It seems useful to distinguish the “psychological motivations” for a belief from the “dialogical motivations” for it.
- Psychological motivations are your best account, given your model of someone’s mind, to explain how they got their belief; given usual “disenchanted” views of psychology, this may involve attributing most beliefs to emotions, or psychoanalytic complexes, etc.
- Dialogical motivations are the motives that a person themself gives for their own belief, when talking to you in dialogue.
(Note that I have to speak of “motives” or “motivations”, not “reasons”, because a person may be willing to admit that their belief is unreasonable, but nevertheless have motivations to give for it.)
I’m not sure how important the dialogical motivations are.
On the one hand, it seems that psychological motivations may allow us to explain the presence of a belief without any reference to the dialogical motivations. If someone’s psychological situation changes in such a way that the psychological motivations for their belief are no longer in place, then the belief changes. If you ask someone, “What happened to all those motives you told me before? Those didn’t change, so why did you change your mind?”, they might have to shrug it off and say, “I guess I just don’t care about that so much anymore.”
On the other hand, some people may place a high value on not ending up in a dialogue situation exactly like I just described; that is, they may highly value avoiding the appearance of their being fickle, inconstant, irrational. So they may prevent themselves from changing their belief until they can find a good counter to their own previous dialogical motivations.
And it seems, after all, that if someone has weak dialogical motivations, such that they keep getting embarrassed in an argument when they talk about their belief, then this may amount, itself, to a psychological motivation to change it.
And of course, it’s probable that the dialogical and psychological motivations will coincide in some cases, if someone simply reports their motives accurately; this seems most likely for low-stakes intellectual beliefs, where, indeed, the main effect of having them is that you’ll defend them in dialogues.
Someone said that the talk of “psychological motivations” seems redundant, since all motivations are psychological; he wanted to use different words, so as to focus on a contrast between a belief’s true causes and someone’s attempt to explain, and possibly idealize, what they are.
I said I’d really rather frame this distinction in terms of “you explaining someone” versus “someone explaining themselves”. The former is your attempt to do psychology, while the latter is someone’s attempt to look like they’re doing psychology while also possibly (though not necessarily) trying to, e.g., save face, or look good, or convince you of the belief. So that’s where I’d be coming from, regarding the nomenclature.
It is at least possible that the motivations someone gives in dialogue are always affected by ulterior motives such as “trying to look good”, whereas under a rare condition —let’s say, under hypnosis— they might give a “pure” account that is unaffected by ulterior motives and is, therefore, different; the dialogical motivations are the former. It is also at least possible that all three of, the dialogical account, the hypothetical “pure” self-report, and your psychological assessment of someone, are different from the person’s “true” motivations— which, if we are to operationalize without allowing for mind-reading, I’ll just say are the motivations that an idealized ‘very good psychologist’ would ascribe to the belief.
But really, with this post I’m most interested in the question of, what’s the value of dialogical motivations? If you imagine that it’s 2007 and people are hyped up in New Atheism debates, obviously they’re very interested in the dialogical motivations: they want to know all the possible arguments their opponents might give for their belief, and how to counter-argue each one. Which might be pretty removed from a psychological model, but it would seem that it can’t be totally irrelevant to changing minds either, if they’re caring so much. Even though, all the while, both sides might think that their opponents are childish and their entire belief is just an excuse for being an asshole.
It certainly feels like someone’s model of my motives, in order to be accurate, has to listen to my self-reports and attempt to explain them, even if it explains them away and opts for an account that diverges a lot from them.
