Objectivity And Practical Reason
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23245684 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Donald A Davidson (corresponding author), Donald Davidson |
| Year | 2000 |
| Pages | 17-26 |
| Publication date | 2000-01-27 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Reasoning practically (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University PressNew York, NY (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780195125511.003.0002 |
| OpenAlex | W4388258145 |
| ISBN | 9780195125511 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
One part of the brain, the amygdala, is responsible for emotional or evaluative responses to perceived facts. Another part of the brain, the hippocampus, as signs to those same facts a degree of belief or subjective probability. In other words, beliefs and desires, the main explainers of action and intention, employ quite different bits of gray matter. So striking is the effect that if the amygdala of a human adult is severely damaged, the emotive response to normally disagreeable stimuli (say a sudden loud noise) is suppressed, though the existence of the stimulus is accurately noted, while an adult whose hippocampus is damaged displays the appropriate emotion in response to the same stimulus, but fails to record its cause. It is somewhat surprising that a person can respond positively or negatively to a stimulus he or she apparently does not know to be present; it is more surprising that a person can know he or she is experiencing a normally painful stimulus and yet fail to respond appropriately. But however separable they may be as responses, the onset of belief and the onset of desire in such cases have a common cause, the stimulus itself. Furthermore, both beliefs and desires are, as we like to say, propositional. that is, they have the sort of content we attribute to declarative sentences. We desire it to be true that the loud sound stops (without necessarily believing there is a loud sound); we believe that there is a loud sound (without necessarily wanting it to stop).
Cognitive psychology · Emotive · Epistemology · Stimulus (psychology) · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.16 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2007 - 2020 (14) |
| Highly cited | No |