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Wanting what’s not best

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel account of desire reports, i.e. sentences of the form \(\ulcorner\)S wants p\(\urcorner\). Our theory is partly motivated by Phillips-Brown’s (Mind 130(518):413–437, 2021) observation that subjects can desire things even if those things aren’t best by the subject’s lights. That is, being best isn’t necessary for being desired. We compare our proposal to existing theories, and show that it provides a neat account of the central phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. Here is another way to bring out that what’s best isn’t necessary for being desired. Suppose your favorite type of pasta is spaghetti bolognese, with lasagna a close second. You’re late for dinner, so your friend orders for you. As you sit down, the waiter brings you a plate of lasagna. If your friend points to the food and asks ‘Did you want that?’, you can perfectly well say ‘Yes’. But lasagna isn’t best by your lights.

  2. We will follow Phillips-Brown in assuming that ‘want’ in its most fundamental use expresses a propositional attitude. Some have questioned this assumption (Montague, 2007; Grzankowski, 2016). We expect that our main ideas could be readily adapted to a non-propositional approach.

  3. We let ‘S’ range over the names of agents and let ‘S’ range over the corresponding agents denoted by ‘S’. Similarly, we let ‘p’ range over the logical forms of proposition-denoting strings and let ‘p’ range over the corresponding propositions denoted by ‘p’.

  4. The notion of “being best among the relevant alternatives” can be spelled out in various ways. We consider one common approach below. See fn.11 for another.

  5. The term ‘modal base’ is often used ambiguously in the literature: sometimes it is used to mean the set of propositions that are intersected to determine the modal domain (or the function from worlds to such sets), while other times it is used to mean the modal domain itself. We use it in the second way here.

  6. \(\mathcal {B}\) is often identified with the set of worlds compatible with what the subject believes (Heim, 1992; von Fintel, 1999). As we discuss in Sect. 4.1, there is reason to think that this identification is problematic, so we opt for a less committal statement of the view here.

  7. We will often drop the world subscript on preference orderings when no confusion arises.

  8. As Phillips-Brown points out, trying to explain how both reports can be true by appealing to a shift in the preference ordering over worlds is problematic, since the only thing valued here is money.

  9. Phillips-Brown also denies that being best is sufficient for being wanted. His argument against this claim ultimately comes down to cases such as the following:

    Depressive: Suppose that you are deeply, deeply depressed. There is nothing at all in the whole world that you want. Life is misery. Even so, you do prefer some things to others. Something is best, but nothing is wanted.

    The idea is that if you are such a depressive, then even if you prefer some options to others, \(\ulcorner\)You want p\(\urcorner\) is false for any p. If it is coherent to suppose that such an individual exists, then this poses a problem for the ordering-based account, no matter which worlds appear in the modal base.

    We find cases such as Depressive fairly tendentious (after all, it’s fairly strange to say something like ‘I prefer getting spaghetti most of all, but I don’t want to get spaghetti’). More generally, our sense is that the case against the sufficiency of being best for being desired is weaker than the case against the necessity of being best for being desired. Consequently, we focus on the latter here, and remain neutral about the status of sufficiency (but see fn.24 for how a rejection of sufficiency could be captured on our positive proposal).

  10. It is worth noting that the analogue of (1a) with ‘hope’—‘I hope to get the red ticket’—sounds much worse in the Tickets scenario. Similarly with ‘wish’: ‘I wish I had gotten the red ticket’ is infelicitous if you find out that you were given, for example, the green ticket. Moreover, the only appropriate answer to the questions ‘How many tickets are ones you hope will be drawn?’ and ‘How many tickets are ones you wish had been drawn?’ in these scenarios is ‘One’. More generally, in contrast to wanting, one cannot hope or wish for what isn’t best. See (Blumberg & Hawthorne, forthcoming) for a detailed discussion of these features of hoping, among others, and (Blumberg, 2018) for an analysis of wish reports.

