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A State of Besire

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Abstract

I argue that there is at least one genuine state of besire.

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Notes

  1. This idea goes back to Anscombe 1957.

  2. See Smith 1994 and 1987.

  3. See Tenenbaum 2006. Other proponents of the normative view include Searle 1985, 2001; Platts 1979; Humberstone 1992; Gregory 2012.

  4. There is conceptual space for adopting a normative account of belief’s direction of fit but a descriptive account of desire’s direction of fit: we can say that beliefs ought to aim at the truth, while desires aim at their own fulfillment (else they are not desires). Such asymmetry, however, may seem problematic for all talk of directions of fit.

  5. The term “besire” is attributed to Altham 1987.

  6. Smith puts the point forcefully in Smith 1994, p. 118.

  7. An imagining may, of course, be coupled with a desire, as when a person imagines herself winning a gold medal, and she also wants to win one, but any accompanying desire of this sort is fully separable from the imagining. I thank an anonymous referee for bring up the problem of imaginings.

  8. I cannot here discuss the shortcomings of all these arguments but briefly: Little does not make a positive case for the existence of besires: she simply argues that besires are not incoherent, a point made also in Price 1989. Indeed, the existence of besires remains controversial on Little’s own admission (Little 1997, p. 66). Bromwich, on the other hand, focuses on our tendency to respond to questions truthfully, other things being equal. She claims that sometimes, no desires of ours will be served by responding truthfully, so that belief alone explains why we respond and say the truth (Bromwich 2010). The problem with this argument is that there are many alternative explanations – better ones than motivation by belief alone – of our propensity to answer truthfully: social norms; a tendency to preserve cognitive resources (inventing a lie is a more cognitively taxing endeavor than speaking the truth); habits, etc. Finally, Swarzer claims that appetitive desires such as craving saag can be seen as perceptions of need (when I crave saag, it seems to me I need saag). So construed, these desires are complex mental states involving a desire component and a perception component, where perceptions, presumably, are sufficiently like beliefs and share the latter’s direction of fit (Swarzer 2013). There are, however, several problems with Swarzer’s argument as well. For instance, pre-verbal children and non-verbal animals have appetitive desires, but it is unlikely that their desires are perceptions of need. In addition, to the extent to which the appetitive desires of adult humans may be said to involve a perception of need, the perception and the desire dissociate: I can crave saag without its being the case that it seems to me I need saag at all.

  9. The “thetic” versus “telic” terminology in this context can be found in Humberstone 1992; Frost 2014.

  10. This may seem like a second way in which hope aims to fit the world. The first I mentioned was this: hope must not be groundless. But hope tends to vanish in the face of evidence it has not been fulfilled. If it persists in the face of such evidence, it will be completely groundless if not absurd.

  11. See Smith 1987, p. 56.

  12. See, for instance, Tenenbaum 2006.

  13. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.

  14. Of course, an agent may have stronger contrary desires and so not favor a world in which the desire is fulfilled all things considered.

  15. This formulation differs from Smith’s because he requires a perception that ~ p, not merely evidence.

  16. In many cases, the desire would dispose the agent to bring about p though we can imagine a very lazy agent who has no disposition to bring about p but who would, if given a magic wand, bring about p. Such an agent still desires p.

  17. Frost argues that no interpretation of the direction of fit idea succeeds, and that we ought to abandon all talk of directions of fit (Frost 2014). Skepticism about the idea of a direction of fit and Smith’s use of this idea can be found also in Sobel & Copp 2001; Humberstone 1992; Coleman 2008. I mention, in this regard, that hope has elements of both practical and theoretical reason, regardless of what account of the difference between the two we adopt and whether or not we cash out the difference in terms of “directions of fit.” But for present purposes, I am happy to make my claim conditional: if there are two directions of fit, hope has both.

  18. See Smith 1994, p. 119.

  19. For an interesting account of hope that’s friendly to the point about irreducibility I make here, see Meirav 2009. Meirav argues that two people may both want p and assign the same probability to p (for instance, being cured from an illness), but one may be in a state of hope while the other, in a state of despair (and so, not of hope).

  20. There is a further question of what exactly the belief component is. Hope requires, at minimum, a belief in the possibility of its own fulfillment. In most cases, something stronger will be required. In addition, hope resembles epistemic attitudes such as credence in coming in degrees. A person who believes that the hoped for outcome is at least somewhat likely will tend to hope more strongly for that outcome, while one who believes the outcome is extremely unlikely may hold out a small hope. (Of course, if you are 100% certain that p, then you can no longer hope that p. This is because hope has an ineliminable desire component: if it makes no sense to desire that p, then you cannot hope for p.) Now, desire also comes in degrees, and the degree of someone’s desire for an outcome may affect the degree of his or her hope for that outcome. A person who wishes for something more strongly may tend to hope for it more. So both the degree of one’s credence and the strength of one’s desire will tend to affect the strength of one’s hope. But we need not pursue these issues here.

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Fileva, I. A State of Besire. Philosophia 49, 1973–1979 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00338-2

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