Published in Education for Development, vol. 6, No. 1, April 1980, pp. 18-25
Teachers are frequently enjoined to cater for the needs of the children in their charge; bureaucrats planning the school system propose to cater for the needs of 'society'. Ordinary people in a variety of circumstances are asked, or themselves demand, that needs be taken into account. Despite the prevalence of talk about needs, and its occurrence in some influential theorising in psychology (Maslow, 1970), geography (Harvey, 1973), and elsewhere, there is still little clarity about the concept, although in the comparatively untrodden paths of philosophical enquiry there has recently been an advance towards consensus (White, 1975, ch. 8; Woods and Barrow, 1975, pp. 117-22). I intend here to offer an outline of the structure of thought about needs, relating it to some earlier and misleading pronouncements in educationally relevant areas, and conclude by drawing a moral for the pursuit of philosophical analysis in the education of teachers.
It has been said that error in philosophy is often due to an over-restricted diet of examples. I think that a similar blinkering of one's mental vision is responsible for the variability of much non-philosophical theorising about needs: discussions concerned, say, with questions of social justice concentrate on needs related to subsistence about a poverty line, or focusing on fundamental motivating forces suppose needs to be what is necessary for biological survival or psychic balance. People may need sex or a minimum wage, but at this moment I also need a contrivance for joining two pieces of electric wire, my car needs its timing adjusted, water needs to be raised to 202oF at Denver to boil, and I hazard the guess that a small baby needs at least four hours roasting in a medium oven to be well cooked. One way to avoid these heterogeneous needs, if you are committed to 'needs' being of a very limited kind, is to declare your 'needs' theoretical items and so exempt from the changes and chances of ordinary needs, but I shall try to show that such a move is quite unnecessary when the logical structure of needs is understood, while this understanding helps to explain the attractiveness of making the kinds of limitation I have alluded to.
The fundamental logical point about talk about needs is that it is very often elliptical, that is to say, something vital to the complete statement is omitted. This may be obvious by reflection on the few examples I have already offered - water needs a certain temperature to boil at different altitudes - and it may be obvious that objectives must be understood in a similar way in the other cases before the claims can be evaluated for truth or falsehood: I need a wire connector to rig up a light at a long distance from the socket, but not to cook the dinner. A rough test for uncovering ellipsis is to ask 'can we evaluate this statement for truth or falsehood as it stands?' If further evidence is required we can look at cases where we might agree that two statements which seem to contradict each other may yet be true. Thus Mary may claim 'I need a new dress', and John respond, 'No, you don't.' Reflecting on Mary's lack of the latest fashion, we may agree with her; reflecting on her overflowing wardrobe, we may agree with John. But two contradictory statements cannot both be true, so we have to conclude that they are not really contradictory, which is as much as to say, that more is being stated than gets explicit mention, that the grammatical structure of the sentences used conceals part of their vital logical structure. And the full forms are not hard to find: Mary needs a new dress to keep up with fashion, but she does not need a new dress to be respectable. So we can plausibly claim that all statements about needs have the following logical structure: a person, group, thing (A) needs something (X) in order to be or achieve something (Y); briefly, A needs X for/to Y. And it is the last part, the mention of Y, that tends to get left out.
What does such a statement state? Very roughly, but with sufficient accuracy for my present purposes1, if A needs X for/to Y then X is necessary in the circumstances for Y. To keep up wit fashion, Mary must have a new dress; to boil water in Denver, you have got to raise it to 202oF. Note that the reference here to what is necessary in the circumstances indicates another ellipsis in most talk about needs - I need to sell my labour-power to live, the world being as it is, but in some imaginable social orders I would not need to, indeed with a fairy-godmother I would not have to in this - but it is usually agreed among speakers what the relevant circumstances are, so this ellipsis does not produce so much confusion as the one I have first mentioned. Leaving aside this usually elliptical reference to the field in which questions of necessity are being raised, the important point to grasp is that these are as straightforwardly factual questions as can be found. Allowing for the range of tastes in roast meat, it is a simple factal question how long a piece of meat, be it baby human or baby pig, takes to get well cooked; similarly granted criteria for respectability, it is a factual matter whether John's claim is true.
While some (e.g. White, 1975, ch. 8) have correctly seen the objective, factual nature of claims about needs, others (e.g. Dearden, 1968, pp. 14-18) have stressed evaluative aspects of such claims. But it is wrong to characterise the statement that A needs X for Y as itself an evaluation, as Dearden does in saying that 'teachers need an increase of three hundred pounds only if it is a good thing to have one's salary so advanced'. The statement about this need is a purely factual statement; teachers may have needed a mere £300 to achieve parity wit some other ill-paid group whether or not anyone thinks or thought such parity worth while. It is simply false that we have to decide whether the end, the Y, is good, bad, or indifferent. But the making of a statement about needs may, however, embody an evaluation, in as much as the speaker takes for granted that Y is worth pursuing. And it is only if we suppose that the speaker makes such a presumption that we can understand the point of his making the statement, especially when reference to the Y in question is elided. For if we were free to range over all possible Ys, practically any statement that A needs X, however extravagant or odd, could be construed as uncontroversially and non-tautologically true; but this is not how we understand such statements. Rather we suppose that a limited range of arguably worthwhile Ys are in question, with respect to which it may be an open question whether X is needed or not. In such a context, if we do agree on the worthwhileness of the Y, then if it is true that A needs X then we have a prima facie reason to do something to ensure that A has X. But these evaluations and their consequences for action are not in the needs-statements themselves; they are in the surrounding context, and we can quite properly discuss needs in other, non-evaluative contexts - I was not earlier endorsing any modest proposals in talking of what babies need to be roasted, nor do we need any evaluations about boiling water to agree on its behaviour in Denver.
