A Dispositionalist Approach to Desire and Valuing

What is it to desire or value something? Is it to feel a certain way? Is it instead to have a certain sort of representational architecture (a stored representation of "X is good" or a representation of X in one's "desire box")? Is it to have a certain type of neurological structure associated with reward and learning?

I hold, instead, that to desire or value something is a matter or being disposed to act and react in a certain characteristic pattern of ways; to desire or value is to have a certain type of habitual posture toward the world. I have long defended a dispositionalist theory of belief (e.g., here and here). In 2013, I extended this dispositionalist theory to "attitudes" generally, explicitly including desiring and valuing. But I have never written a full-length journal article specifically on desire and value. Here's a preliminary sketch of my approach.

Liberal Dispositionalism about Desire

In the 20th century, dispositionalist accounts of attitudes were generally associated with behaviorism: To believe P or desire Q is to be disposed to behave in a particular set of ways. Such accounts fell out of favor as behaviorism fell out of favor. One of the main innovations of 21st-century dispositionalism -- "liberal dispositionalism" as I call it -- was to explicitly put other types of dispositions on equal footing with behavioral dispositions, thus avoiding the troubles that plague behaviorist approaches to the mind.

I favor sorting the dispositions into three broad classes: behavioral, phenomenal (that is, pertaining to conscious experience), and cognitive. Suppose I want my daughter to do well in school. On a liberal dispositional account of desire, to have this desire is neither more nor less than to possess a certain suite of behavioral, phenomenal, and cognitive dispositions. Behaviorally, it is to be disposed, for example, not to interfere with her homework, to encourage her when she does well, to provide the resources she needs to succeed, and so on. Phenomenally, it is to feel good when I hear of her successes, to feel disappointed when she fails, to fantasize happily about good educational outcomes, to feel anxious if she doesn't seem to be putting in the necessary work, and so on. And cognitively, it is to be disposed to enter further mental states under various relevant conditions, such as to engage in certain types of planning and to reject incompatible desires, such as that she drop out of school to pursue a career in fashion.

As in the case of belief, all these dispositions hold only ceteris paribus, that is, other things being equal, or when conditions are normal, absent competing influences. I won't encourage her to do her homework if the house is on fire. And as in the case of belief, few of us will perfectly match any dispositional profile so constructed; it's a matter of whether we match closely enough. A natural comparison is personality traits: To be an extravert is just to match, close enough and ceteris paribus, the dispositional profile constitutive of extraversion: being disposed to enjoy parties, to make friends easily, to take the lead in social situations, and so on.

Every theory of desire will hold that, generally speaking, if one has a desire one also has a certain suite of appropriate dispositions. What is distinctive about dispositionalism is that it says that that is all desire is. Once your dispositional profile is fully characterized, that's the end of the story as far as the existence or non-existence of desire is concerned. Maybe there's some representation in the desire box (if human architecture works a certain way), or maybe the reward system is in some particular state, or maybe you buzz with a certain feeling; or maybe none of that is the case. Such facts, if they are facts, are contingent associations or implementations. Anyone who matches the dispositional profile constitutive of desire to an appropriate degree does desire, regardless of whatever else is true of them; and anyone who does not match that dispositional profile does not desire. If there were space aliens with a radically different cognitive architecture, they would desire if and only if they matched the relevant dispositional profile. Cognitive and physiological architecture is only derivatively important to the metaphysics of desire: It is important only because, and to the extent, it undergirds the dispositional profile.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Desire

Arguably, there are two very different types of desire: short-term and long-term. I desire (short-term) a beer from my fridge, right now. I also desire (long-term) that my fridge be stocked with beer, in general. Sometimes the first type of desire is called "occurrent" and the second "dispositional". Such occurrent desires plausibly feel a certain way (there's a feeling of craving that beer), while the dispositional desires don't. Maybe only the latter are subject to dispositional analysis.

I reject that view. Short-term and long-term desires can both be analyzed dispositionally and exist on a spectrum rather than being different in kind. The difference lies in the duration of the dispositional structure. If I currently want a beer, I have a suite of dispositions constitutive of that desire: I'm disposed to go the fridge to get it; I would feel disappointed if I discovered I was out of beer; I'm inclined to make a plan to get that beer as soon as the game pauses for commercials. If I lack these dispositions, it's not true that I want a beer. But the dispositions only endure briefly. As soon as I get that beer, they vanish.

Now it might be true that often (even typically) certain feelings tend to accompany short-term desires. But if so, on my view they are signals of the desires or at most the surface manifestations of the dispositional structures constitutive of desire. If the feeling is disconnected from other dispositions, it constitutes a "wraith" of a desire, not a full-blown desire (see Schwitzgebel 2013, sec 11 on "wraiths").

