This paper introduces Integral Motivation Theory (IMT) as a cross-domain theoretical framework that proposes three primitives, Value, Motivation and Purpose (the VMP triad), as irreducible, integrative constituents of human experience and cultural formation.
IMT is not a grand theory of everything, nor a prescriptive account of which values, motivations or purposes are correct. It is a metatheory: a second-order framework concerned with the conditions under which any particular configuration of value, motivation and purpose becomes culturally operative, individually inhabited and collectively reproduced. Its ambition is diagnostic and generative rather than totalising.
