The Nature of Desire. New York: Oxford University Press (original) (raw)
Related papers
Some Semantic and Cognitive Aspects of Desire
Desire is investigated in relation to concepts such as need, will, and value, and it is argued that these are essentially species of desire. The relationship between desire and reason, the concept of negative desire (the desire that some state or event not come about) and are also examined, and the possibility of a desire-based ethics is briefly examined.
Introduction: Reconsidering some Dogmas about Desires
Desire has not been at the center of recent preoccupations in the philosophy of mind. Consequently, the literature settled into several dogmas. The first part of this introduction presents these dogmas and invites readers to scrutinize them. The main dogma is that desires are motivational states. This approach contrasts with the other dominant conception: desires are positive evaluations. But there are at least four other dogmas: the world should conform to our desires (world-to-mind direction of fit), desires involve a positive evaluation (the “guise of the good”), we cannot desire what we think is actual (the “death of desire” principle), and, in neuroscience, the idea that the reward system is the key to understanding desire. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contributions to this volume. The hope is to contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on this neglected, albeit crucial, aspect of the mind.
Naturalizing the Content of Desire
Philosophical Studies, 2018
Desires, or directive representations, are central components of human and animal minds. Nevertheless, desires are largely neglected in current debates about the naturalization of representational content. Most naturalists seem to assume that some version of the standard teleological approach, which identifies the content of a desire with a specific kind of effect that the desire has the function of producing, will turn out to be correct. In this paper I argue, first, that this common assumption is unjustified, since the standard approach is in fact deeply problematic. Secondly, I propose an alternative account of the content of (basic) desires which, while generating plausible and determinate content ascriptions, avoids the main problem that plagues the standard approach, and is also preferable on other grounds.
Reconsidering Some Dogmas about Desires
Desire has not been at the center of recent preoccupations in the philosophy of mind. Consequently, the literature settled into several dogmas. The first part of this introduction presents these dogmas and invites readers to scrutinize them. The main dogma is that desires are motivational states. This approach contrasts with the other dominant conception: desires are positive evaluations. But there are at least four other dogmas: the world should conform to our desires (world-to-mind direction of fit), desires involve a positive evaluation (the “guise of the good”), we cannot desire what we think is actual (the “death of desire” principle), and, in neuroscience, the idea that the reward system is the key to understanding desire. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contributions to this volume. The hope is to contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on this neglected, albeit crucial, aspect of the mind.
Reason and Desire: The Case of Affective Desires
European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2010
The paper begins with an objection to the Desire-Based Reasons Model. The argument from reason-based desires holds that since desires are based on reasons (first premise), which they transmit but to which they cannot add (second premise), they cannot themselves provide reasons for action. In the paper I investigate an attack that has recently been launched against the first premise of this argument by Ruth Chang. Chang invokes a counterexample: affective desires. The aim of the paper is to see if there is a way to accommodate the counterexample to the first premise. I investigate three strategies. I first deal with the idea that the motivation for the premise may be the thesis that an action is intentional if and only if it is done under the guise of perceived reasons. This offers us a way of defending the premise: by showing that actions prompted by affective desires are not intentional. I, however, argue that this strategy is unworkable. This brings me to the second strategy. Here I consider the idea that the premise does not require a conscious normative thought on the part of the agent; in fact, it may not require any such thought, conscious or unconscious. I claim that this strategy too is a failure. Finally, the third approach builds normative judgment in the desire. This is the approach that I think works; in particular, recent work by Jennifer Hawkins may help us accommodate affective desires. The challenge of affective desires, I conclude, can be tackled.
2009
In philosophy of mind, desire is an also-ran when it comes to theorizing about mental states- all the attention is on belief, (visual) perceptual experience, and pain. Desire is largely ignored, as it is assumed to be similar enough to belief that one can simply focus on belief, in forming theories of belief and desire. Here I address two areas where I see this assumption as a particular problem. One is in the metaphysics of desire. It has not been recognized that we might have conflicting behavioral dispositions because of an over-focus on mental states that are usually held together coherently: beliefs. Desires, unlike beliefs, are often held together although they conflict; I can both want to have coffee because I love the taste, and also want to refrain because I want to sleep. I argue in chapter 1, for reasons independent of philosophy of mind, that an object can have conflicting dispositions. I then apply this in chapter 2 to argue that having conflicting desires involves having conflicting behavioral dispositions. It is also usually assumed that the first-personal epistemology of belief and desire will be roughly the same. Given this, there have been attempts to extend a promising account of introspection for belief to desire, and I address this in chapter 3. On this account, we know our beliefs by looking out towards the belief's content, without turning inwards to our own mind. I know I believe there is coffee in the cupboard by thinking about the cupboard, and concluding that there is coffee inside. Those who have extended this to desire claim that to know whether I want something, I look out to the world, fixing my attention on the potential object of desire, and ignoring my own mind. I think that although we must of course attend in thought to the object of desire, we also keep one eye on ourselves. The epistemology of desire is unlike that of belief in that we must measure how we feel - to know what we want, our attention is be split between our own minds and the world.
In Thought in a Hostile World (2003) Kim Sterelny develops an idealised natural history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that under certain selection pressures belief-like states are a natural elaboration of simpler control systems which he calls detection systems, and which map directly from environmental cue to response. Belief-like states are distinguished by the properties of robust tracking (being occasioned by a wider range of environmental states, including distal ones), and response breadth (being able to feature in the triggering of a wider range of behaviours). A key driver, according to Sterelny, of the development of robust tracking and response-breadth, and hence belief-like states, are properties of the informational environment. A transparent environment is one where the functional relevance to an organism of states of the world is directly detectable. In a translucent or opaque environment, on the other hand, states significant to an organism map in less direct or simple ways onto states that the organism can detect. A hostile environment, finally, is one where the specific explanation of translucency or opacity is the design and behaviour of competing organisms. Where the costs of implementing belief-like states pay their way in more discriminating behaviour allocation under conditions of opacity and hostility, Sterelny argues, selection can favour the development of decoupled representations of the environment. In the case of desires, however, Sterelny maintains that the same arguments do not generalise. One justification that he offers for this view reasons that unlike the external environment, the internal processes of an organism are under significant selection pressure for transparency. Parts of a single organism, having coinciding interests, have nothing to gain from deceiving one another, and much to gain from accurate signalling of their states and needs. Key conditions favouring the development of belief-like states are therefore absent in the case of desires. Here I argue that Sterelny’s reasons for saying that his treatment of belief doesn’t generalise to motivation (desires, or preferences) are insufficient. There are limits to the transparency that internal environments can achieve. Even if there were not, tracking the motivational salience of external states calls for pervasive attention to valuation in any system in which selection has driven the production of belief-like states.