  11. Decision-theoretic accounts of desire are also endorsed by (van Rooij, 1999; Lassiter, 2011; Jerzak, 2019). Existing decision-theoretic analyses also typically maintain that being best among the relevant alternatives is necessary (and sufficient) for being desired. For instance, on Levinson’s account, \(\ulcorner\)S wants p\(\urcorner\) is true just in case p has higher expected value than \(\lnot p\). The relevant alternatives here are the propositions p and \(\lnot p\), and the “best” proposition is that which has highest expected value. It is worth noting that Levinson’s proposal predicts that (1a) (‘I want to get the red ticket’) is true in the Tickets scenario (so this example does not support thresholdism over Levinson’s account). However, his account also predicts that there should be no scenarios where although some outcomes are preferred to others, every outcome is good and therefore wanted. But such cases seem to obtain, e.g. if every dish on the menu looks good, I can truly assert ‘I want everything on the menu’. Moreover, the problems that we raise for thresholdism in Sect. 3 also arise for Levinson’s theory. Finally, if one was convinced that being best isn’t sufficient for being desired, then Levinson’s account would be problematic, e.g. it cannot capture cases such as Depressive of fn.9.

  12. Technically, on the variant of thresholdism developed by Phillips-Brown the threshold is fixed by a contextually determined function from world-agent pairs to real numbers (15-18), rather than directly by context. But this machinery is only needed to handle embedded desire reports, which we do not consider here. Presenting things as we have done simplifies the discussion.

  13. This argument is also endorsed by Crnič (2011) and Pasternak (2019).

  14. Some might be tempted to respond by appealing to the so-called “neg-raising” properties of ‘want’ i.e. the phenomenon whereby negated want reports are interpreted with negation taking narrow scope with respect to ‘want’ (Collins, 2014). However, it is generally assumed that the negation ‘it’s not that’ resists neg-raising, and yet (6) is just as unacceptable as (5):

    (6) # I want spaghetti, but it’s not that I want pasta.

    Moreover, ‘I want to not get pasta’ is predicted to be true on thresholdism so long as the threshold is below 50. So, neg-raising doesn’t provide us with a good explanation for the badness of (5).

  15. We explore the various data points around monotonicity and abominable conjunctions in more detail in (Blumberg and Hawthorne, 2021). Also see (Blumberg, forthcoming) for related discussion.

  16. This countermodel to Weakening is inspired by a similar countermodel provided by Cariani (2016) against certain decision-theoretic analyses of deontic modals.

  17. One might want to allow the set of alternatives to vary from world to world. One could capture this by maintaining that interpretation proceeds relative to a function from worlds to sets of alternatives, rather than just a set of alternatives. But we’ll ignore this complication in what follows.

  18. If you were a “doxastic cognitivist” in the sense of (Dietz, 2020) you might think that the goodness of an alternative has to do with the agent believing the alternative has some special property, and then somehow try to explain desire in terms of beliefs of this kind. We wish to be agnostic about cognitivism here.

  19. The alternatives in \(\mathcal {A} - \mathcal {G}^{\mathcal {A}, w}(S)\) needn’t be bad for S, they just aren’t good.

  20. We will often drop the world subscript on the good-selecting function when no confusion arises.

  21. As far as we’re aware, this argument was first put forward by Levinson (2003). It has been endorsed by Lassiter (2011) and Jerzak (2019).

    It might be argued that the ordering-based analysis does actually predict that (8) should be true, once one takes peace of mind into account: in worlds where Sue buys insurance, Sue’s peace of mind has greater utility than the cost of insurance (Büring, 2003; von Fintel, 2012). However, we can control for this aspect of the case by considering a similar scenario where Sue never finds out whether insurance is purchased:

    Trip: Sue is going on a cross-country trip. As a favor to Sue, Bill agreed to organize the car rental. She estimates that the chances of the car being in an accident are \(\frac{1}{1000}\). But the results would be very bad: she’d have to pay for the cost of repairs which will be at least \(\$10,000\). Comprehensive car insurance costs \(\$100\). Sue won’t be able to find out from Bill if he purchases insurance—he’s at a meditation retreat for the duration of her trip, and personal calls are not allowed.

