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.

On Being Accused of Ableism

Like many (most?) 21st-century North Americans, I hate to be told I’ve done something ableist (or racist, or sexist). Why does it sting so much, and how should I think about such a charge, when it is leveled against me?

Short answer: It stings so much because it’s usually partly, if only partly, true—and partly true criticisms are the ones that sting worst. And the best reaction to the charge is, usually, to recognize its partial, if only partial, truth.

First, let’s remind ourselves of a quote from the great Confucius:

How fortunate I am! If I happen to make a mistake, others are sure to inform me.
(Analects 7.31, Slingerland trans.)

(As it happens, bloggers are fortunate in just the same way.)

Confucius might have been speaking partly ironically in that particular passage. A couple of centuries later, another Confucian, Xunzi, speaks not at all ironically:

He who rightly criticizes me acts as a teacher to me, and he who rightly supports me acts as friend to me, while he who flatters and toadies to me acts as a villain toward me. Accordingly, the gentleman exalts those who act as teachers toward him....
(ch 2, Hutton trans., p. 9)

This is difficult advice to heed.

Note, though: If I make a mistake. He (she, they) who rightly criticizes me. Someone who criticizes me wrongly is no teacher, only an annoying pest! And if you’re anything like me, then your gut reaction to charges of ableism will usually be to want to swat back at the pest, to assume, defensively, that the criticism must be off-target, because of course you’re a good egalitarian, committed to fighting unjustified prejudice!

No. Here’s the thing. We all have ableist reactions and engage in ableist practices sometimes, to some degree. Disability is so various, and the ableist structures of our culture so deep and pervasive, that it would be superhuman to be immune. Maybe you are immune to ableism toward people who use wheelchairs. Maybe your partner of many years uses a wheelchair and you see wheelchair-use as just one of the many diverse human ways of comporting oneself, with its challenges and (sometimes) benefits, just like every other way of getting around. But how do you react to someone who stutters? How do you react to someone who is hard of hearing? How do you react to someone with depression or PTSD? Someone with facial burns or another skin condition you find unappealing? Or a very short man? What sorts of social structures do you manifest and reinforce in your behavior? In your choice of words? In your implicit assumptions? In what you expect (and don’t expect) people to be able to do?

Here’s my guess: You don’t always act in ways that are free of unjustified prejudice. If someone calls you out on ableism, they might well be right.

You might sincerely and passionately affirm that "all people are equal"—whatever that amounts to, which is really hard to figure out!—and you might even pay some substantial personal costs for the sake of a more just and equal society. In this respect, you are not ableist. You are even anti-ableist. But you are not a unified thing. Unless you are an angel walking upon the Earth, our society’s ableism acts through you.

An absurd charge does not sting. If someone tells me I spend too much time watching soccer, the charge is merely ridiculous. I don’t watch soccer. But if someone charges me with ableism, the partial truth of it does sting, or at least the plausibility of it stings. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the particular word that I used. Maybe I shouldn’t have made that particular assumption or dismissed that particular person. Maybe, deep down, I’m not the egalitarian I thought I was. Ouch.

Your ableist actions and reactions can be hard to recognize and admit if you implicitly assume that people have unified attitudes. If people have unified attitudes, they are either prejudiced against disabled people or they are not. If people have unified attitudes, then evidence of ableist behavior is evidence that you are one of the prejudiced, one of the bad guys. No one wants to think that about themselves. If people have unified attitudes, then it’s easy to assume that because you explicitly reject ableism you cannot be simultaneously enacting the very ableism that you are fighting against.

[Image description: psychedelic art "shifting realities", explosion of mixing colors, white on right through blue on the left]

The best empirical evidence suggests that people are highly disunified—inconstant across situations, capable of both great sacrifice and appalling misbehavior, variable in word and deed, spontaneously enacting our cultural practices for both good and bad. If this is true, then you ought to expect that charges of ableism against you will sometimes stick. You should be unsurprised if they do. But you should also celebrate that these charges are only very partial: The whole you is not like that! The whole you is a tangled chaos with many beautiful, admirable parts!

If you accept your disunity, you ought also to be forgiving. You ought to be forgiving especially if you cast your eye more broadly to the many forms of prejudice and injustice in which we participate. Suppose, impossibly, that you were utterly free of any ableist tendencies, practices, or background assumptions. It would be a huge life project to achieve that. Are you equally free of racism, classism, sexism, ageism, bias against those who are not conventionally beautiful? Are you saving the environment, fighting international poverty, phoning your senators about prisons and wage justice, volunteering in your community?

