Hope

Even though, philosophy has traditionally not paid same attention to hope as it did for attitudes like belief and desire, but still there are various discussions of hope that can be found throughout the history of philosophy. Almost all philosophers acknowledge that hope plays a significant role in human motivation.

When we compare hope with attitudes like belief and desire, this phenomenon of hope presents unique challenges to both theories of the mind and theories of value.

Hope is not only an attitude; it has cognitive components as well- as it is responsive to facts about possibility of future events. It also has conative components- hope is merely a representation of our desires.

The classic analysis of hope, which is called ‘standard account’ takes hope to be a compound attitude- a mixture of desires of an outcome and a belief in the possibility of that outcome. But it is not necessary that if we desire for an outcome and belief for its occurrence, then it is a hope. It should be driven by consistent and dedicated efforts and backed by positive desire and positive belief, and then only it will be a hope with high probability of occurrence.

We use this word “HOPE” whenever or wherever we want, but it has deep in-sighted meaning.