    (9) Sue wants Bill to buy insurance.

    (9) is true here, but Sue won’t find out if insurance is bought, and so won’t get peace of mind from the purchase.

  22. By contrast, such constraints seem to be operative in the case of hoping. For instance, as Blumberg & Hawthorne (forthcoming) observe, the analogues of the examples in (10) with ‘hope’ sound much worse.

  23. We use expected value because it is fairly simple, and allows us to fix ideas. We want to leave it open that the “good news value” of an outcome is better represented by using expected value in more sophisticated ways, or even by adopting a more sophisticated decision theory, e.g. prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1988) or risk-weighted utility theory (Buchak, 2013). Note moreover that even if the relevant notion of goodness isn’t ultimately cashed out in decision-theoretic terms, the central tenets of our account remain unaffected.

  24. For those who think that being best is not sufficient for being desired, our account can accommodate this if we assume that the set of good alternatives can be empty in context, i.e. \(\mathcal {G}^{\mathcal {A}}(S) = \emptyset\).

  25. Cf. Cariani ’s (2013) notion of a proposition being “visible” with respect to a background partition of logical space.

  26. For convenience, we assume that presupposition failure has a semantic effect. But our general approach is compatible with pragmatic accounts of presupposition on which presupposition failure affects assertability rather than semantic value (Schlenker, 2009).

  27. (12) can be heard as true:

    (12) I want to get the blue ticket and inherit a Ferrari.

    We can explain this if we take on board the following widely accepted principle: hearers tend to interpret sentences so as to avoid presupposition failure. That is, within reasonable limits, hearers will make the assumptions necessary to avoid undefinedness. (This process is usually discussed under the heading “accommodation”. The basic phenomenon goes back at least to Kartunnen (1974). See (von Fintel, 2004) for a more recent discussion.) For instance, even if I suspect that you have no siblings, I will come to assume that you have a sister once I’ve heard you utter ‘I have to fetch my sister from the airport tomorrow’. That is, the presupposition triggered by the possessive ‘my sister’, namely that I have a sister, is taken to hold when evaluating my utterance. Similarly, when hearers interpret (12) as true, they are shifting to a set of alternatives on which I get the blue ticket and inherit a Ferrari is represented. And relative to such a set, it is plausible that at least one good alternative entails I get the blue ticket and inherit a Ferrari, in which case (12) should be true. Note that relative to such a set (11) will be false, and so will still be predicted to be unacceptable.

  28. Note that monotonicity isn’t classically valid on this entry, but is only “Strawson valid” (von Fintel, 1999). But this doesn’t affect our predictions about conjunctions such as (5): these will either be false or undefined on any set of alternatives.

  29. It should be clear that similar effects can be obtained for other threshold values; we just use 70 as an illustration.

  30. Another way of bringing out the concern here is through the following observation: if you know that I want to go to Paris more than any other city, then you have enough information to conclude that I want to go to Europe. In particular, you don’t need to know anything about my preferences with respect to other European cities.

  31. Given our existential semantics for ‘want’, we could frame the effect as one where \(\ulcorner\)S wants p or q\(\urcorner\) suggests that both p and q are each entailed by good alternatives, and thus that both \(\ulcorner\)S wants p\(\urcorner\) and \(\ulcorner\)S wants q\(\urcorner\) are true. But instead we have chosen to frame the effect more neutrally so that it doesn’t presuppose the correctness of our account.

  32. Similarly, the effect goes away under the modal ‘will’ as well as probability operators:

    1. (18)
      1. a.

        He will want spaghetti or lasagna.

      2. b.

        There is a chance that he wants spaghetti or lasagna

    Neither (18a) nor (18b) tends in general to suggest that my companion is positively disposed to both spaghetti and lasagna.

