma que la doxografía debe ser utilizada para clarificar esos materiales de referencia primarios, y no al revés.

It is often thought that the computational paradigm provides a supporting case for the theoretical autonomy of the science of mind. However, I argue that computation is in fact incompatible with this alleged aspect of intentional explanation, and hence the foundational assumptions of orthodox cognitive science are mutually unstable. The most plausible way to relieve these foundational tensions is to relinquish the idea that the psychological level enjoys some special form of theoretical sovereignty. So, in contrast to well known (...) antireductionist views based on multiple realizability, I argue that the primary goal of a computational approach to the mind should be to facilitate a translation of the psychological to the neurophysiological. (shrink)

This book explores the mind-body issue from both the perspectives of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Starting from the problem of mental causation, it provides an overview of the contemporary metaphysical discussion and argues in favour of the token-identity thesis, as the only position that can account for the causal efficacy of the mental. Showing furthermore that this ontological reductionism is not dissociable from epistemological reductionism, the author applies a new strategy of inter-theoretic reduction, which is compatible with (...) the multiple realizability of mental properties. Using functionally defined sub-types, this account establishes a conservative reduction of psychology to neuroscience, which vindicates both the scientific legitimacy and the theoretical indispensability of psychology. This account is illustrated by several empirical examples borrowed from contemporary neuroscience. (shrink)

Psychologists and neuroscientists often struggle to integrate findings in their respective domains, a problem due partly to implicitly and explicitly held philosophical positions on issues of reduction and autonomy across these domains. The present article reviews how reduction and autonomy have been used in philosophical arguments regarding how macro-scale findings relate to micro-scale findings across various scientific disciplines. The present article demonstrates how macro findings are indispensable to explanations of phenomena of interest by (a) providing information regarding higher levels of (...) organization in mechanisms, (b) including information not contained within certain micro explanations that (c) provides more general and stable causal explanations relative to micro explanations in certain situations. The purpose of presenting these analyses and recommendations is to disabuse psychologists and neuroscientists of pervasive assumptions that psychology is reducible to biology and that lower level phenomena (molecular) should be prioritized as somehow more explanatory than higher level phenomena (behavioral). The article concludes with 3 hypothetical scenarios from clinical psychology and psychiatry illustrating this critique and providing a pragmatic approach to clarify the relative roles, and importance, of biological and psychological data in service of general and stable explanations that are tailored to the kind of intervention desired. (shrink)

The appearance of multiple realization of the special sciences kinds by physical kinds can be fully explained within a type-identity reductive physicalist framework, based on recent findings in the foundations of statistical mechanics. This has been shown in Hemmo and Shenker. However, while this account is available for special sciences like biology and thermodynamics, it is unavailable for psychology. Therefore the only coherent physicalist account of psychology is a type-type identity account. The so-called “non reductive” physicalism turns out (...) to be an incoherent idea, and functionalism and supervenience cannot salvage it. At the same time, within a type-identity account properly understood one can give a full account of the anomaly of psychology and understand in what sense the special sciences - including psychology - are autonomous. (shrink)

This article covers four types of hedonism: ancient hedonism; ethical hedonism; axiological hedonism; and psychological hedonism. It concentrates on the latter two types, both by clarifying them and by discussing arguments in their behalf. It closes with a few words about the relevance of those positions to applied ethics.

This article explores the nature of "the phenomenological attitude," which is understood as the process of retaining a wonder and openness to the world while reflexively restraining pre-understandings, as it applies to psychological research. A brief history identifies key philosphical ideas outlining Husserl's formulation of the reductions and subsequent existential-hermeneutic elaborations, and how these have been applied in empirical psychological research. Then three concrete descriptions of engaging the phenomenological attitude are offered, highlighting the way the epoché of the (...) natural sciences, the psychological phenomenological reduction and the eidetic reduction can be applied during research interviews. Reflections on the impact and value of the researcher's stance show that these reductions can be intertwined with reflexivity and that, in this process, something of a dance occurs—a tango in which the researcher twists and glides through a series of improvised steps. In a context of tension and contradictory motions, the researcher slides between striving for reductive focus and reflexive self-awareness; between bracketing pre-understandings and exploiting them as a source of insight. Caught up in the dance, researchers must wage a continuous, iterative struggle to become aware of, and then manage, pre-understandings and habitualities that inevitably linger. Persistance will reward the researcher with special, if fleeting, moments of disclosure in which the phenomenon reveals something of itself in a fresh way. (shrink)

A commentary on Neurophilosophy: Toward a unified science of the mind/brain, by Patricia Smith Churchland. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press/Bradford, 1986, pp. xi + 546, $27.50, ISBN 0-262-03116-7.

