Motivism and the differences in Motives

I'd been reading Wayne Booth's Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent over the last couple of weeks, and though I haven't been able to continue reading past the first chapter, that first chapter sparked a line of thought.

According to Wayne Booth we have fallen prey to a modernist dogma known as motivism. From what I've understood, motivism means an underlying and ardent belief that statements of motivation, or reasons given, are always a rationalization constructed to mask an underlying motive. A couple of days ago I was reminded of an example from television.

There's an episode of Friends where the friends set out to prove that Phoebe's altruism is actually based on purely selfish motives. She is kind to people only because there's a payoff: she gets to feel good about herself.

I don't remember the outcome. I don't care a bunch about what happens on Friends, if only because it was such a popular television show when I was in college. Wayne Booth seems to say that this modern dogma is specious. It is wrong to claim that a person's stated motives could not possibly be their actual motives. It is an assumption that may be true under some circumstances, but that cannot be accurately applied to every situation.

I had a conversation about this with Michael just a few nights ago. We were talking briefly about a friend of mine named, who I'll call Vickrum (another Friends reference), who told me, back when Michael and I were contemplating marriage, that I wasn't ready to get married because I didn't know who I was or what I wanted yet. I immediately qualified this statement to Michael by saying that of course that wasn't the real reason he objected to our engagement. The act of making that statement stopped me short.

Now it's true that Vickrum had a second reason for objecting to the engagement. It's true that Vickrum had a stake in my remaining unattached, but that does not mean that the reason he gave for objecting to the engagement wasn't a real reason. There were at least two levels of coexistent reasoning going on. On the one hand if I were to marry Michael, I would no longer be available toVickrum . On the other hand, Vickrum was correct that I didn't really know who I was or what I wanted. This not knowing could be a liability in marriage, and marriage would put a definite spin on the answer, might possibly even remove the question entirely.