appointments at a number of universities in the UK. He has published widely across many areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, including work on cognitive architecture, the role of language in thought, self-knowledge, consciousness, the mentality of animals, and meta-cognition. His most recent books are The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought (2015) and Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (2019).
Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect, and reported the following:
Page 99 advances a particular theory of what pleasure and displeasure really are. Rather than being intrinsic felt qualities of experience, or a sort of “hedonic gloss” that attaches to experience (as many philosophers and others assume), they are better understood as perception-like representations of value. Pleasure attaching to the taste of a ripe strawberry, for example, represents it in a fine-grained perception-like way as good (to some degree), and in consequence makes continued eating seem choice-worthy. But what are these values and disvalues that are represented by degrees of pleasure and displeasure? Page 99 suggests that they are best understood in evolutionary terms, as adaptive values and disvalues (to be cashed out in terms of inclusive fitness). This answers a problem that had been raised previously in the chapter, that since values don’t really exist as part of the natural world, they can’t be represented correctly or incorrectly. Page 99 points out this problem evaporates if the values in question are cashed out in terms of biological inclusive fitness.Learn more about Human Motives at the Oxford University Press website.
A reader who opens the book to read just page 99 won’t get a good idea of what the book as a whole is about, I’m afraid. But he or she will have landed on a crucial node in the overall argument. The book aims to refute a new and powerful, scientifically grounded, form of motivational hedonism. (This is the view that all human actions are really taken to secure pleasure and avoid displeasure.) The new hedonism argues on very good grounds that pleasure and displeasure are the common-currency of all human and animal decision making, enabling seemingly incommensurable things to be traded off against one another. (Is it worth getting stung by the bees to extract the honey from the hive? Here pain is pitted against pleasure.) As a result, it seems that genuine altruism is impossible. When I act to save someone’s life, I am really acting because I anticipate that saving the life will make me feel good, or because not acting will make me feel bad, or both. While accepting the common-currency idea, I argue that because pleasure and displeasure are really representations of value, altruism is possible after all (and frequently actual). When acting to save the life, I act because doing so strikes me as an intrinsically valuable thing to do (this is what the anticipated pleasure really is), not because I think it will make me feel good. The goal of the book is to flesh out this account in detail, to defend it against alternatives, and to show how it provides the best interpretation of the underlying affective science.
--Marshal Zeringue
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