A Puzzle About Desire

Abstract

The following four assumptions plausibly describe the ideal rational agent. (1) She knows what her beliefs are. (2) She desires to believe only truths. (3) Whenever she desires that P ? Q and knows that P, she desires that Q. (4) She does not both desire that P and desire that *P, for any P. Although the assumptions are plausible, they have an implausible consequence. They imply that the ideal rational agent does not believe and desire contradictory propositions. She neither desires the world to be any different than she thinks it is, nor thinks it is any different than she desires it to be. The problem of preserving our intuitions about desire, without embracing the implausible conclusion, is what I call ''the Wishful Thinking Puzzle.'' In this paper, I examine how this puzzle arises, and I argue that it is surprisingly difficult to solve. Even the decision theoretic conception of desire is not immune to the puzzle. One approach, the contrastive conception of desire, does avoid the puzzle without being ad hoc, but it remains too inchoate to win our full confidence.

Reasoning AboutWant

“…On these accounts, when A wants P, it implies that A prioritizes those possible worlds in which P holds as more desirable to those in which P does not. Another approach uses a decisiontheoretic semantics that bases the meaning of desire on both the desirability and probability of the considered alternatives: hence, A wants P means that A's desire for P exceeds some threshold (e.g., Jerzak, 2019;Lassiter, 2011Lassiter, , 2011aLevinson, 2003;Phillips-Brown, 2021;van Rooij, 1999;Wrenn, 2010; we address these approaches in the General discussion). Both accounts, however, treat desires as fundamentally belief-oriented (see the Introduction).…”

Deflationism, truth, and desire

“…My point in this paper is that even if these infinite analyses are correct, there are other cases that deflationists cannot handle adequately.4 I presume, followingSchroeder (2004), that desires have propositional content. I also presume this to be a fairly orthodox view, though it is not universal (Wrenn (2010),. for instance, construes the contents of desires as sets of preferences.)…”

(Counter)factual Want Ascriptions and Conditional Belief

“…Levinson 2003;Lassiter 2011; Phillips-Brown fc) face more or less this same problem. Wrenn (2010) proposes a solution that bears a certain resemblance to our own, although he confines his view to cases of all-things-considered desire (as opposed to 'some-things-considered' desire, in the sense of Phillips-Brown ms). Our approach, by contrast, is designed to be compatible with some-thingsconsidered desire, either by bringing in multiple preference rankings (à la Levinson 2003;Crnič 2011), or by replacing possible worlds with something coarser (see section 7).…”