Motivation resides only in our language, not in our mental processes.

“Motivation” is one of the most popular and important concepts in psychology. But what is motivation actually? To answer the question, in this essay, I argue that motivation does not exist in our mental processes --- rather, motivation is a naïve linguistic expression that loosely represents emergent properties of underlying mental processes. Therefore, there are no definitive features of motivation, and there is no such entity in our mental processes. As an example, I showed that a reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition can sufficiently describe autonomous behaviors often attributed to “need for competence”, without assuming the existence of such motivation. I further argue that the term motivation is so useful to explain behavior that it could often even stop us from thinking deeply about our mental processes, potentially preventing the mechanistic understanding of human mind.