A rose expressing hope, at Auschwitz concentration camp
In previous posts (here and here), I’ve been discussing hope, and I’d like to now briefly summarize the standard account of hope among professional philosophers.1 Here’s how the discussion of hope begins in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Hope is not only an attitude that has cognitive components—it is responsive to facts about the possibility and likelihood of future events. It also has a conative component—hopes are different from mere expectations insofar they reflect and draw upon our desires.2
So hope encompasses both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of the mind. The cognitive component assesses possibilities and probabilities, the non-cognitive component has to do with desires.
In the “standard account,” hope consists of both a belief in an outcome’s possibility and a desire for that outcome. Here is the“standard account,” as defined by R. S. Downie:
There are two criteria which are independently necessary and jointly sufficient for ‘hope that’. The first is that the object of hope must be desired by the hoper. […] The second […] is that the object of hope falls within a range of physical possibility which includes the improbable but excludes the certain and the merely logically possible.
Or, as J. P. Day writes, “A hopes that p” is true iff “A wishes that p, and A thinks that p has some degree of probability, however small” is true.
The standard definition of “hoping that,” conforms to my definition of wishful hoping. So nothing about the standard definition gainsays the kind of hope that I advocate.3
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1. My summary borrowed heavily from the entry on hope in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2. Conation is any natural tendency, impulse, striving, or directed effort.[1] To be distinguished from the intellectual and the affective.
3. And here’s a different take, “The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence. “~ Gertrude Stein
Note – This post originally appeared on this blog on March 27, 2017.
I hope this distinction between the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of Hope satisfy others as much as it helped clarify it for me. Thanks!
you’re welcome. JGM
Straightforward.
Is Gertie Stein correct on the role of artists in providing an antidote to emptiness? Perhaps art is no more or less than sheer escapism however necessary. Art is not eternal.
Something else: the deliberate disingenuousness of propagandistic hope. It is inconceivable that highly educated religious and Marxist leaders could, in the year 2021, subscribe to such notions as the Return of Christ or Revolution Proletarian. And how could an educated libertarian think that aging societies are going to limit government?
Such is illustrative of how as things become more complex and complicated, more layers of delusion and obfuscation are retained/added. I can see great hope for the future in a material sense, and in the possibilities of AI and high tech in general. Beyond this is a large question mark.