Motivation and volition

This paper presents an overview of the key neuroscience studies investigating the neural mechanisms of self-initiated movements that form the basis of our human consciousness. These studies, which commenced with the seminal works of Benjamin Libet and colleagues, showed that an ensemble of brain areas — localized to the frontal and medial regions of the brain — are involved in engendering the conscious decision to commit a motor act. Regardless of differences in neuroimaging techniques, these studies commonly showed that early neuronal activities in the frontal lobules and supplementary motor areas, interpreted by some to be reflective of unconscious processes, occurred before one was conscious of the intention to act as well as the act itself. I examine and discuss these empirical findings with regard to the need to analyze the contents and stages of awareness, and devise paradigm-specific models or theories that could account for inconsistent findings garnered from different experimental paradigms. This paper concludes by emphasizing a need to reconcile the principles of determinism with the notions of free will in future development of consciousness research and theories. © The Institute of Mind and Behavior, Inc., P.O. Box 522, Village Station, New York City, New York, 10014. URL: https://umaine.edu/jmb/

Academic dissertation, Faculty of Education of the University of Tampere, 2003:

"Assessing motivation and the use of learning strategies  by secondary students in three international schools" is a study to assess the motivational orientations and volitional strategy-use of secondary school students at international schools in Europe.

In the theoretical part of the study there is a synthesis of recent research into motivation and self-regulated learning, focusing especially on the volitional aspects of learning...  (see PDF version from the attached email address.)

"""This paper defends the action-theory of the Will, according to which willing G is doing F (F≠G) in order to make G happen. In a nutshell, willing something is doing something else in order to get what we want.

I argue that only the action-theory can reconcile two essential features of the Will. (i) its EFFECTIVITY: willing is closer to acting than desiring. (ii) its FALLIBILITY: one might want something in vain. The action-theory of the will explains EFFECTIVITY by claiming that each time one wants G, one accomplishes the action of doing F ( it is argued following Von Wright that every action has a result as a proper part, here F). And the action-theory explains  FALLIBILITY by claiming that although willing G entails making some F happen –the result of the action of willing–, it does not entail that G –the intended consequence of our willing– will happen.

By contrast, behaviorist accounts of the will (which merely equate willing with an action) captures its EFFECTIVITY but loose its FALLIBILITY. And volitionist accounts (which introduce naked volitions lacking any essential results) capture the FALLIBILITY of the will, but loose its EFFECTIVITY.

I consider disjunctivist accounts  of trying  (such as O'Shaughnessy and Hornsby's ones) as an alternative way to reconcile EFFECTIVITY and FALLIBILITY. I argue that though the view manages to reconcile these two constraints, it does so only at the price of gerrymandering the concept of willing (or trying): failed tryings end up having nothing in common with successful ones.

I then address three objections to the action-theory of the will, to the effect (i) that not all actions have a result (ii) that total failures are possible (iii) that willing is  more fundamental than acting. I argue in answer (i) that all actions have results (results which can be irrelevant to the production of the goal, pr which can be merely mental images), (ii) that total failures do not correspond to  acts of will, but mere desires or wishes, and (iii) that given the possibility of basic actions, acting has to be more fundamental than willing (and trying)."""

Many universities require submission of Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores with applications thereby invalidating other general measurements. The test’s popularity is spreading although research has been inconclusive on the correlation between completion of an advanced degree and GRE scores. It is also unclear whether the items measured on the GRE measure ‘intelligence’ or ‘ability’. Despite this and other charges against the test such as discrimination related to gender and international students, as of 2010 scores on the GRE General Test are accepted as a reliable admissions instrument at several ‘top’ business schools; the new non-cognitive supplementary product to GRE, the Personal Potential Index, is also gaining acceptance without critical analysis. Particularly focusing on GRE, I argue in this paper that ‘general’ standardized admissions tests intended for graduate level study neither test ‘intelligence’ nor ‘ability’ but more likely the applicant’s ‘volition,’ more specifically his or her ‘will to acceptance’ which cannot assume predictive validity of degree completion; and rather than questioning the efficacy of a single standardized intelligence test as an admissions tool, universities are using the GRE General Test as an exclusionary instrument based on an anticompetitive tying arrangement with the test makers.

