2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Why treat "desire" as a propositional attitude?
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 ptrlix at 10/02/2017 at 10:21 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Yeah, I think you're right that it seems to be a widely held presupposition rather than a well-argued conclusion.
Also I don't know if this is actually the case, but treating desire as a propositional attitude might be necessary or just really important for someone who wants to both defend a form of cognitivism in meta-ethics, and also a form of hedonism. I'm just blindly guessing here, but if I wanted to deny Ayer's emotivism and Moore's naturalistic fallacy, and if I also wanted to somehow link morality and pleasure/desire, I probably would have to show that desires express meaningful propositions with a pinch of morality involved.