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Motives and Motivation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

R. S. Peters
R. S. Peters
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Extract

To probe people's motives is almost an occupational malaise amongst psychologists. And it is not one that can be nursed in private. It intrudes constantly into discussion of acquaintances, into moral assessments of people's actions and their responsibility for them, and into pronouncements on the proper operation of law. On this account psychologists are treated with suspicion, often with derision and resentment, by their academic colleagues. Of course, like Jehovah's witnesses, they come to expect, even to relish, the reception they receive. For has it not been written that we all have a strong resistance to such revelations, our real motives being often those which we are ashamed to admit? But there may be good grounds for this resistance as well as psychological explanations of it. My hope in this paper is to set out the sorts of grounds that there may be for our resistance to this scrutiny of our motives and to the theories of motivation which lend some kind of scientific respectability to it.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 31 , Issue 117 , April 1956 , pp. 117 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1956

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References

2 I made this point in a previous paper but did not develop it. See Peters, R., Motivts and Causes, Proc. Arist. Soc. Supp. Vol. XXVI, 1952, p. 145.Google Scholar

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