This study aimed at investigating the relations between students' strategic behaviour during problem solving, task performance and domain-specific self-concept. A total of 167 first-and second-graders were individually examined in tasks involving cubes assembly and in academic self-concept in mathematics. Students' cognitive, metacognitive, and Motivational/Volitional Strategic Behaviours were video-recorded and rated by two independent observers. Structural equation modelling showed that the cognitive and Metacognitive Strategic Behaviours were explained by a cognitive self-regulation factor which correlated with the Motivational/Volitional Strategic Behaviour factor. The importance of the cognitive self-regulation factor for task performance and the association of domain-specific self-concept with Motivational/Volitional Strategic Behaviour were shown.

This paper understands mental attitudes such as emotions and desires to be dispositions to behavior. It also acknowledges that people are often ambivalent, i.e., that they may hold opposed attitudes towards something or someone. Yet the first position seems to entail that ambivalence is either tantamount to paralysis or a contradictory notion. I identify the problem as based on a reductive interpretation of the dispositional character of attitudes and of ambivalence. The paper instead defends a post-Davidsonian view of the basic rationality of human life. By focussing on desire and emotion we can see that the mutually exclusive ways of life involved in ambivalence are manifested in the person’s conduct.

Nicolai Hartmann was educated at his birthplace, Riga in Latvia and at St. Petersburg (Russia), where he graduated from gymnasium in 1901 prior to his university studies in medicine at Tartu (German, Dorpat; Russian, Yuryev) in Estonia and in classical philology at St. Petersburg. When he changed fields to philosophy, he moved to the university at Marburg, Germany. The principal chairs in philosophy there were held by the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Under their direction, he worked intensively on ancient philosophy, completing his doctoral dissertation in 1907 and his Habilitationschrift on Platos Logik des Seins (Plato"s logic of being ) in 1909. By 1912, however, Hartmann began a struggle against the general neo-Kantian approach and against the logical idealism of his chief academic mentors at Marburg. This shift was brought on, as he himself later reported, largely by studying the work of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. The change did not become public, however, until his Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis (Outlines of a metaphysics of cognition) in 1921 after he assumed in 1920 the chair Natorp had held at Marburg. In that work he declares affinity with the work of these phenomenologists whom he identified as his nearest philosophical neighbors. Still, he had hardly any contact with members of the phenomenological movement until 1925 when he became a colleague of Scheler at Cologne. They remained friends until Scheler"s death in 1928. In 1931 Hartmann transferred to a chair at Berlin and finally to Göttingen in 1945. He died at Göttingen on 9 October1950.

L'Etica di Spinoza è attraversata da una forte tensione tra la centralità accordata al corpo sul piano teorico e la relativa sua marginalizzazione sul piano testuale. Da un lato, l'Etica riconosce esplicitamente l'impossibilità di separare la conoscenza della mente da quella del corpo, ed assegna al corpo il ruolo del protagonista in una lunga sezione testuale. D'altro lato, il fine perseguito dall'opera è quello di indicare al lettore la strada che conduce alla libertà o alla felicità «della mente», e questo punto di fuga impone a tutta l'argomentazione spinoziana una prospettiva prevalentemente mentale, nella quale la presenza del corpo si dirada facendosi più rapsodica e defilata. Lo scopo della mia tesi è quello di accogliere la sfida interpretativa lanciata da questo

In rccenr ycars, nnrrarive interpretations of selfhood in Kicrkegaard's sorl., hlr pruriJed a re-rilt b.r'r" f"r.rppr"a.'hinF Ira-e(ofi"uc'in r..r,l p'1,:h"lopy tn"r rre rmPorLlrt in th, rr otr ri6hr' II ri rnre'e'I ing hoiv much rhese debares have startcd ro focus less on Kierkegaard inierprcration and more on deveioping Kierkegaard's insights to make hca,lway on some of the perennial qutstions of philosophical anthftrpology. Anrhony Rudd and I have defendrd 'narrarive rcalisc accounis oiselvcs that draw on Kierkcgaard for inspitation. Likewise, several paprrs in rhis volLrme challenge thcse narradve rheories on their mcrits, in,l eq,ecially as ways to understand erhical and religious ideals' I cannor do justicc to thc rich range ot new questions raised h these contribudons, br:r I will foi:us on rhrle in particular. These are Walrer Vietzke's suggcstion thar a rich conccprion of the hurnan talos rarher rh.rn narrarive form is doing the heavv lifting in rccenr Kierkegaardian narrarivist theories;John LiPPirr's argumenr ihni firrms of ambivalence incompatiblc with wholeheanedness may be needed both in coming ro terms rvirh psychic conflict and in forgivencss; and Eleanor Helms' cl:im, supporred by Kierktgaard and Kermode, rhat we can onlv Dope n' enrlings rhat yield a coherent srorvin both aruorks and real human lives. I rm indebted to all rhree for these challenging questlons about rhe adequacy of my own conception of pracrical idcnrities as 'narravivcs', thar is, living processes olaccumulating mcaning_relarions with a narrarivc-like temporal xructure that parrly precedc expllcit 'teliing' or reliectivc explanarion.