We must pick our projects. A more vivid appreciation of our own disunity, flaws, and abandoned good intentions ought to make us both more ready to see the truth in charges of prejudice against us and also more forgiving of the disunity, flaws, and abandoned good intentions in others.

[image source]

[Cross-posted at Discrimination and Disadvantage; HT Shelley Tremain for the invitation and editorial feedback]

Three Ways to Be Not Quite Free of Racism

Suppose that you can say, with a feeling of sincerity, "All races and colors of people deserve equal respect". Suppose also that when you think about American Blacks or South Asians or Middle Eastern Muslims you don't detect any feelings of antipathy, or at least any feelings of antipathy that you believe arise merely from consideration of their race. This is good! You are not an all-out racist in the 19th-century sense of that term.

Still, you might not be entirely free of racial prejudice, if we took a close look at your choices, emotions, passing thoughts, and swift intuitive judgments about people.

Imagine then the following ideal: Being free of all unjustified racial prejudice. We can imagine similar ideals for classism, ableism, sexism, ethnicity, subculture, physical appearance, etc.

It would be a rare person who met all of these ideals. Yet not all falling short is the same. The recent election has made vivid for me three importantly distinct ways in which one can fall short. I use racism as my example, but other failures of egalitarianism can be analyzed similarly.

Racism is an attitude. Attitudes can be thought of as postures of the mind. To have an attitude is to be disposed to act and react in attitude-typical ways. (The nature of attitudes is a central part of my philosophical research. For a fuller account of my view, see here.) Among the dispositions constitutive of all-out racism are: making racist claims, purposely avoiding people of that race, uttering racist epithets in inner speech, feeling negative emotions when interacting with that race, leaping quickly to negative conclusions about individual members of that race, preferring social policies that privilege your preferred race, etc.

An all-out racist would have most or all of these dispositions (barring "excusing conditions"). Someone completely free of racism would have none of these dispositions. Likely, the majority of people in our culture inhabit the middle.

But "the middle" isn't all the same. Here are three very different ways of occupying it.

(1.) Implicit racism. Some of the relevant dispositions are explicitly or overtly racist -- for example, asserting that people of the target race are inherently inferior. Other dispositions are only implicitly or covertly racist, for example, being prone without realizing it to evaluate job applications more negatively if the applicant is of the target race, or being likely to experience negative emotion upon being assigned a cooperative task with a person of the target race. Recent psychological research suggests that many people in our culture, even if they reject explicitly racist statements, are disposed to have some implicitly racist reactions, at least occasionally or in some situations. We can thus construct a portrait of the "implicit racist": Someone who sincerely disavows all racial prejudice, but who nonetheless has a wide-ranging and persistent tendency toward implicitly racist reactions and evaluations. Probably no one is a perfect exemplar of this portrait, with all and only implicitly racist reactions, but it is probably common for people to match it to a certain extent. To that extent, whatever it is, that person is not quite free of implicit racism.

Implicit racism has received so much attention in the recent psychological and philosophical literature that one might think that it is the only way to be not quite free of racism while disavowing racism in the 19th-century sense of the term. Not so!

(2.) Situational racism. Dispositions manifest only under certain conditions. Priscilla (name randomly chosen) is disposed sincerely to say, if asked, that people of all races deserve equal respect. Of course, she doesn't actually spend the entire day saying this. She is disposed to say it only under certain conditions -- conditions, perhaps, that assume the continued social disapproval of racism. It might also be the case that under other conditions she would say the opposite. A person might be disposed sincerely to reject racist statements in some contexts and sincerely to endorse them in other contexts. This is not the implicit/explicit division. I am assuming both sides are explicit. Nor am I imagining a change in opinion over time. I am imagining a person like this: If situation X arose she would be explicitly racist, while if situation Y arose she would be explicitly anti-racist, maybe even passionately, self-sacrificingly so. This is not as incoherent as it might seem. Or if it is incoherent, it is a commonly human type of incoherence. The history of racism suggests that perfectly nice, non-racist-seeming people can change on a dime with a change in situation, and then change back when the situation shifts again. For some people, all it might take is the election of a racist politician. For others, it might take a more toxically immersive racist environment, or a personal economic crisis, or a demanding authority, or a recent personal clash with someone of the target race.

