3 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Why treat "desire" as a propositional attitude?
Well, 20th century philosophy, at least "analytic philosophy", has almost always studied propositions/sentences/statements/that-clauses, etc. I guess the reason why Russell was able to make propositions so dominantly popular is because 20th century philosophy, both the first half (Russell-Ayer-Carnap, etc.) and the second half (Quine, Putnam, etc.) were really using logic for philosophy.
There is this distinction in epistemology between objectual knowledge (I know her; I know how to run) and propositional knowledge (I know that...), and analytic philosophers are sometimes accused of being dismissive of the former. I know some people who argue, for example, that even the ancient notion of "episteme" in Plato and Aristotle was more similar to objectual knowledge.
But I am personally doubtful about such a distinction because it seems that both types of knowledge seems to be reducible to the other. Hence, propositional attitudes in general seems to be translateable to objects, and vice versa. It sounds possible that you can translate "I desire Pepsi" as "I desire that I am drinking/can access to/would like to have a Pepsi." I guess if you're going to analyze the concept of desire, translating it as a propositional attitude, dissecting it, seems to be methogolocially better.
Comment by drinka40tonight at 10/02/2017 at 10:01 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Yeah, that sounds about right. It just seems like there should be more than that, since, by my lights, the position goes on to do substantive work. Like, if they aren't propositional attitudes than the direction-of-fit metaphor to bifurcate mental states falls flat.
I guess, more generally, I'm just sort of stunned by the lack of developed arguments for such a position. It seems, at best, people will just point to one or two example sentences (like, "Smith desire that he drink a Pepsi" or "John desire that he get to school on time"), and then they just bluntly declare that desires are propositional. From what I've seen, the only argument for this position is from Searle (and it's quite short, and I think, rather poor). It seems odd to me that there hasn't been more done here. As you say, in the case of belief, there is all sorts of work on objectual knowledge, and know-how and other sorts of things. For desire, not so much it seems.
Comment by [deleted] at 12/02/2017 at 09:12 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
ptrlix this was really helpful and I hadn't heard before of the term "objectual knowledge" Do you think that objectual vs. propositional knowledge is roughly equivalent to Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description? Thanks!