One of the greatest philosophical disputes in Germany in the latter half of the 19th century concerned the value of life. Following Arthur Schopenhauer, numerous philosophers sought to defend the provocative view that life is not worth living. A persistent objection to pessimism is that it is not really a philosophical theory at all, but rather a psychological state; a mood or disposition which is the product of socio-economic circumstance. A developed and influential version of this view was advanced (...) in the 1870’s by the English psychologist James Sully. Yet, as important as Sully’s critique was for the pessimism dispute, it has been almost entirely overlooked in the history of philosophy. With some growing recent attention to 19th century pessimism, this paper aims to reconstruct Sully’s view, and what I argue is his primary argument for it in terms of the best explanation for an alleged historical correlation between pessimistic belief and social hardship in the form of frustrated ideals. The paper then presents and analyses some challenges to this argument, some of which are argued to have been at least partially anticipated in the 19th century by the likes of Schopenhauer and Olga Plümacher. (shrink)

This thesis defends a hedonistic theory of value consisting of two main components. Part 1 offers a theory of pleasure. Pleasures are experiences distinguished by a distinct phenomenological quality. This quality is attitudinal in nature: it is the feeling of liking. The pleasure experience is also an object of this attitude: when feeling pleasure, we like what we feel, and part of how it feels is how this liking feels: Pleasures are Internally Liked Experiences. Pleasure plays a central role in (...) the motivational system such that pleasure tends to influence, and in turn be influenced by, other motivational, dispositional and evaluative states of the agent. While this connection is strong, it is often indirect and contingent - the necessary attitudinal connection is a matter of how pleasure feels, not of how it functions. -/- Part 2 is concerned with the nature of value. What kind of problem is it that value poses, and what ought a theory of value to do? In face of the fundamental disagreements that persist over these questions, we try to gather and systemize what we can agree upon about value, and then develop a theory that accounts for (enough of) those things. Meta-ethical naturalism, as developed here, is the view that value is a natural property, identified via the role “value” plays according to the best systematization of moral and evaluative thought. The theory engaging meta-ethics with the scientific investigation of matters relevant to value: we need to understand the causal processes behind our beliefs in order to make an informed decision about which of the competing theories offers the best explanation of value. Finally, the argument is made that the nature and function of pleasure shows it to play the kind of explanatory role necessary for a sound naturalistic reduction of value: it makes many of our beliefs about value true, and it is causally responsible for most of our attributions and beliefs about value. (shrink)

I argue that academic psychology’s quest to achieve scientific respectability by reliance on quantification and objectification is deeply flawed. Specifically, psychological theory typically cannot support prognostication beyond the binary opposition of “effect present/effect absent”. Accordingly, the “numbers” assigned to experimental results amount to little more than affixing names (e.g., more than, less than) to the members of an ordered sequence of outcomes. This, in conjunction with the conceptual under-specification characterizing the targets of experimental inquiry, is, I contend, a primary (...) reason why psychologists find it difficult to discriminate between competing, explanations of the effects of mind on behavior. Absent well-specified theory capable of enabling precise and detailed quantitative prediction, inferring underlying mental mechanisms from experimental outcomes becomes a difficult, if not impossible, task. (shrink)

One of the central problems in the philosophy of psychology is an updated version of the old mind-body problem: how levels of theories in the behavioral and brain sciences relate to one another. Many contemporary philosophers of mind believe that cognitive-psychological theories are not reducible to neurological theories. However, this antireductionism has not spawned a revival of dualism. Instead, most nonreductive physicalists prefer the idea of a one-way dependence of the mental on the physical.In Psychoneural Reduction, John Bickle presents (...) a new type of reductionism, one that is stronger than one-way dependency yet sidesteps the arguments that sank classical reductionism. Although he makes some concessions to classical antireductionism, he argues for a relationship between psychology and neurobiology that shares some of the key aims, features, and consequences of classical reductionism. Parts of Bickle's "new wave" reductionism have emerged piecemeal over the past two decades; this is his first comprehensive statement and defense of it to appear. (shrink)

In rounded terms and modem dress a theory of intentionality is a theory about how humans take in information via the senses and in the very process of taking it in understand it and, most often, make subsequent use of it in guiding human behaviour. The problem of intentionality in this century has been the problem of providing an adequate explanation of how a purely physical causal system, the brain, can both receive information and at the same time understand it, (...) that is, to put it even more briefly, how a brain can have semantic content. In these two articles, one in this issue of the journal and one in the next, I engage in a critical examination of the two most thoroughly canvassed approaches to the theory and problem of intentionality in philosophical psychology over the last hundred years. In the first article, entitled 'The modern reduction of intentionality, ' I examine the approach pioneered by Carnap and reaching its apotheosis in the work of Daniel Dennett. In the second article, entitled 'The return to representation, 'I examine the approach which can be traced back to the work of Noam Chomsky but which has been given its canonical treatment in the work of Jerry Fodor. (shrink)