(3.) Racism of indifference. Part of what prompted this post was an interview I heard with someone who denied being racist on the grounds that he didn't care what happened to Black people. This deprioritization of concern is in principle separable from both implicit racism and situational racism. For example: I don't think much about Iceland. My concerns, voting habits, thoughts, and interests instead mostly involve what I think will be good for me, my family, my community, my country, or the world in general. But I'm probably not much biased against Iceland. I have mostly positive associations with it (beautiful landscapes, high literacy, geothermal power). Assuming (contra Mozi) that we have much greater obligations to family and compatriots than to people in far-off lands, my habit of not highly prioritizing the welfare of people in Iceland probably doesn't deserve to labeled pejoratively with an "-ism". But a similar disregard or deprioritization of people in your own community or country, on grounds of their race, does deserve a pejorative label, independent any implicit or explicit hostility.

These three ways of being not quite free of racism are conceptually separable. Empirically, though, things are likely to be messy and cross-cutting. Probably the majority of people don't map neatly onto these categories, but have a complex set of mixed-up dispositions. Furthermore, this mixed-up set probably often includes both racist dispositions and, right alongside, dispositions to admire, love, and even make special sacrifices for people who are racialized in culturally disvalued ways.

It's probably difficult to know the extent to which you yourself fail, in one or more of these three ways, to be entirely free of racism (sexism, ableism, etc.). Implicitly racist dispositions are by their nature elusive. So also is knowledge of how you would react to substantial changes in circumstance. So also are the real grounds of our choices. One of the great lessons of the past several decades of social and cognitive psychology is that we know far less than we think we know about what drives our preferences and about the situational influences on our behavior.

I am particularly struck by the potentially huge reach of the bigotry of indifference. Action is always a package deal. There are always pros and cons, which need to be weighed. You can't act toward one goal without simultaneously deprioritizing many other possible goals. Since it's difficult to know the basis of your prioritization of one thing over another, it is possible that the bigotry of indifference permeates a surprising number of your personal and political choices. Though you don't realize it, it might be the case that you would have felt more call to action had the welfare of a different group of people been at stake.

[image source Prabhu B Doss, creative commons]

Introspecting an Attitude by Introspecting Its Conscious Face

In some of my published work, I have argued that:

(1.) Attitudes, such as belief and desire, are best understood as clusters of dispositions. For example, to believe that there is beer in the fridge is nothing more or less than to be disposed (all else being equal or normal) to go to the fridge if one wants a beer, to feel surprised if one were to open the fridge and find no beer, to conclude that the fridge isn't empty if that question becomes relevant, etc, etc. (See my essays here and here.)

And

(2.) Only conscious experiences are introspectible. I characterize introspection as "the dedication of central cognitive resources, or attention, to the task of arriving at a judgment about one's current, or very recently past, conscious experience, using or attempting to use some capacities that are unique to the first-person case... with the aim or intention that one's judgment reflect some relatively direct sensitivity to the target state" (2012, p. 42-43).

Now it also seems correct that (3.) dispositions, or clusters of dispositions, are not the same as conscious experiences. One can be disposed to have a certain conscious experience (e.g., disposed to experience a feeling of surprise if one were to see no beer), but dispositions and their manifestations are not metaphysically identical. Oscar can be disposed to experience surprise if he were to see an empty fridge, even if he never actually sees an empty fridge and so never actually experiences surprise.

From these three claims it follows that we cannot introspect attitudes such as belief and desire.

But it seems we can introspect them! Right now, I'm craving a sip of coffee. It seems like I am currently experiencing that desire in a directly introspectible way. Or suppose I'm thinking aloud, in inner speech, "X would be such a horrible president!" It seems like I can introspectively detect that belief, in all its passionate intensity, as it is occurs in my mind right now.

I don't want to deny this, exactly. Instead, let me define relatively strict versus permissive conceptions of the targets of introspection.

To warm up, consider a visual analogy: seeing an orange. There the orange is, on the table. You see it. But do you really see the whole orange? Speaking strictly, it might be better to say that you see the orange rind, or the part of the orange rind that is facing you, rather than the whole orange. Arguably, you infer or assume that it's not just an empty rind, that it has a backside, that it has a juicy interior -- and usually that's a safe enough assumption. It's reasonable to just say that you see the orange. In a relatively permissive sense, you see the whole orange; in a relatively strict sense you see only the facing part of the orange rind.

