Abstract Practical hope is often thought to sustain difficult action, especially in the face of uncertainty and setbacks. But how? A prominent explanation holds that hope increases agents’ willingness to take risks, thereby leading them to pursue unlikely but highly valued outcomes. Although initially plausible, I argue that this picture does not hold up to scrutiny. The proposed link between hope and risk-inclination faces a conceptual mismatch. In some cases, the proposed link even implies that agents who hope to succeed in a project will abandon it for a riskier alternative. I develop an alternative account of hope’s role in action. Building on recent accounts of the nature of hope, I argue that practical hope involves seeing the hoped-for outcome as genuinely realisable through one’s agency. This allows agents to see their efforts toward the outcome as meaningful, thereby sustaining perseverance.
Abstract The Quality of Thought articulates and vigorously defends the thesis that every conscious thought has a distinctive phenomenal character that fully determines the thought’s propositional content, independently of any facts about the cognitive agent’s external environment. In this critical study I contend that the book’s two key arguments in favor of this thesis have a natural and plausible interpretation under which the arguments only support a more generic ‘phenomenal intentionality of thought’ thesis. One version of this generic thesis asserts (i) that phenomenal character heavily constrains mental reference-eligibility for any thought constituents that are expressible in public language by names or natural-kind terms, but does not itself determine the referents (if any) of these constituents, (ii) that the mental referents of such constituents are aspects of a thought’s propositional content, and hence (iii) that the propositional content of a thought with such constituents is determined in a partially externalist manner.
Abstract Hope can motivate action and substantially alter our psychological outlook. In this essay, we bring to the fore a largely unaddressed risk associated with hope. Under conditions of social oppression, hope can engender a form of psychological oppression. The phenomenon we describe arises when an oppressed person’s hope is apt, yet imprudent. Apt, because what we hope for is especially valuable. And imprudent, because acting on hope is likely to expose the hopeful agent to exhaustion, failure, or further harm. In such cases, an agent has good reasons both for maintaining hope and for abandoning it. The deliberative challenge of mediating between a hope’s aptness and its prudential risks amounts to a form of psychological oppression. This deliberative challenge can be met, but doing so is much harder for someone living under oppressive conditions than for someone more privileged. Our argument owes much to Srinivasan (2018) who makes a similar argument regarding anger.
Abstract This essay combines the philosophy of hope with Sally Haslanger’s theory of social structures to identify two limits to hope and its influence on human action. The limit of feasibility arises when social structures are too rigid to allow for change. It marks the point at which a hoped-for outcome becomes socially impossible for external reasons. The limit of conceivability , on the other hand, arises when I cannot even desire a change because the altered network of social relations is not intelligible to me as a social structure of a particular kind. The limit of conceivability thus internally prevents hope from arising within the subject, before it can gain any influence. The essay’s findings highlight that the philosophy of hope can benefit from incorporating theories of social structures into their conceptual repertoire.
