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Wanting as Believing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

I. L. Humberstone
I. L. Humberstone*
Affiliation:
Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia3168
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Extract

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. Here the appeal might be that of forging a link between the holding of a moral belief and the acknowledgment that one has a reason for acting a certain way; and the shortcoming of the suggestion is its evident implausibility: even if the ‘necessity’ direction could be established, having a desire hardly seems sufficient for the holding of any such belief. Again: it might be proposed, perhaps simply to bring some order into the realm of propositional attitudes by reducing some to others, that the belief with which we should identify a’s desire that α is a’s belief that he will or would be happy if α. This proposed identification can be seen to be incorrect by consideration of examples such as the following, due to J. Gosling. An aging and ailing parent might forego numerous pleasures in order that his children should reap the benefits of his saving and have a good start in life – perhaps by receiving an expensive education – after his impending death. Oearly he may want that they should so benefit even if he does not believe in an after-death existence in which he might come to know of, and so take pleasure in, his children’s subsequent well-being. So his wanting that they should prosper cannot consist in his believing that he will be happy if/when they do, since he has no expectation of even being in existence in that eventuality. As Gosling puts it, there is a clear difference (illustrable with far less dramatic examples than this one) between thinking that something’s coming about will bring one pleasure, on the one hand, and viewing the prospect of its coming about with pleasure, on the other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 49 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 A discussion of several philosophers who have taken such a line may be found in Stocker, M. ‘Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology,’ Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), 738–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Pleasure and Desire (Oarendon Press: Oxford 1969). The example appears in chapter 1.

3 Another handy way of reading ‘Dα’ is ‘it would be nice if α,’ but this should not be taken as a conditional prediction of happiness or any other psychological state on the part of the person concerned, for the reasons already given in connection with Gosling's example.

4 See Kenny, A. J. Action, Emotion and Will (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London 1963)Google Scholar, esp. Chapters 10 and 11, and the same author's ‘Practical Inference,’ Analysis 26 (1966), 65-75. Hare's discussion is to be found in his paper ‘Wanting: Some Pitfalls,’ in Binkley, R. et al. eds., Agent, Action and Reason (University of Toronto Press: Toronto 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The locus classicus for qualms on this score is Quine, W.V. ‘Quantifiers, and Propositional Attitudes,’ Journal of Philosophy 53 (1956), 177–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Recall that I use ‘want’ as the generic verb for desiderative attitudes. I might mention here that this example is only a slight variation on some provided by Pieter Seuren, who notes the expressibility problems involved, in his ‘Forme logique et forme semantique: Un argument contre Geach,’, M. Logique et Analyse 79 (1977), 338–47Google Scholar. It was cases like this one, mentioned by Seuren in seminars at the University of Oxford in 1973, that first suggested the 8-0 analysis to me. The points made about this example, I might add, can also be made about the example we get on replacing ‘wants (or “hopes“) that’ by ‘fears that,’ showing that a thesis like that maintained for desire in this paper can be argued on behalf of the affective (or ‘conative’) propositional attitudes more generally.

7 Cf. homework problem #19 in D. Kaplan, ‘Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,’ in Hintikka, J ed., Approaches to Natural Language (Dordrecht: Reidel 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 It might be said: surely the asymmetry in question amounts to no more than this — than one can have desires about whom one merely believes to exist but not beliefs about what one merely desires should exist. But such a remark still leaves open the question of how to represent the attitude-ascriptions we are interested in.

9 Geach, P.T. ‘Intentional Identity,’ Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), 627–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most interesting discussion of Geach's problem to be found in the literature is that of Saarinen, E. ‘Intentional Identity Interpreted,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 2 (1978), 151–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though I do not find myself in agreement with his conclusions. An example to the same effect as our (1) was given in an earlier discussion of Geach's paper by Dennett, D.C. (‘Geach on Intentional Identity,’ Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968), 335–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, namely ‘Tom thinks there is a bogey man in his bedroom and wishes he would go away.’ Dennett's proposed way of representing this sentence has ‘thinks’ appearing (incorrectly) in the scope of ‘wishes.’

10 See, for example, Evans’, Gareth ‘Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Oauses,’ esp. sections 4 and 6, in Caruulian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977), 467–536CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Kamp, J.A.W. ‘A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation,’ in Formal Methods in the Study of Language, ed. Groenendijk, T. et al.Google Scholar (forthcoming); and note also Hintikka's remarks at p. 201 of his contribution to the volume cited in note 7 about indefinite descriptions and Hilbert’s E-terms.

11 For more details on this, see my ‘Scope and Subjunctivity,’ Philosophia 12 (1982), 99-126; want-ascriptions are discussed in Section 4. For present purposes, ‘actually’ may be taken as a simple backward-looking operator in the sense of Saarinen's paper cited in note 9.

12 The notion of equivalence involved here is that called real-world equivalence in Crossley, J.N. and Humberstone, I.L. ‘The Logic of “Actually,”’ Reports on Mathematical Logic 8 (1977), 11–29Google Scholar. The discussion in the present paper is oversimplified in order to get a point across briefly: it should not be concluded from what is said here that in general any formula has an ‘A’ -free equivalent (this fails, in particular, for quantified formulae). I plan to discuss in more detail the interplay between the B-D proposal and the material of the papers cited in this and the preceeding note, in a separate piece on the fine structure of propositional attitude ascriptions.

13 A worry on this score was expressed to me by U.T. Place, on whose comments the view expressed in the following sentence is based.

14 This would be one reason for being sceptical about an analysis, asymmetrical like mine, but in the opposite direction, analysing beliefs as a species of desire. Such a proposal has actually been made, at p. 451 of Grandy, R. ‘Reference, Meaning, and Belief,’ Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), 439–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Grandy analyses beliefs as higher-order desires (desires about desires), surely a kind of desire not possessable by all creatures sophisticated enough to hold beliefs.