Another example: From my office window I see the fire burning downtown. Of course, I only see the smoke. Even if I were to see the flames, in the strictest sense perhaps the visible light emitted from flames is only a contingent manifestation of the combustion process that truly constitutes a fire. (Consider invisible methanol fires.) More permissively, I see the fire when I see the smoke. More strictly, I need to see the flames or maybe even (impossibly?) the combustion process itself.

Now consider psychological cases: In a relatively permissive sense, you see Sandra's anger. In a stricter sense, you see her scowling face. In a relatively permissive sense, you hear the shyness and social awkwardness in Shivani's voice. In a stricter sense you hear only her words and prosody.

To be clear: I do not mean to imply that a stricter understanding of the targets of perception is more accurate or better than a more permissive understanding. (Indeed, excessive strictness can collapse into absurdity: "No, officer, I didn't see the stop sign. Really, all I saw were patterns of light streaming through my vitreous humour!")

As anger can manifest in a scowl and as fire can manifest in smoke and visible flames, so also can attitudes manifest in conscious experience. The desire for coffee can manifest in a conscious experience that I would describe as an urge to take a sip; my attitude about X's candidacy can manifest in a momentary experience of inner speech. In such cases, we can say that the attitudes present a conscious face. If the conscious experience is distinctive enough to serve as an excellent sign of the real presence of the relevant dispositional structure constituting that attitude, then we can say that the attitude is (occurrently) conscious.

It is important to my view that the conscious face of an attitude is not tantamount to the attitude itself, even if they normally co-occur. If you have the conscious experience but not the underlying suite of relevant dispositions, you do not actually have the attitude. (Let's bracket the question of whether such cases are realistically psychologically possible.) Similarly, a scowl is not anger, smoke is not a fire, a rind is not an orange.

Speaking relatively permissively, then, one can introspect an attitude by introspecting its conscious face, much as I can see a whole orange by seeing the facing part of its rind and I can see a fire by seeing its smoke. I rely upon the fact that the conscious experience wouldn't be there unless the whole dispositional structure were there. If that reliance is justified and the attitude is really there, distinctively manifesting in that conscious experience, then I have successfully introspected it. The exact metaphysical relationship between the strictly conceived target and the permissively conceived target is different among the various cases -- part-whole for the orange, cause-effect for the fire, and disposition-manifestation for the attitude -- but the general strategy is the same.

[image source]

Metaphilosophical Tides in the Literature on Belief

Why should a philosopher care about the nature of belief? Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a student, there were two main animating reasons in the Anglophone philosophical community. Recently, though, the literature has changed.

One of the old-school reasons was to articulate the materialistic picture of the world. The late 1950s through the early 1990s -- roughly from Smart's "Sensations and Brain Processes" through Dennett's Consciousness Explained -- was (I now think) the golden age of materialism in the philosophy of mind, when the main alternatives and implications were being seriously explored by the philosophical community for the first time. We needed to know how belief fit into the materialist world-picture. How could a purely material being, a mere machine fundamentally constituted of tiny bits of physical stuff bumping against each other, have mental states about the world, with real representational or intentional content? The functionalism and evolutionary representationalism of Putnam, Armstrong, Dennett, Millikan, Fodor, and Dretske seemed to give an answer.

The other, related, motivating reason was the theory of reference in philosophy of language. How is it possible to believe that Superman is strong but that Clark Kent is not strong, if Superman really is Clark Kent (Frege's Puzzle)? And does the reference of a thought or utterance depend only on what was in the head (internalism) or could two molecule-for-molecule identical people have different thought contents simply because they're in different environments (externalism). Putnam's Twin Earth was amazingly central to the field. (In 2000, Joe Cruz and I sketched out a "map of the analytic philosopher's brain". Evidence seemed to suggest a major lobe dedicated entirely to Twin Earth, but only a small nodule for the meaning of life.)

These inquiries had two things in common: their grand metaphysical character -- defending materialism, discovering the fundamental nature of thought and language -- and their armchair methodology. Some of the contributors such as Fodor and Dennett were very empirically engaged in general, but when it came to their central claims about belief, they seemed to be mainly driven by thought experiments and a metaphysical world vision.