  33. For a similar diagnosis of the behavior of disjunction under ‘want’, see (Crnič 2011).

  34. The literature on this so-called “free choice” effect is vast. See among others (Kamp, 1974, 1978; Zimmermann, 2000; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002; Asher and Bonevac, 2005; Geurts, 2005; Schulz ,2005; Simons, 2005; Alonso-Ovalle, 2006; Aloni, 2007; Fox, 2007; Klinedinst, 2007; Ciardelli et al., 2009; Chemla, 2009; Barker, 2010; Franke, 2011; Aher, 2012; Roelofsen, 2013; Charlow, 2015; Fusco, 2015b; Starr, 2016; Willer, 2017; Romoli and Santorio, 2017; Alon,i 2018).

  35. See, e.g. (Ross, 1941; Chierchia et al., 2009; Cariani, 2013; Fusco, 2015a) for discussion of this effect.

  36. Some theorists have also tried to connect these effects featuring deontics to the theory of scalar implicatures. We won’t attempt to survey this work, or the merits of these approaches, but see, e.g. (Fox, 2007; von Fintel, 2012) for further discussion.

  37. Indeed, our observations concerning negation in (17) are inspired by well-known observations about the behavior of deontics under negation—see (Alonso-Ovalle, 2006; Starr, 2016; Romoli and Santorio, 2019) among others. For instance, (21a) is equivalent to (21b), and not the weaker (21c):

    1. (21)

      a. Mary may not read Ulysses or Madame Bovary.

      b. \(=\) Mary may not read Ulysses and Mary may not read Madame Bovary

      c. \(\ne\) Mary may not read Ulysses or Mary may not read Madame Bovary

  38. Indeed, Blumberg and Goldstein (2021) develop a theory of the behavior of disjunctions in the scope of deontics as well as attitude verbs. However, we will not explore here whether their approach could be adapted to the alternative-sensitive theory of desire presented above.

  39. Indeed, notice that on the natural way of choosing alternatives, for example \(\mathcal {A} = \{\textsc {spaghetti}, \textsc {chicken}, \textsc {lasagna}\}\), the propositions I get chicken and I don’t get pasta are true and false at exactly the same alternatives.

  40. Here is another way to bring out this point. Suppose that you desire both the vegetarian lasagna and the beef bolognese. Then (24a) seems true but (24b) does not:

    1. (24)

      a. You want to get non-vegetarian food.

      b. # You want to not get vegetarian food.

    Or suppose that there are ten diners: all ten desire the vegetarian lasagna, while five of them also desire the beef bolognese. Then (25a) is acceptable but (25b) is not:

    1. (25)

      a. Five diners want to get non-vegetarian food.

      b. # Five diners want to not get vegetarian food.

    But to all intents and purposes, x gets non-vegetarian food is contextually equivalent to x does not get vegetarian food.

  41. This means that thresholdism also predicts that (23b) should be true, given any context where the threshold is set so that (23a) comes out true. More generally, examples featuring internal negation also pose a problem for thresholdism.

  42. Although the theory in (Phillips-Brown, 2021) isn’t alternative-sensitive, the account in (Phillips-Brown, 2018) is. Just as we have suggested in this paper, Phillips-Brown (2018) maintains that what is relevant for the evaluation of a desire ascription is the subject’s preferences over a set of pair-wise incompatible propositions. His semantics is similar to the ordering-based semantics discussed in Sect. 2.1, but “lifted” to a domain of propositions. Although his account validates Weakening, it also makes being best necessary for being desired, and so doesn’t accommodate the central data discussed here. Similarly, the alternative-sensitive theory of Villalta (2008) doesn't explain the target phenomena. For reasons of space, we leave a careful comparison of our account with the analysis in the yet more recent (Phillips-Brown, Unpublished manuscript) for future work.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Simon Goldstein and Milo Phillips-Brown for helpful discussion. And special thanks to the reviewers at Philosophical Studies for their thoughtful comments.

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  1. Dianoia Institute of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

    Kyle Blumberg & John Hawthorne

  2. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    John Hawthorne

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Blumberg, K., Hawthorne, J. Wanting what’s not best. Philos Stud 179, 1275–1296 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01707-z

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