ABSTRACT
Besides the reduction of mind to matter, psychological reducers have another possibility open to them, which can prove even more gratifying. Besides reducing other people’s motives to mechanical movements, they can also reduce them to other, underlying, motives which are cruder than those usually admitted. Now the relation between these two enterprises is not clear. If the physicalist reduction works, it is not obvious how the purely psychological one can find room to work as well, or why it is needed. If (for instance) Huxley and Skinner are right to say that the chapters in this book have just written themselves as a result of a blind movement of particles – that the author’s thoughts didn’t affect the process at all – it is rather hard to see how they have also (actually) been produced by unbridled self-aggrandisement and dynastic ambition.
