On Sat, 19 Feb 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Why is interest in human motivation banal and reactionary? People behave all
> kinds of different ways under different circumstances; faced with the same
> situation, some people might cry and some might kill; some might revolt, and
> some might conform. Isn't it interesting to you why that is, and how it
> matters for politics?
As the resident psychologist on the list (anybody else?), I completely agree with the idea that we should study human motivation. In addition, sociologists like Mills have done some interesting work on the social "vocabulary of motives" (what passes for a reasonable motive for specific behavior in a society?).
The problem here is when people replace reasoned argument for or against a claim with imputations about the speaker's motives. In my view, this is a social problem (I'm serious): if somebody claims X, a very common response in our society is "X can't be true, because the speaker has motive Z". This is-- put bluntly--illogical reasoning, because the motive of the speaker cannot validate nor undermine the claim.
Perhaps I'm sensitized to this because I hear it a lot in my courses: if an eyewitness is confident that he accurately remembers the details of a crime, and he is not motivated by hatred or racial prejudice, then, students typically assume, when can trust his testimony. This tends to happen even after we spend a week in class going over research that illustrates how easily memory is reconstructed, revised and unintentionally fabricated!
In short: research on motives is a valid scientific research topic, but imputing motives to evaluate a claim is a waste of time.
Miles