Papers
Desires as Sub-agential Evaluations of the Good
According to unqualified versions of the “guise of the good” theory of desire, an agent desires φ only if that agent believes that φ is good. Such theories make having the belief that φ is good a necessary condition for desiring φ. However, this precludes the possibility of nonlinguistic animals—that lack the concept of the good—from having desires. In this paper I offer an alternative to the unqualified “guise of the good” theory of desires, which allows for the possibility of nonlinguistic animals having desires. To this end, I argue that to desire φ is for φ to be evaluated as good by some subsystem of the agent, where the criterion of evaluation is determined by the agent's biological context.
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McDowell's Account of Perceptual Knowledge
Draft Only
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