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Nonbelief and the Desire-As-Belief Thesis

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Abstract

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 (a) and (b) cannot both be true if it is possible for there to exist an agent who has a desire initially, say the desire for the truth of p, and then expands the corpus of propositions she believes to include p. This result provides a new route to the denial of (a).

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Arló-Costa et al. 1995; Collins 1988; Howe 1994; Humberstone 1987; Jackson et al. 1988, Lewis 1996; Price 1989; Velleman 1992.

  2. The Ramsey test is the thesis that an agent believes or accepts the conditional ‘If p then q’ just in case the agent would believe q if his or her beliefs were revised to include p. Authors disagree about whether conditionals belong to the belief sets on which the revision operation is defined.

  3. Note that K′′ need not be an expansion of K or an expansion of K′.

  4. More needs to be said on this last point, but that will have to wait for another occasion. See Levi (1979) and Levi (1988) for a defense of what amounts to a version of the “no proposition at all” view.

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Acknowledgments

For helpful comments I would like to thank Randolph Clarke and Steven Reynolds. For their support of this research I would like to thank the University of Georgia Research Foundation and the University of Georgia Center for Humanities and Arts.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Peabody Hall, University of Georgia, 290 South Jackson Street, Athens, GA, 30606-1627, USA

    Charles B. Cross

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Correspondence to Charles B. Cross.

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Cross, C.B. Nonbelief and the Desire-As-Belief Thesis. Acta Anal 23, 115–124 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0026-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0026-0

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