Abstract
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 of mind, with regards the problem of naturalizing the propositional attitudes, and for metaethics, with regards Michael Smith’s ‘moral problem’. This paper defends a version of Desire-As-Belief, and shows that it is immune to several major objections commonly levelled against such theories.
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Notes
I use [n] to denote the proposition expressed by sentence number n and [...*...] to denote the proposition expressed by the sentence ‘...*...’.
MAX is a normative rule, which, as a descriptive matter of fact, either might or might not be implemented by the practical reasoning system of a given agent.
In the examples that follow I will simplify by supposing that the scalar value is some real number, like 100 (big) or 1000 (extremely big). In reality it is most unlikely the scale used by the human mind allows for the exactitude real numbers permit.
MER2 needs to be modified as per decision theory in order to be able to cope with beliefs held by an agent with varying degrees of credence. I leave this complication aside (as do proponents of MER1).
If an agent believes that \(D(\uppsi \),x) where x is some negative value, then IDENTITY implies that the agent will have a negative desire that \(\uppsi \), or, in other words, a desire that \(\lnot \uppsi \). If an agent has such a negative desire and also believes that by \(\upphi \)-ing she will make it the case that \(\uppsi \), then MER2 will issue in a motivating reason to \(\upphi \) that is of negative strength—i.e., a motivating reason to refrain from \(\upphi \)-ing.
Sinhababu and I agree that some causal powers of desires are essential and others are accidental, but disagree as to which are essential. I hold that the only causal power essential to desire is their (MER2-based) motivational role. Sinhababu holds that both their motivational role and the power of causing hedonically charged feelings are essential (forthcoming, p. 30). This difference is merely terminological. However, my (more liberal) usage of ‘desire’ makes more sense provided the phenomenon one wants to refer to is the entire class of intentional mental states that serve as motivators in means-end rationality, not just the subcategory of this class which also cause hedonic feelings in the ‘right’ way.
Here, ‘pleasures’ and ‘pains’ obviously include not just bodily pleasures and pains but also the positive and negative hedonic valances that tinge many affects and emotions. A more sophisticated version of HTD would allow for temporal discounting.
The precise contents of Homer’s E-belief will depend on how the term of art, ‘valuable’, is to be unpacked. For example, if HTD is true then Homer’s believing that E([I drink beer],100) would amount to his believing, in a disinterested, intellectual, non-MER2-triggering way, that he will experience 100 units of pleasure if he drinks beer.
Perhaps it will be said that my perceptual ‘belief’ that the circles are of different sizes is not a genuine belief at all, and that it is instead merely an unruly perceptual representation with false content. My reply is that a such a ‘representation’ counts as a ‘belief’ for the purposes of this paper. (Given that this representation is fully present to consciousness, has a mind-to-world direction of fit, and is even capable of controlling my muscle movements as I try to grasp a circle, it is hard to deny that it is a ‘belief’ in some perfectly reasonable, if perhaps liberal, sense of this term.)
Gendler (2008a, b) would say that the bungy jumper believes jumping to be safe but alieves it to be dangerous, with ‘alief’ being some sort of poor cousin of belief. However, her definition of ‘alief’ leaves it unclear what differentiates aliefs from beliefs (Sinhababu forthcoming). As I use the term ‘belief’, Gendler’s ‘aliefs’ count as a sub-species of belief. (Perhaps what she means by ‘alief’ matches what I mean by ‘unruly belief’. I’m not sure.)
Like me, Oddie (2005) and Tenenbaum (2007) use optical illusions to help explain how desires can conflict with rationally accredited beliefs about what is good or valuable. But similarities between my position and those of Oddie and Tenenbaum are superficial. They hold that desires are identical to experiences (or perceptions) of value that inform beliefs about value, not to beliefs about value themselves. For Oddie and Tenenbaum optical illusions serve to illustrate, not that unruly belief is possible, but rather that what we might call unruly experience (or ‘unruly perception’) is possible—this being experience that makes things appear to be a way the experiencer knows they are not.
A serious objection to hybrid theories is that they multiply states capable of playing the motivational role beyond necessity (Dancy 1993; McNaughton 1988, p. 130). Neither McDowell nor Shafer-Landau commit wholeheartedly to the hybrid view. Both leave the door open to Desire-As-Belief being correct instead (McDowell 1978, pp. 24–25; Shafer-Landau 2003, p. 134).
DTD might be thought of as a logical descendent of Humberstone’s theory (although I developed DTD and the notion of the D-concept before reading Humberstone’s work). Both Humberstone and I posit a D-concept. We both identify desires with D-beliefs, and both remain officially neutral as regards D’s truth-conditional content. Beyond this, however, the similarities between our theories are slight.
Perhaps Zangwill would respond by insisting that—at least as he conceives of A and B—not only do they both believe with equal strength that taking bribes is ‘bad’, but they also agree as to how bad it is. But the scenario then becomes similar to that of the depressive, and can be dealt with along the same lines. E.g., we may suppose that A and B both believe, with equal certitude, that E([I take bribes],−200). Hence both believe equally strongly that taking bribes is ‘very disvaluable’. But whereas B also believes that D([I take bribes],−200), A instead believes that D([I take bribes],−100). A is therefore less strongly motivated than B to refuse bribes.
I have omitted discussion of Lewis’ (1988, 1996) decision-theoretic objection against Desire-As-Belief theories because, although I think Lewis’ argument is severely flawed, explaining why is an article-length task in its own right. However for recent critiques of Lewis, see Weintraub (2007) and Daskal (2010).
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Tim Bayne, Susan Dimmock, Carolyn Mason, Elijah Millgram, Michael-John Turp, the anonymous reviewers, and especially Neil Sinhababu, for comments and suggestions.
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Campbell, D.I. Doxastic desire and Attitudinal Monism. Synthese 195, 1139–1161 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1255-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1255-1