ABSTRACT

The Concept of Motivation looks philosophically and psychologically at the idea of motivation in order to explain human behaviour. This chapter focuses on types of explanation in psychological theories. The author presents Freud's sort of questions about human behaviour which he was answering. The over-riding aim of a scientist should be explanation. This sounds rather obvious, but it has many important consequences in relation to psychological theorizing. The author argues that human actions cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of causal concepts like 'colourless movements'. Causal explanations, in other words, can count as the reason why a person does something. Freud claimed in 1913 that the main contribution of psycho-analysis to general psychology was to link together and to give psychological explanations for happenings which had previously been left to physiology or to folk-lore. The argues that Freud in fact only intended to explain by reference to unconscious mental processes cases where the purposive rule-following model breaks down.