All actions, even the simplest like moving an arm to grasp a pen, are associated with energy costs. Thus all mobile organisms possess the ability to evaluate resources and select those behaviours that are most likely to lead to the greatest accrual of valuable items (rewards) in the near or, especially in the case of humans, distant future. The evaluation process is performed at all possible stages of the series of decisions that lead to the building of a goal-directed action or to its suppression. This is because all animals have a limited amount of energy and resources; to survive and be able to reproduce they have to minimize the costs and maximize the outcomes of their actions. These computations are at the root of behavioral flexibility.
Two executive functions play a major role in generating flexible behaviors: i) the ability to predict future outcomes of goal-directed actions; and ii) the ability to cancel them when they are unlikely to accomplish valuable results. These two processes operate continuously during the entire course of a movement: during its genesis, its planning and even its execution, so that the motor output can be modulated or suppressed at any time before its execution. In this review, functional interactions of the extended neural network subserving generation and inhibition of goal-directed movements will be outlined, leading to the intriguing hypothesis that the performance of actions and their suppression are not specified by independent sets of brain regions. Rather, it will be proposed that acting and stopping are functions emerging from specific interactions between largely overlapping brain regions, whose activity is intimately linked (directly or indirectly) to the evaluations of pros and cons of an action. Such mechanism would allow the brain to perform as a highly efficient and flexible system, as different functions could be computed exploiting the same components operating in different configurations.

The question seems to presuppose that there is an agent or 'self' involved in the first instance to perform physical actions; we shall endeavor to answer this question and apparent presupposition through first investigating the difference if any, between physical actions and bodily movements. Through looking at what is called the causal theory of action (CTA) or the 'standard story', refined and put forward by Davidson (1980), and whether this story holds

— Autonomous robots implement decision making capacities on several layers of abstraction. Put in terms of desires, decision making evaluates desires to eventually commit to some most rational one. Drawing on the philosophical literature on volition and agency, this work introduces a conceptual model that enables robots to reason about which desires they want to want to realize, i.e., higher-order desires. As a result, six jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint types of choices are defined. Technical evaluation shows how to add a robot's will to its rational decision-making capacity. This guarantees that informed choices are possible even in cases rational decision making alone is indecisive. Further applications to modeling personality traits for human-robot interaction are discussed.

Modern theories of behavioral control converge with the idea that goal-directed/voluntary behaviors are intimately tied to the evaluation of resources. Of key relevance in the decision-making processes that underlie action selection are those stimuli that bear emotional content. However, even though it is acknowledged that emotional information affects behavioral control, the exact way in which emotions impact on action planning is largely unknown. To clarify this issue, I gave an emotional version of a go/no-go task to healthy participants, in which they had to perform the same arm reaching movement when pictures of fearful or happy faces were presented, and to withhold it when pictures of faces with neutral expressions were presented. This task allows for the investigation of the effects of emotional stimuli when they are task-relevant without conflating movement planning with target detection and task switching. It was found that both the reaction times (RTs) and the percentages of errors increased when the go-signal was the image of a fearful looking face, as opposed to when the go-signal was a happy looking face. Importantly, to control for the role of the features of the stimuli, I ran a control task in which the same pictures were shown; however, participants had to move/withhold the commanded movement according to gender, disregarding the emotional valence. In this context, the differences between RTs and error percentages between the fearful and happy faces disappeared. On the one hand, these results suggest that fearful facial stimuli are likely to capture and hold attention more strongly than faces that express happiness, which could serve to increase vigilance for detecting a potential threat in an observer's environment. On the other hand, they also suggest that the influence of fearful facial stimuli is not automatic, but it depends on the task requirements.