Literature on the nature of belief has been re-energized in the 2010s, I think, by issues less grand but more practical -- especially the issue of implicit bias, but more generally the question of how to think about cases of seeming mismatch between explicit thought or speech and spontaneous behavior. Tamar Gendler's treatment of (implicit) alief vs. (explicit) belief, especially, has spawned a whole subliterature of its own, which is intimately connected with the recent psychological literature on dual process theory or "thinking fast and slow". Does the person who says, in all attempted sincerity, "women are just as smart as men", but who (as anyone else could see) consistently treats women as stupid, believe what he's saying? Delusions present seemingly similar cases, such as the Cotard delusion which involves seemingly sincerely claiming that one is dead. What are we to make of that? There's a suddenly burgeoning philosophical subliterature on delusion, much of it responding to Lisa Bortolotti's recent APA prizewinning book on the topic.

By most standards, the issues are still grand and impractical and the approach armchairish -- this is philosophy after all! -- but I believe their metaphilosophical spirit is very different. What animates Gendler, Bortolotti, and the others, I think, is a hard look at particularly puzzling empirical issues, where it seems that a good philosophical theory of the nature of the phenomena might help clear things up, and then a pragmatic approach to evaluating the results. Given the empirical phenomena, are our interests best served by theorizing belief in this way, or are they better served by theorizing in this other way?

This is music to my ears, both metaphilosophically and regarding the positive theory of belief. Metaphilosophically, because it is exactly my own approach: I entered the literature on belief as a philosopher of science interested in puzzles in developmental psychology that I thought could be dissolved through application of a good theory of belief. And at level of the positive theory of belief, because my own theory of belief is designed exactly to shine as means of organizing our thoughts about such splintering (The Splintered Mind!), seemingly messed-up cases.

The Nature of Desire: A Liberal, Dispositional Approach

What is it to desire something? I suggest: to desire (or want) some item or some state of affairs is just to be disposed to make certain choices, to inwardly and outwardly react in certain ways, and to make certain types of cognitive moves. It is to match, well enough, a certain inward and outward dispositional profile given by folk psychology. Compare: What is it to be an extravert? It is just to match, well enough, the dispositional profile of the extravert -- to seek out and enjoy social gatherings, to be expressive and talkative, to enjoy meeting new people. Match this stereotypical profile of the extravert well enough and you are an extravert. Nothing more to it. Similarly for desire: If you will seek out chocolate cake, if you would choose chocolate cake over other desserts, if you tingle with delight when eating it, if you say "I want chocolate cake", if the thought of getting chocolate cake captures your anticipatory attention, etc., then you like or want or desire chocolate cake. Nothing more to it.

There are two types of alternative account. One alternative approach is, shall we say, deep: To desire something, on a deep account, is to be in some particular brain state or to have some underlying representational structure in the mind (perhaps the representation "I eat chocolate cake" in the Desire Box). The problem with such deep accounts is, I believe, that they don't get to the metaphysical root.

Consider an alien case. Suppose some Deep Structure D is necessary for wanting chocolate cake, on some deep account of desire. Unless that structure is more or less tantamount to possessing the dispositional profile constitutive (on my account) of wanting chocolate cake, then it should be metaphysically possible for an alien species that lacks Deep Structure D to act and react, inwardly and outwardly, in every respect as though it wanted chocolate cake. In such a case, I would suggest, both ordinary common sense and good philosophy advises ascribing the desire for chocolate cake to such hypothetical aliens, despite their lacking whatever Deep Structure D is necessary in the human case.

Alternatively, suppose some Deep Structure E is held to be sufficient for wanting chocolate cake. It seems that we could construct, at least hypothetically, a possible case in which Deep Structure E is present but the person in no way acts or reacts, inwardly or outwardly, like someone who wants chocolate cake: She wouldn't seek it, she wouldn't enjoy eating it, the anticipation of eating it would give her no pleasure, she gives it no weight in her plans, etc. It seems that we should say, in such cases, that the person does not desire chocolate cake. In ascribing desire or its lack, what we care about, both as ordinary folks and as philosophers, is how the person would act and react across a wide variety of possible circumstances. It is only contingently important what underlying mechanisms implement that pattern of action and reaction.

