Valuing Names and Learning to Care

I intended to put these ideas in a post called "Living in Your Name" (which I might finish writing someday for all you know!), but they stand alone pretty well, so I'm posting early.

I. Valuing names 

Consider a type of impression management, where you select your conduct with regard to descriptions and designations that people might plausibly apply to that conduct. This might be termed "acting with regard to names-in-general."

You might concern yourself determining the applicability of conduct labels because:

1. Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are fairly terminal, ex. you want to hear compliments, or you want others to think well of you (perhaps even if their beliefs are mistaken). If you had no other terminal preferences but these, it would perhaps be desirable to intervene directly on (to force the value of) your beliefs, or others' speech, or others' beliefs about your conduct, at any given time.
2. Evidential-Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are based on the evidence they give about your conduct, about which you have relatively terminal preferences. If you had no other terminal preferences in this case, hearing a person apply some preferred label to your conduct would generally be good news, but you would be indifferent about it if you learned that the person was uninformed/misinformed about your conduct, or that they were being dishonest, or even if you realized that you'd already accounted for their information about your conduct by conditioning on other indicators. Likewise you would be indifferent about label application if you were certain about the character of your conduct. Unless you (the rhetorical subject, momentarily assumed to have evidential preferences over label applications) also had terminal preferences over label applications, you would probably be indifferent to making, or would want not to make, a direct intervention on others' speech or on your beliefs in regard to labels, unless you had good reason to believe that doing so would improve your conduct, or unless you were sure that your conduct would not suffer but that you could receive some other gain.
3. Evidential-Instrumental-Terminal: Here again, the contours of your preferences over applied labels come from how those labels inform/constrain your beliefs about the desirable character of your conduct, but then those desirabilities in turn are derived from how you expect your conduct to achieve terminally desirable conditions (which, in full generality, might include preferences over your conduct beliefs, others' beliefs about you, your actual conduct, et cetera ad infinitum). Psychologically, many of our more-terminal-seeming preferences seem not to make reference to manners of conduct, and instead focus on ....momentary, local material conditions of individual experience? Those words aren't quite right, but some kind of temporal independence gets close to the issue. I dunno. Here's a dumb example of a solely instrumental preference over conduct: you want to be good at chess because you're playing Death for your soul, but external conditions held equal, you don't care about your chess competence, and absent the causal contingencies which make the manner of conduct useful, you wouldn't trade desirable external conditions for greater chess competence.

I don't know if these are exhaustive in any interesting sense, but it seems like the terminal / instrumental value distinction is commonly established, while (non-instrumental) evidential preference is somewhat neglected in rationality rhetoric, while being of comparable status. Perhaps notably, I'm missing Instrumental-Terminal and Instrumental-Instrumental-Terminal categories, where learning that a conduct label reasonably applies to you helps you to perform more effectively, according to the standards associated with the conduct label (I hope to extensively detail ways that this happens in the full post on Living in Your Name). And then, of course there's {evidential preference over conduct label applications derived from evidential preferences over actual conduct derived from terminal preferences over outcomes}, whose behavioural incidents should be obvious.

Learning to care:

Preferences are often not easily categorized into just one of these three templates, especially not in the presence of stable causal contingencies. For example, if an indicator (like a person's verbal judgement) is reliably informative about something that you care about (your conduct), then, as you become accustomed to that contingency, you may find yourself caring about the indicator value even when it's not informative about the value of the indicated thing. Likewise, if good chess performance reliably protects your soul (or is exhilarating, or trains your rationality, or whatever), then the desire to be (more) competent at chess at any moment will start to feel more terminal, and perhaps it does in fact become a more terminal preference. If so, then the establishment and extinction of stable causal contingencies is a potent source of value drift in humans, but in a totally uninteresting way.

Edit: If phenomena like the endowment effect and sour grapes are not merely instrumental or performative - if we learn through habit of motivated focus to more strongly and terminally prefer those world conditions (outcomes, experiences, stable attributes of moral character, ...) that reliably hold, and to more strongly and terminally dislike conditions that we reliably can not easily achieve - that suggests there are a few more kinds of adaptive preference formation worth including in a rich classification of issues that prevent a clean factoring of preferences over applicability of conduct labels according to paths of derivation from stable terminal preferences. Maybe? Hmm.