Henry Schiller

Sometimes we do what other people tell us to. A natural thought is that the motivation to act on an instruction comes about rationally as the result of interpreting an imperative and deciding to act on it; that is, by updating on information that gets mediated through belief‐desire reasoning. We defend an alternative “Spinozan” view about how instructions—specifically those performed with imperative sentences—might give rise to a motivation to act, namely, that when someone is told to do something, this activates motivations directly, without the person updating on information that gets mediated through belief‐desire reasoning. We will discuss two general strategies for thinking about how imperatives might supply motivation that are consistent with this view—one based on models of dissonance reduction and the other involving a more direct link between imperative utterances and motivational mental states. We will conclude with a discussion of how ecological considerations might favor a Spinozan process of motivation from imperatives.

Sometimes we do what other people tell us to. A natural thought is that the motivation to act on an instruction comes about rationally as the result of interpreting an imperative and deciding to act on it: i.e. by updating on information that gets mediated through belief-desire reasoning. We defend an alternative ‘Spinozan’ view about how instructions–specifically those performed with imperative sentences–might give rise to a motivation to act: namely, that when someone is told to do something, this activates motivations directly, without the person updating on information that gets mediated through belief-desire reasoning. We’ll discuss two general strategies for thinking about how imperatives might supply motivation that are consistent with this view–one based on models of dissonance reduction and the other involving a more direct link between imperative utterances and motivational mental states. We'll conclude with a discussion of how ecological considerations might favor a Spinozan process of motivation from imperatives.

For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the “wild west” of pragmatics and context-sensitivity -- including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse -- and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor.