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  1. Counterfactual desire as belief.J. Robert G. Williams - manuscript
    Bryne & Hajek (1997) argue that Lewis’s (1988; 1996) objections to identifying desire with belief do not go through if our notion of desire is ‘causalized’ (characterized by causal, rather than evidential, decision theory). I argue that versions of the argument go through on certain assumptions about the formulation of decision theory. There is one version of causal decision theory where the original arguments cannot be formulated—the ‘imaging’ formulation that Joyce (1999) advocates. But I argue this formulation is independently objectionable. (...)
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  2. Desires without Guises: Why We Need Not Value What We Want.Sabine Döring & Bahadir Eker - forthcoming - In Julien Deonna & Federico Lauria (eds.), The Nature of Desire. Oxford University Press.
    Evaluativism about desire, the view that desires just are, or necessarily involve, positive evaluations of their objects, currently enjoys widespread popularity in many philosophical circles. This chapter argues that evaluativism, in both of its doxastic and perceptual versions, overstates and mischaracterises the connection between desires and evaluations. Whereas doxastic evaluativism implausibly rules out cases where someone has a desire, despite evaluating its object negatively, being uncertain about its value, or having no doxastic attitude whatsoever towards its evaluative status at all, (...)
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  3. The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism.Allan Hazlett - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.
    Most people have wondered whether anything really matters, some have temporarily thought that nothing really matters, and some philosophers have defended the view that nothing really matters. However, if someone thinks that nothing matters--if they are a "nihilist about value"--then it seems that it is irrational for them to care about anything. It seems that nihilism about value mandates total indifference. This is the "problem of nihilism" Allan Hazlett addresses in The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism. -/- (...)
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  4. Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality, by Alex Gregory. [REVIEW]Michael Milona - forthcoming - Mind:1-8.
    A traditional Humean view about motivation says that only desires motivate action. This theory meshes with the familiar ‘directions of fit’ metaphor: while beli.
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  5. Desire-As-Belief and Evidence Sensitivity.Kael McCormack - 2023 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 38 (2):155-172.
    Alex Gregory (2017a; 2017b; 2018; 2021) provides an ingenious, systematic defence of the view that desires are a species of belief about normative reasons. This view explains how desires make actions rationally intelligible. Its main rival, which is attractive for the same reason, says that desires involve a quasi-perceptual appearance of value. Gregory (2017a; 2018; 2021) has argued that his view provides the superior explanation of how desires are sensitive to evidence. Here, I show that the quasi-perceptual view fairs better (...)
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  6. Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality.Alex Gregory - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire? This book defends “desire-as-belief”, the view that desires are just a special subset of our beliefs: normative beliefs. This view entitles us to accept orthodox models of human motivation and rationality that explain those things with reference to desire, but nonetheless to also make room for our normative beliefs to play a role in those domains. And this view tells us to diverge from the orthodox (...)
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  7. A puzzle for evaluation theories of desire.Alex Grzankowski - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2):90-98.
    How we evaluate things and what we desire are closely connected. In typical cases, the things we desire are things that we evaluate as good or desirable. According to evaluation theories of desire, this connection is a very tight one: desires are evaluations of their objects as good or as desirable. There are two main varieties of this view. According to Doxastic Evaluativism, to desire that p is to believe or judge that p is good. According to Perceptual Evaluativism, to (...)
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  8. Desire and Goodness.Allan Hazlett - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1):160-180.
    Hume argued that passions, unlike judgments of the understanding, cannot be reasonable or unreasonable. Crucial for his argument was the premise that passions cannot be correct or incorrect. As he put it: “[a] passion is an original existence … and contains not any representative quality” and “passions are not susceptible of any … agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact … being original facts and realities, compleat in themselves.” In (...)
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  9. Desire and What It’s Rational to Do.Ashley Shaw - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4):761-775.
    It is often taken for granted that our desires can contribute to what it is rational for us to do. This paper examines an account of desire—the ‘guise of the good’— that promises an explanation of this datum. I argue that extant guise-of-the-good accounts fail to provide an adequate explanation of how a class of desires—basic desires—contributes to practical rationality. I develop an alternative guise-of-the-good account on which basic desires attune us to our reasons for action in virtue of their (...)
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  10. Choice set dependent performance and post-decision dissonance.Toru Suzuki - 2019 - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 163:24-42.
    A decision maker (DM) selects a project from a set of alternatives with uncertain productivity. After the choice, she observes a signal about productivity and decides how much effort to put in. This paper analyzes the optimal decision problem of the DM who rationally filters information to deal with her post-decision cognitive dissonance. It is shown that the optimal effort level for a project can be affected by unchosen projects in her choice set, and the nature of the choice set-dependence (...)
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  11. Doxastic desire and Attitudinal Monism.Douglas I. Campbell - 2018 - Synthese 195 (3):1139-1161.
    How many attitudes must be posited at the level of reductive bedrock in order to reductively explain all the rest? Motivational Humeans hold that at least two attitudes are indispensable, belief and desire. Desire-As-Belief theorists beg to differ. They hold that the belief attitude can do the all the work the desire attitude is supposed to do, because desires are in fact nothing but beliefs of a certain kind. If this is correct it has major implications both for the philosophy (...)
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  12. Why Do Desires Rationalize Actions?Alex Gregory - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.
    I begin the paper by outlining one classic argument for the guise of the good: that we must think that desires represent their objects favourably in order to explain why they can make actions rational (Quinn 1995; Stampe 1987). But what exactly is the conclusion of this argument? Many have recently formulated the guise of the good as the view that desires are akin to perceptual appearances of the good (Oddie 2005; Stampe 1987; Tenenbaum 2007). But I argue that this (...)
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  13. Against Lewis on ‘Desire as Belief’.Douglas Ian Campbell - 2017 - Polish Journal of Philosophy 11 (1):17-28.
    David Lewis describes, then attempts to refute, a simple anti-Humean theory of desire he calls ‘Desire as Belief’. Lewis’ critics generally accept that his argument is sound and focus instead on trying to show that its implications are less severe than appearances suggest. In this paper I argue that Lewis’ argument is unsound. I show that it rests on an essential assumption that can be straightforwardly proven false using ideas and principles to which Lewis is himself committed.
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  14. Are All Normative Judgments Desire-Like?Alex Gregory - 2017 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (1):29-55.
    In this paper I first argue against one attractive formulation of the motivation argument, and against one attractive formulation of noncognitivism. I do so by example: I suggest that other-regarding normative judgments do not seem to have motivational powers and do not seem to be desires. After defending these two claims, I argue that other views can accommodate the motivational role of normative judgment without facing this objection. For example, desire-as-belief theories do so, since such theories only say that some (...)
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  15. How Verbal Reports of Desire May Mislead.Alex Gregory - 2017 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (4):241-249.
    In this paper I highlight two noteworthy features of assertions about our desires, and then highlight two ways in which they can mislead us into drawing unwarranted conclusions about desire. Some of our assertions may indicate that we are sometimes motivated independently of desire, and other assertions may suggest that there are vast divergences between our normative judgements and our desires. But I suggest that some such assertions are, in this respect, potentially misleading, and have in fact misled authors such (...)
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  16. Might Desires Be Beliefs About Normative Reasons?Alex Gregory - 2017 - In Julien Deonna & Federico Lauria (eds.), The Nature of Desire. Oxford University Press. pp. 201-217.
    This paper examines the view that desires are beliefs about normative reasons for action. It describes the view, and briefly sketches three arguments for it. But the focus of the paper is defending the view from objections. The paper argues that the view is consistent with the distinction between the direction of fit of beliefs and desires, that it is consistent with the existence of appetites such as hunger, that it can account for counterexamples that aim to show that beliefs (...)
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  17. Introduction. Reconsidering Some Dogmas About Desire.Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna - 2017 - In Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.), The Nature of Desire. New York: Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  18. Desire, Expectation, and Invariance.Richard Bradley & H. Orii Stefansson - 2016 - Mind 125 (499):691-725.
    The Desire-as-Belief thesis (DAB) states that any rational person desires a proposition exactly to the degree that she believes or expects the proposition to be good. Many people take David Lewis to have shown the thesis to be inconsistent with Bayesian decision theory. However, as we show, Lewis's argument was based on an Invariance condition that itself is inconsistent with the (standard formulation of the) version of Bayesian decision theory that he assumed in his arguments against DAB. The aim of (...)
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  19. General Dynamic Triviality Theorems.Jeffrey Sanford Russell & John Hawthorne - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (3):307-339.
    Famous results by David Lewis show that plausible-sounding constraints on the probabilities of conditionals or evaluative claims lead to unacceptable results, by standard probabilistic reasoning. Existing presentations of these results rely on stronger assumptions than they really need. When we strip these arguments down to a minimal core, we can see both how certain replies miss the mark, and also how to devise parallel arguments for other domains, including epistemic “might,” probability claims, claims about comparative value, and so on. A (...)
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  20. abuse to human greed and its impulse else-the two legends ...Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri - 2015
    "My boat was moored beside an old bathing 'ghat' of the river, almost in ruins. The sun had set,"...https://youtu.be/VAhd2GNf1js. (http://philpapers.org/profile/112741).
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  21. A triviality result for the “Desire by Necessity” thesis.Ittay Nissan-Rozen - 2015 - Synthese 192 (8):2535-2556.
    A triviality result for what Lewis called “the Desire by Necessity Thesis” and Broome : 265–267, 1991) called “the Desire as Expectation Thesis” is presented. The result shows that this thesis and three other reasonable conditions can be jointly satisfied only in trivial cases. Some meta-ethical implications of the result are discussed. The discussion also highlights several issues regarding Lewis ’ original triviality result for “the Desire as Belief Thesis” that have not been properly understood in the literature.
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  22. The Guise of the Good.Francesco Orsi - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (10):714-724.
    According to the doctrine of the guise of the good, all that is desired is seen by the subject as good to some extent. As a claim about action, the idea is that intentional action, or acting for a reason, is action that is seen as good by the agent. I explore the thesis' main attractions: it provides an account of intentional behavior as something that makes sense to the agent, it paves the way for various views in meta-ethics and (...)
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  23. The - Generation Will One Day Understand: The English language : 'I am' but 'I do' speak English!Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri - 2015
    [ https://plus.google.com/108060242686103906748/posts/cwvdB6mK3J6 ]"As Literature germinates within me, my words are-“Literature is something, that I need to be acclaimed for, I need to know more...it’s my life that has given me birth, my way of thoughts that I am visualizing in the perspective of all dimensions, my frailties, my faults...my every comprehensive discussion even after my death, my spiritualism, my haunting towards the ecology of the cosmic world, and the way that I have brought up at my elbows to enhance myself (...)
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  24. What are Theories of Desire Theories of?Tamar Schapiro - 2014 - Analytic Philosophy 55 (2):131-150.
    In this paper I try to undermine complacency with a predominant conception of desire, for the sake of refocusing attention on a philosophical problem. The predominant conception holds that to have a desire is to occupy an evaluative outlook, a perspective from which the agent 'sees' the world in practically salient terms. I argue that it is not clear what this theory is a theory of, because the concept of desire at its center is deeply ambiguous. Understood as a theory (...)
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  25. Desires, beliefs and conditional desirability.H. Orri Stefánsson - 2014 - Synthese 191 (16):4019-4035.
    Does the desirability of a proposition depend on whether it is true? Not according to the Invariance assumption, held by several notable philosophers. The Invariance assumption plays an important role in David Lewis’ famous arguments against the so-called Desire-as-Belief thesis (DAB), an anti-Humean thesis according to which a rational agent desires a proposition exactly to the degree that she believes the proposition to be desirable. But the assumption is of interest independently of Lewis’ arguments, for instance since both Richard Jeffrey (...)
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  26. Jeffrey Conditionalization, the Principal Principle, the Desire as Belief Thesis, and Adams’s Thesis.Ittay Nissan-Rozen - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (4):axs039.
    I show that David Lewis’s principal principle is not preserved under Jeffrey conditionalization. Using this observation, I argue that Lewis’s reason for rejecting the desire as belief thesis and Adams’s thesis applies also to his own principal principle. 1 Introduction2 Adams’s Thesis, the Desire as Belief Thesis, and the Principal Principle3 Jeffrey Conditionalization4 The Principal Principles Not Preserved under Jeffrey Conditionalization5 Inadmissible Experiences.
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  27. That Obscure Object, Desire.Peter Railton - 2012 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 86 (2):22-46.
  28. Absolute value as belief.Steven Daskal - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (2):221 - 229.
    In “Desire as Belief” and “Desire as Belief II,” David Lewis ( 1988 , 1996 ) considers the anti-Humean position that beliefs about the good require corresponding desires, which is his way of understanding the idea that beliefs about the good are capable of motivating behavior. He translates this anti-Humean claim into decision theoretic terms and demonstrates that it leads to absurdity and contradiction. As Ruth Weintraub ( 2007 ) has shown, Lewis’ argument goes awry at the outset. His decision (...)
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  29. Desire-as-Belief Revisited.Richard Bradley & Christian List - 2009 - Analysis 69 (1):31-37.
    On Hume’s account of motivation, beliefs and desires are very different kinds of propositional attitudes. Beliefs are cognitive attitudes, desires emotive ones. An agent’s belief in a proposition captures the weight he or she assigns to this proposition in his or her cognitive representation of the world. An agent’s desire for a proposition captures the degree to which he or she prefers its truth, motivating him or her to act accordingly. Although beliefs and desires are sometimes entangled, they play very (...)
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  30. Nonbelief and the desire-as-belief thesis.Charles B. Cross - 2008 - Acta Analytica 23 (2):115-124.
    I show the incompatibility of two theses: (a) to desire the truth of p amounts to believing a certain proposition about the value of p’s truth; (b) one cannot be said to desire the truth of p if one believes that p is true. Thesis (a), the Desire-As-Belief Thesis, has received much attention since the late 1980s. Thesis (b) is an epistemic variant of Socrates’ remark in the Symposium that one cannot desire what one already has. It turns out that (...)
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  31. Desire as belief, Lewis notwithstanding.Ruth Weintraub - 2007 - Analysis 67 (2):116-122.
    In two curiously neglected papers, David Lewis claims to reduce to absurdity the supposition (commonly labeled DAB) that (some) desires are belief-like. My aim in this paper is to explain the significance of this claim and rebut the proof.
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  32. Desire Beyond Belief.Philip Pettit & Alan Hájek - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):77-92.
    David Lewis [1988; 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the 'Desire-as-Belief Thesis'. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis's. We explore ways of being anti-Humean that evade all these negative results. We begin by providing background on evidential decision theory and on Lewis's negative results. We (...)
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  33. Belief-Desire Coherence.Stephen David Petersen - 2003 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
    Broadly construed, this dissertation addresses a question central to normative epistemology: "what makes for good thinking?" My answer is a computational, internal, pragmatic, coherence epistemology. I call it, somewhat incompletely and inaccurately, "belief-desire coherence". It is designed to draw from progress in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. ;Probably the standard philosophical answer to "what makes for good thinking?" is a variation on "thinking directed toward the truth." I save the bulk of my arguments against this traditional alethic approach for the (...)
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  34. Hume, the BAD Paradox, and Value Realism.Graham Oddie - 2001 - Philo 4 (2):109-122.
    A recent slew of arguments, if sound, would demonstrate that realism about value involves a kind of paradox-I call it the BAD paradox.More precisely, they show that if there are genuine propositions about the good, then one could maintain harmony between one’s desires and one’s beliefs about the good only on pain of violating fundamental principles of decision theory. I show. however, the BAD paradox turns out to be a version of Newcomb’s problem, and that the cognitivist about value can (...)
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  35. Against direction of fit accounts of belief and desire.David Sobel & Copp - 2001 - Analysis 61 (1):44-53.
    The authors argue against direction of fit accounts of the distinction between belief and desire.
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  36. David Hume, David Lewis, and decision theory.Alex Byrne & Alan Hájek - 1997 - Mind 106 (423):411-728.
    David Lewis claims that a simple sort of anti-Humeanism-that the rational agent desires something to the extent he believes it to be good-can be given a decision-theoretic formulation, which Lewis calls 'Desire as Belief' (DAB). Given the (widely held) assumption that Jeffrey conditionalising is a rationally permissible way to change one's mind in the face of new evidence, Lewis proves that DAB leads to absurdity. Thus, according to Lewis, the simple form of anti-Humeanism stands refuted. In this paper we investigate (...)
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  37. Desire as belief II.David K. Lewis - 1996 - Mind 105 (418):303-13.
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  38. Desire-as-Belief Implies Opinionation or Indifference.John Collins - 1995 - Analysis 55 (1):2 - 5.
    Rationalizations of deliberation often make reference to two kinds of mental state, which we call belief and desire. It is worth asking whether these kinds are necessarily distinct, or whether it might be possible to construe desire as belief of a certain sort — belief, say, about what would be good. An expected value theory formalizes our notions of belief and desire, treating each as a matter of degree. In this context the thesis that desire is belief might amount to (...)
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  39. The Belief-Desire Model of Decision Theory Needs a Third Component: Prospective Intentions.J. Nicolas Kaufmann - 1995 - Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 178:215-228.
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  40. Harmony, purity, truth.Graham Oddie - 1994 - Mind 103 (412):451-472.
    David Lewis has argued against the thesis he calls "Desire as Belief", claiming it is incompatible with the fundamentals of evidential decision theory. I show that the argument is unsound, and demonstrate that a version of desire as belief is compatible with a version of causal decision theory.
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  41. Defending desire-as-belief.Huw Price - 1989 - Mind 98 (January):119-27.
  42. Belief, desire, and revision.D. Collins - 1988 - Mind 97 (July):333-42.
  43. Desire as belief.David Lewis - 1988 - Mind 97 (418):323-32.
    Argues for the humean theory of motivation on the grounds that rejecting it requires rejecting decision theory.
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  44. Wanting as believing.I. L. Humberstone - 1987 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (March):49-62.
    An account of desire as a species of belief may owe its appeal to the details of its proposal as to precisely what sort of beliefs desires are to be identified with, and its downfall may be due to those details it does provide. For example, it may be proposed that the desire that α is in fact the belief that it ought to be that α, or is morally good or desirable that it should be the case that α. (...)
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  45. What Is a Belief State?Curtis Brown - 1986 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1):357-378.
    What we believe depends on more than the purely intrinsic facts about us: facts about our environment or context also help determine the contents of our beliefs. 1 This observation has led several writers to hope that beliefs can be divided, as it were, into two components: a "core" that depends only on the individual?s intrinsic properties; and a periphery that depends on the individual?s context, including his or her history, environment, and linguistic community. Thus Jaegwon Kim suggests that "within (...)
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