While talk about needs is then not itself evaluative, the practical importance of my focus on its elliptical nature concerns the evaluations that we have seen are often floating about in the surrounding context. For these evaluations regard the Ys, and it is the Y slot that is often left unfilled, so these evaluations can be insinuated in debate and left unchallenged the more easily given the normal conversational usage in needs-statements, in virtue of the grammar of 'need'. Evaluations hidden in this way can acquire a spurious authority since what is explicitly mentioned is presented as, and is in fact, objectively true (or false, though one then hopes challenge will be easier). The grammar of 'need' connives with our pervasive wish to pass the buck of our valuing onto the nature of things. Without existentialist histrionics, but with a little logical analysis, we have uncovered one of the mechanisms used by that 'bad faith' that won't face its own valuing; and we have also illustrated the thesis that the distinction between facts and values is not something we are presented with but is rather the fruit of analysis (cf. Mackie, 1977, p. 73).
A different threat to rational choice that flows from the same tendency to ellipsis is that it is easy to forget the specificity and relativity of needs - A needs X1 for Y1, X2 for Y2, X3 for Y3, etc. - since when these specific ends are dropped and we are merely told that A needs X1 and X2, say, it is, I suggest, easy to assume that these two specified needs are exhaustive and absolute, that if we take care of X1 and X2 there is nothing else to worry about; whereas in fact we would only have provided for two specific but unspecified ends, Y1 and Y2. I would suggest that a lot of the debate about 'our' need for technologists exemplifies this point.
While it ought to be clear from the few examples I have used so far that what A needs and what A wants (supposing now that we are only considering cases where A can sensibly be said to want things) need have no important logical connections - I need to licence my car but I don't want to, and I want endless supplies of Ch. Lafite though I wouldn't hope to convince anyone that I need them - I should offer some explanation for the widespread tendency to tie them together. I have said that A's needs are what are necessary for various Ys, what A must have to have Y. Now if we concentrate on Ys which A considers vital to him, he will probably consider those Xs necessary for them as particularly important needs, and can understandably reserve the term 'need' for them, in contrast to other things he wants, and may want for further ends, but which he regards as dispensable. Certain needs, because of their special status, tend to appropriate the phrase 'need' since this points in the objective direction, in contrast to other things which may be equally needed, but being less vital can be left as subjective claims, 'wants'. This explanation of the apparent restrictions on acceptable fillers of the X slot appeals again to our desire to have objective backing, something 'out there', for our important evaluations. Tastes in music we may allow to be as diverse as tasters, but freedom from starvation isn't just something I want, it is something I need. But my healthy survival is no more required by the nature of things than a preference for Bach; fundamental and universally shared evaluations are no less evaluations for all that.
The opposite tendency, an overinflation of needs, also occurs through a tendency to label items that belong not in the X slot but rather in the Y slot as needs. Thus Maslow (1970, ch. 4) talks of food and shelter as needs, but caps his hierarchy of needs with needs for understanding and knowledge, and even for Bach. While I might need to understand Gödel's theorems to pass an exam, Maslow is not thinking here of understanding or knowledge as means, but of the fact that some people delight in some knowledge for its own sake. To do this, there are no doubt various things that are necessary, that a man needs in order to pursue disinterested enquiry, but there seems no reason to speak of knowledge itself as one of his needs. (Of course, one could always fabricate an emasculated, tautologous Y for such cases, try 'self-fulfilment' or Maslow's 'self-actualization' for size, but I am concerned with informative and non-extravagant claims about needs.) Maslow may just have been confused - since a need is vital for something, he may have thought that what a person thinks vital is a need - or indulging the unfortunate tendency among psychologists to mistranslate people's wants into needs (cf. Murray, 1938, pp. 123-9), but there seems also to have been the idea that unsatisfied wants sometimes lead to mental illness, so that these wants can appropriate the 'need' terminology in the way suggested in the previous paragraph. Once we know what is to count as mental illness, it is an empirical question whether failure to cater for a person's desire to pursue chemistry or listen to Bach leads to it, though one may register a certain scepticism about the claim. Further one may suggest that it seems unlikely that the pursuit of knowledge and so on will prove to be specific needs of a healthy mind in the way in which different vitamins can be shown to be necessary for a healthy body; rather it may be that the frustration of a person's major projects, whatever they are, may cause him to evince symptoms of mental illness - the fact that some people have the pursuit of some knowledge as a vital project need tell us nothing about people in general.
