Can Motivation Be Irrational: The Grice-Pears polemic

--- An item in the Grice Archive reads, "Rational movitation". On the other hand, Pears has a book, crediting Grice, on "Motivated irrationality". Enough for a dispute.

From the amazon.com cite for Pears book:

"To explain irrational belief formation

and irrational action . . . we may invoke

the notions of self-deception and weakness of will. . . .

When described in a certain way, these phenomena

appear so paradoxical that doubts have been raised

as to their very possibility.

Pears's Motivated Irrationality is a major step towards this goal. . . .

-----

"It is inevitable that a book of this scope and ambition

will be controversial. . . . What ought not to be controversial,

however, is that David Pears has given us an outstandingly

lucid and intelligent account of matters of the highest importance.

It is the first comprehensive and unified treatment of the

paradoxes of irrational thought and irrational action."

-- Jon Elster, Times Literary Supplement


""Motivated irrationality" is about self-deception

and lack of self-control or wishful thinking and

acting against one's own better judgement. Steering

a course between the skepticism of philosophers,

who find the conscious defiance of reason too paradoxical, and the tolerant

empiricism of psychologists, it compares the two kinds

of irrationality, and relates the conclusions drawn

to the views of Freud, cognitive psychologists,

and such philosophers as Aristotle, Anscombe, Hare and Davidson.


----- And Grice, who was Pears' tutor.



--- Amazon's one customer review below:

"I enjoyed Pears' works on Wittgenstein (The False Prison) but this book really was more irritating than informative. The topic, to be sure, is of prime importance and is also not very well handled considering how the term "rational" is tossed about these days. However, this book really appears to miss both the crucial points by simply staying within the tight boundaries of a very dry discussion.
That is, Pears doesn't really advance the concept of irrational behaviour very far. He spends the first part of the book exploring 'akrasia' (that's right, we're right back to Socrates even after a few thousand years) and some of the side arguments related to this explanation of irrational behaviour. Then he criticizes Freud and Davidson for their expansion on this idea. But all the way through the book there is really little to be learned and the language, straight out of a thesis paper, is not really a pleasant read. This could be forgiven if there were some good ideas but ultimately that is not the case. This is rather odd, too, since one would think that Pears would bring some of his expertise on the limitations of thought to bear on this subject. Ultimately I believe there is a lot more to be understood here before we even start asking the correct questions."