Hope and Mental Imaging

Can Dogs Hope? part 5

In his article 'The Value of Hope'(1), Luc Bovens attempts to clarify what the necessary and sufficient conditions for us to be able to say that a person is hoping for something.(2) This is of great use in terms of trying to answer whether dogs can hope - if the account is satisfactory we will have a tick list of abilities dogs and other animals must possess in order to hope.

Bovens gives the following three conditions as, together, being necessary and sufficient for someone to hope for something:

1. One must not be certain that what one hopes for will or will not come about.
2. One must desire what one hopes for.
3. One must engage in devote some amount of mental energy to what it would be like if what we hoped for were to happen (Bovens terms this 'mental imaging')
   

Number 2 seems pretty uncontroversial. Number 1 is a little more difficult, but I've already dedicated some discussion to the relationship between hope and certainty, and am personally satisfied with Bovens' justifications for this point (for now at least).

Number 3 may cause us some difficulties. Bovens gives the following example of such expenditure of mental energy or 'mental imaging': "I had been looking at my clock wondering whether Sophie would still come, I had been turning my head earlier to check whether Sophie was amongst some newly arrived guests" But the turn of phrase, 'mental imaging', suggests very much that what's important here is not the behaviour but the mental processes involved.

Would it be possible to remove this reference to 'mental imaging' and instead speak of characteristic 'hope behaviour'? Could we make sense of hope without reference to an inner life?

Why do I find the reference here to 'inner life' as such a little problematic? Personally I have a little trouble with any concept we can't bring back to the way people act and the things people say. I've some sympathy with Wittgenstein's dictim (or at least, my interpretation of Wittgenstein's dictim) 'The human body is the best picture of the human soul' - the body, in its widest sense, should be our reference for a person's emotions and dispositions, and by this we are not denying the possibility of 'inner life' - it's just not so important. (3)

But that's not the main problem in this context - it's a question of whether we could test if a dog is engaged in mental imaging in this way. The main way we'd verify this with people is by asking them. People can be mistaken, but if we cannot bring a person to admit they were hoping, it seems very difficult for us to claim that they were (assuming that they are not trying to deceive us, and are not deceiving themselves)

Perhaps we could build up a sufficient body of behaviourial evidence to establish someone is hoping for something. In fact, I feel we probably could. But in the case of a dog, would we be actually be establishing this, or would we be engaged in anthropomorphism?

My next post in this series will attempt to tackle this head on - once I've done a little more reading...

(1) in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 59, No. 3, (Sep., 1999), pp. 667-681.
(2) ibid. pp.673-4
(3) Though possibly it might be the case that the words 'inner life' actually refer to a certain position in a complex web of human language and behaviour. I won't pursue this until I've had chance to consider what this might actually mean!