A second type of alternative approach is, like my own approach, superficial rather than deep, but unlike my approach it is narrow. What matters, on such accounts, is just some sub-portion of the pattern that matters on my approach. Maybe what is essential is that the person would choose the cake if given the chance, and not whether the person thinks she wants it or would feel anticipation when about to get it or would enjoy eating it. Or maybe what is essential is that the person judges that it would be good to get cake, and all the rest is incidental. Or maybe the essence is that receiving chocolate cake would be rewarding to that person. Or.... (See Tim Schroeder's SEP entry on Desire for a review of various narrow accounts, which Schroeder contrasts with holistic accounts like my own.)

The problem with narrow accounts is that it's hard to see a good justification for picking out just one feature of the profile as the essential bit. Desire is more usefully regarded as a syndrome of lots of things that tend to go together -- like extraversion is a syndrome, or like being happy-go-lucky is a syndrome. We can be liberal about what goes into the profile. It can be a cluster concept; aspects of the syndrome might be more or less central or important to the picture, but there need be no one essential piece that is strictly necessary or sufficient.

The flexible minimalism of a liberal, dispositional approach is, I think, nicely displayed when we consider messy, in-between cases. So let's consider one.

Matthew the envious buddy. Matthew and Rajan were pals in philosophy grad school. Ten years out, they still consider themselves close friends. They exchange friendly emails, comment warmly on each other’s Facebook posts, and seek each other for tête-à-têtes at professional meetings. In most respects, they are typical ageing grad-school best buddies. Also perhaps not atypically, one has had much more professional success than the other. Rajan was hired straight into a prestigious tenure-track position. He published a string of well-regarded articles which earned him quick tenure and, recently, promotion to full Professor. Now he is considering a prestigious job offer from another leading department. Matthew, in contrast, struggled through three temporary positions before finally landing a job at a relatively unselective state school. He has published a couple of articles and book reviews, suffered some ugly department politics, and is now facing an uncertain tenure decision. Understandably, Matthew is somewhat envious of Rajan – a fact he explicitly admits to Rajan over afternoon coffee in the conference hotel. Rajan is finishing his first book project and Matthew is halfway through reading Rajan’s draft.

Matthew, as I’m imagining him, is not generally an envious character; he has a generous spirit. The well-wishes he utters to Rajan are sincerely felt at the time of utterance, not a sham. Picturing Rajan as the next David Lewis makes Matthew smile and chuckle with a good-natured shake of the head. There would be something truly cool about that, Matthew thinks – though the fact that he explicitly thinks that thought in that particular way already reveals a kind of ambivalence. Matthew intends to give Rajan his best advice about book revisions. He plans to recommend the book warmly to influential people he knows, including the program chair of the Pacific Division APA. At the same time, though, it’s true that were Matthew to read a devastating review of Rajan’s book, he would feel a kind of shameful pleasure, while seeing a glowing review in a top venue would bring a painful pang. In drafting out thoughts about the book, Matthew finds himself sometimes resentful of the effort, and he finds himself somewhat unhappy when he reads a particularly fresh and clever argument in the draft, wishing he had come up with that argument himself instead – though when he notices this about himself, he rebukes himself sharply. If Rajan’s book were to flop, Matthew would love commisserating; if Rajan’s book were to be a great success, that would add to the growing distance between the two friends. In some moments, Matthew admits to himself that he doesn’t really know if he wants the book to succeed or not.

We can, of course, add as much detail to this case as we want -- dispositions pointing in different directions, in whatever balance we wish.

Question: Does Matthew want Rajan's book to succeed?

The best answer, I submit, if we've built the case as I've intended, is "kind of", or "it's an intermediate, messy case". Just as someone might be an extravert in some respects and an introvert in other respects so that neither a plain ascription of "extravert" nor a plain ascription of "introvert" is quite right, so also with the question of whether Matthew wants Rajan's book to succeed. A liberal, dispositional approach to desire captures this ambivalence perfectly: Matthew wants the book to succeed exactly insofar as he matches the broad syndrome and no farther. There need be no "Q" either determinately in or determinately out of his "Desire Box"; there need be no one essential feature. In ascribing a desire, we are pointing toward a folk-psychologically recognizable pattern, and people might fit that pattern very well or not well at all, deviating in different ways and to different degrees.

The implications for self-knowledge of desire I leave as an exercise for the reader.

[For more on my dispositional approach to the attitudes see here.]