Motivational inconsistency theory

The fundamental axiom in Ainslie s theory is motivational inconsistency and ambivalence, and the theory describes the strategies people may use to handle the resulting problems. The theory therefore allows for more complex interactions between conflicting motives within the person than do the conventional utility calculus that Becker and Murphy apply. However, as opposed to Becker and Murphy, Ainslie does not base his addiction theory on any explicit assumptions about the properties of potentially addictive substances. The phenomena Ainslie describes in his addiction theory are quite general and not restricted to the addictions. Since potentially addictive substances clearly do have specific properties that other substances do not have, it would be of interest to apply Ainslie s scheme to a consumption good with such properties. 

The main difference between Becker and Murphy s standard rational choice theory and Ainslie s picoeconomic theory is dynamic consistency versus inconsistency. The congenital inconsistency that forms the starting in Ainslie s theory allows Ainsliean addicts to struggle to get out of their addiction, and relapse may be explained within the Ainsliean framework by erosion of personal rules and willpower. Hence, an addiction theory based on Ainslie s theory of motivation can handle the phenomena that are left unexplained by Becker and Murphy s theory of addiction. 

These prior works offered new motivation to several authors, whose purpose was to obtain adequate theories that would be able to match, at last, with simulation results. Huge efforts were made in this direction. Thus, in order to overcome the problem of thermodynamic consistency (or inconsistency), some attempts consisted in performing judicious interpolations between already existing nonconsistent IETs, while others were devoted to improve these last by introducing parameters to render them consistent [37]. This finding is the subject of what follows. 

A key motivation for these alternatives is that the project of reduction fails because of a fundamental incompatibility - or logical inconsistency - between the theories of chemistry and the theories of physics, which cannot be overcome even by a liberal reading of the Magellan reduction postulates. 

In this section, I will focus on an example from the chemistry the theory of absolute chemical reaction rates. This theory is a typical chemical theory in the sense that it draws on many tmderlying theories to synthesise a new theory. Another motivation is that it can be argued that many of the current problems that plague current philosophers of chemistry - such as the problem of molecular structure and the problem of inconsistent use of quantum theoretical notions - were introduced to accommodate this theory. A brief overview and philosophical evaluation of the theory was given in Hettema (2012b), which I refer to for some of the details. 

Especially illustrative for this is the motivation Eyring (1938) gave for his introduction of various semi-empirical methods in quantum chemistry, which lead to various inconsistencies between these semi-empirical theories and quantum theory. 

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