[This kid really wants cake; image source]

In-Between Desire and "Weakness of Will"

Much of my work on belief has emphasized the existence of "in-between believing": cases in which people have some substantial portion of the dispositional profile constitutive of believing some particular proposition but in which they also deviate substantially from that profile, such that it's neither quite right to say they believe nor quite right to say they fail to believe. One plausible case is implicit bias, someone who sincerely affirms (for example) that all the races are intellectually equal, and reasons on that basis in explicit contexts, but who also often acts and reacts as if the races are not all intellectually equal.

Similarly, we can have in-between desires. "Weakness of will" and temptation cases are one plausible category. I'm on a diet. Do I desire to eat the chocolate cake? In a sense, obviously yes. There it is. I can feel myself wanting it. I have an urge to reach out and eat it. Maybe I actually do eat it. At the same time, I'm telling myself "I shouldn't eat that cake". And maybe I do resist. I plan ways to avoid eating the cake -- for example, by turning my eyes away, by telling myself and others that I'm not going to eat it. I say to myself sincerely that I want to refrain from eating it. I'm torn.

We could treat this as two conflicting desires. But dispositionalism gives us a different way of conceptualizing the case. Like someone who has some extraverted dispositions and some introverted dispositions, or someone who has some egalitarian dispositions and some racist dispositions, the cake-tempted-dieter has a mix of dispositions those don't all fall neatly on one side or the other.

We can map this partly (not perfectly) onto the short-term / long-term distinction. If I yield to temptation, probably the short-term dispositions were overall dominant in my profile. As soon as I eat the cake, those dispositions mostly disappear and the long-term dispositions dominate, leaving me with the taste of both cake and regret.

Desire, Valuing, and Believing Good: Overlapping Profiles, not Discrete Representations

So far I have only talked about desiring, not valuing, but I don't think they are different in kind. "Valuing" sounds more long-term and tightly connected to intellectual endorsement. (It's odd to say that I "value" eating the cake.) But the relationship between desiring and valuing is something like the relationship between being brave and being courageous. It's not like people have one brave state or one brave representation and then a separate courageous state or courageous representation. Rather, the dispositional profiles constitutive of bravery and courage largely overlap. "Bravery" tilts perhaps a bit more to the physical and has less of a moral loading than "courage". But central to both dispositional profiles is leaping boldly to the defense of your unjustly attacked friends.

Here's how I express the idea in my 2013 article:

Shortly after moving into one of my residences, I met a nineteen-year-old neighbor. Let's call him Ethan. In our first conversation, it came out (i.) that Ethan had a handsome, expensive new pickup truck, and (ii.) that he unfortunately had to go to community college because he couldn't afford to attend a four-year school. Although I didn't think to ask Ethan whether he thought owning a handsome pickup truck was more important than attending a four-year university, let's suppose that's how he lived his life in general.

Ethan's inward and outward actions and reactions -- perhaps not with perfect consistency -- generally revealed a posture toward the world of valuing his truck over his education, or thinking that it's more important to have a beautiful truck than to go to a demanding university, or wanting a beautiful truck more than wanting to attend a four-year school. On a dispositional stereotype approach to the attitudes, we can treat the stereotypes associated with these somewhat different attitudes as largely overlapping, though with different centers and peripheries. Believing and desiring and valuing would seem on the surface to be very different attitude types, and are often treated as such -- beliefs are "cognitive", desires "conative", they have different "directions of fit", etc. -- and yet in Ethan’s case, the particular belief, desire, and valuation seem only subtly different.

On Not Counting Up the Number of Desires

How many desires do you have? Exactly 4,628,414? Yes, that's precisely the number!

Just kidding of course. The question doesn't even make sense. There is no fact of the matter exactly the number of desires you have. Desires aren't discrete countable things. This fact spells trouble for some excessively realist views of desire that require, for example, that every desire must be underwritten by some particular stored representation. In a forthcoming paper, I argue that this issue creates a morass of problems for representationalist accounts of belief, which must either multiply representations implausibly or draw an occult and useless sharp line between "explicit" (stored) and "tacit" (quickly inferrable) beliefs.

Similar problems -- though I won't detail them here -- will arise for any view of desire that grounds desires in countable objects or states. Dispositionalism avoids these problems. There is no countable number of dispositional profiles that you match to a (contextually determined) appropriate degree. To say that someone matches a dispositional profile is like saying that some part of a richly complex figure has a certain approximate shape. There are many ways to characterize the shape of a complex figure, no countable number of shapes to which a complex figure might to some degree conform, and no need for separate storage compartments for each reasonably accurate shape-description. You get an infinite number of dispositions, and an infinite number of finely specified shape profiles, for free, without need to treat each as requiring a distinctly existing, resource-consuming ontological ground.