Comment by drinka40tonight on 11/02/2017 at 06:54 UTC

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View submission: Why treat "desire" as a propositional attitude?

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In a sense, yeah. The same non-propositional analysis could probably be given for other attitudes. I guess I focused on desire because there's a lot of work that invokes it (as opposed to work on fear), without, at least to me, justifying the thought that it just is a propositional attitude.

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Comment by NausicaaSantiago at 11/02/2017 at 07:39 UTC

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Also, just a minor point. It's about your spider example. Consider the following:

John wants to smoke a cigarrete John knows that cigarretes are harmful

Does John want to do something harmful?

John himself might say yes, but it seems that in some contexts it would be inappropriate to say so. If, for instance, we ask: Why did John ask for a lighter? I think it would be incorrect in that case to say that he did so because he wanted to do something harmful.