Version pénultième, à paraître dans R. Clot-Goudard (dir.), L'Explication de l'action. Analyses contemporaines, Recherches sur la philosophie et le langage n°30, Paris, Vrin, 2013. Merci de citer cette version.] Vouloir quelque chose, selon une approche philosophique standard, est un acte intentionnel simple, dirigé vers la chose voulue. Un acte de volonté serait mental dans la mesure où il viserait un objet à réaliser. Il serait simple en ce qu'il serait dépourvu de parties propres. Telle était, notamment, la position de Locke (2002, Livre II, xxi, 15) ou de Brentano (1995, chap. 8). Je soutiens ici, contre l'approche standard, que les actes de volonté ne sont ni simples ni purement mentaux. Ils sont complexes et partiellement non-mentaux. La thèse que je soutiens n'est pas la thèse selon laquelle l'objet voulu ferait partie de l'acte de volonté lui-même (je reste neutre à ce sujet), mais la thèse selon laquelle même abstraction faite de la chose voulue, vouloir est en partie constitué d'un élément non-mental. Lequel ? Vouloir quelque chose est faire quelque chose afin d'obtenir la chose voulue. Un acte de volonté est une action accomplie dans un certain but. Toute action a pour partie propre un résultat, l'effet produit sur le monde. Tel est l'élément non-mental du vouloir. Certaines actions n'ont pour but que leur propre résultat. Si Julie aime danser, le résultat de son action (activité) de danser est aussi le but de son action. De telles actions

I offer a prolegomenon to the philosophical study of a uniquely human activity—the selfbinding act. This philosophical interest directly connects with the Enlightenment project of centralizing personal autonomy and individual freedom as primary values of personhood. Selfbinding represents an easily referenced action that introduces a possible clash between autonomy and freedom on the one hand seen as in conflict with other ancient basic human values like selfcontrol and avoiding akrasia. This dissertation investigates the inverted manner whereby an act of self-binding, which voluntarily and effectively limits a person’s options, can end up augmenting rather than interfering with personal autonomy. I claim that, properly understood, self-binding, rather than a threat to personal autonomy, turns out to be a paradigmatic act of autonomous agency and a tool for overcoming akrasia. I show how the self-binding act assists and even expands Harry Frankfurt’s concept of volitional necessity ...

I offer a prolegomenon to the philosophical study of a uniquely human activity—the selfbinding
act. This philosophical interest directly connects with the Enlightenment project of
centralizing personal autonomy and individual freedom as primary values of personhood. Selfbinding
represents an easily referenced action that introduces a possible clash between autonomy
and freedom on the one hand seen as in conflict with other ancient basic human values like selfcontrol
and avoiding akrasia. This dissertation investigates the inverted manner whereby an act
of self-binding, which voluntarily and effectively limits a person’s options, can end up
augmenting rather than interfering with personal autonomy. I claim that, properly understood,
self-binding, rather than a threat to personal autonomy, turns out to be a paradigmatic act of
autonomous agency and a tool for overcoming akrasia. I show how the self-binding act assists
and even expands Harry Frankfurt’s concept of volitional necessity which overestimates the
potential stability of the human will and underestimates the impact of three considerations
related to the instability of the will: (1) the ontological reality of time; (2) the psychological
reality of a tendency to assent to or rebel against authority and (3) a discounted reality wherein
future negative consequences are minimized or dismissed. Accounting for these three realities in
the act of self-binding fortifies volitional necessity into a tighter, more integrated concept. There
are obvious traversals with the concepts of agency, autonomy, rationality and the inevitable
reductionist claims to consider along with worries about coercion and paternalism. Antecedent
authority-sourcing is a central issue for autonomy and self-binding. Surprisingly, the Self as the
sole, ultimate source for self-binding turns out to be more complicated than at first glance.
Finally, I have made an attempt to elucidate why and how the self-binding act might work by
proposing several analogues, particularly a striking correspondence with the functions a fence.