I have shown that needs and wants are quite unrelated logically. For the sake of completeness it should perhaps be mentioned that there is equally no logical connection between needs and lacks. We need oxygen to breathe, and thankfully pollution has not yet gone so far that we lack it. Nor does the fact that I lack a private income give us any reason to agree that I need one (though, as I have said, if we are allowed to import any Y, a true need-statement can be concocted out of most true statements that A lacks X). But given what I have said, it is clear why people should mistakenly suppose a logical connection here, since firstly in many cases where A needs X, A does not have X, and secondly when the context is focused on action there is usually not much point in talking about those things A needs that he already has, unless our intention is to deprive him of them. So since people have often concentrated so much on these cases that they have built the evaluative force of the context into the meaning of 'need', they are likely to build in also the lack of what is needed.
I have taken my title from a magnificent speech in which Lear attacks the meanness of much of the evaluative thinking taking refuge behind invocations of need. My own point is a smaller one, but still, I think, important. It is that needs do not guide action nor motivate people, rather it is the choice of certain aims that guides action, the desiring of certain objectives that motivates; but the grammar of 'need' makes it easy for these evaluations to be concealed. What is usually contentious in talk about needs is not the needs (though, of course, these factual claims should be examined on their merits) but the ends for which they are needed. The grammar of 'need' is structured to put off this debate, and to perpetuate the 'bad faith' that choices can be read off from the nature of things.
To conclude, I wish to add a footnote to the wide-ranging debate about the place of analytical philosophy of education in the education of teachers. While I cannot now take up the whole question of the rightful place of analytical philosophy and the contribution, if any, it can make to education or life in general (for which there are now some cogent positive, if rather heterodox, suggestions in Mackie (1973, ch. 1) and graham (1977, ch. 2)) the point I wish to make is that within the philosophy of education analysis seems to have concentrated on what might be called the breaking up of concepts (of which the notorious paradigm is a bachelor being an unmarried man) without much notice of the equally important job of unearthing what Mackie has called the 'logical cues' governing the uses of expressions, the underlying logical structures and transformations that govern our grasp of the meaning, truth-conditions, and patterns of inference involving these expressions. For instance, the underlying structure of the statement that Furry Barrel is a large cat, which makes us see that this claim together with the equally true claim that all cats are animals does not entail that Furry Barrel is a large animal. I have tried to offer a very simple example of such analysis by showing two respects in which much talk of needs is elliptical, and I have suggested why it is important to appreciate the effects of one of those ellipses. I have not, of course, told you what people or children or 'society' need, but I have, I hope, indicated precisely where in discussions of these questions the vital moves are being made, often under cover. Since it seems to me that many cases of contention and generally unprofitable discussion, for instance, equality, liberty, responsibility, involve equally elliptical uses of language, I would suggest that closer attention to this aspect of philosophical analysis, a firmer grasp of some of the tools currently provided by philosophical logic, might go some way to clarifying issues generally agreed to be important. This is certainly not to leave things as they were (cf. Freeman, 1975), though it does not itself provide the substantive answers to the problems discussed; but it is not per impossibile totally neutral (cf. Colbeck, 1976) for impartiality in logical analysis is opposed to the interests of whoever benefits from the perpetuation of current confusion.
Footnote:
1 One possibly important oversimplification is that I talk of what is necessary in the circumstances. But a need may not in fact be necessary, but only what Mackie has dubbed an inus condition of its Y in the circumstances, that is an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition of Y. Thus one way Mary can keep up with fashion is to have a new dress, but there might be alternative ways of fulfilling this aim - dyeing her hair phosphorescent green and flaunting an old dress might do as well. I need a match to light a fire, although a flame-thrower would do instead, and a match in the absence of oxygen would be of no use. (Return to text.)
REFERENCES
COLBECK, J.E. (1976). The vulgar component in philosophy. Education for Teaching, 99, Spring, 22-7.
DEARDEN, R.F. (1968). The Philosophy of Primary Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
FREEMAN, H. (1975). On the nature of philosophy of education and its practice in colleges and departments of education. Education for Teaching, 98, Autumn, 37-48.
GRAHAM. K. (1977). J.L. Austin: A Critique of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Hassocks: Harvester Press.
HARVEY, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold.
MACKIE, J.L. (1973). Truth, Probability and Paradox. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
MACKIE, J.L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
MASLOW, A.H. (1970). Motivation and Personality (2nd edn.). London: Harper & Row.
MURRAY, H.A. (Ed.) (1938). Explorations in Personality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
WHITE, A.R. (1975). Modal Thinking. Oxford: Blackwell.
WOODS, R.G. and BARROW, R. St C. (1975). An Introduction to Philosophy of Education. London: Methuen.
HTML prepared December 16th, 1999.
URL: http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/oreasonot.html