1,721,135 research outputs found
How verbal reports of desire may mislead
No full textWe each have many desires, and we sometimes report the existence of such desires. I might tell you that I don’t want any dessert, that she does want to marry you, or that my parents want to buy a house. In this paper I highlight two noteworthy features of assertions about our desires, and then highlight two ways in which they can mislead us into drawing unwarranted conclusions about desire. Some of our assertions may indicate that we are sometimes motivated independently of desire, and other assertions may suggest that there are vast divergences between our normative judgements and our desires. But I suggest that some such assertions are, in this respect, potentially misleading, and have in fact misled authors such as Russ Shafer-Landau (2003), Jack Woods (2014), and Tim Scanlon (1998)
Desire as belief: a study of desire, motivation, and rationality
No full textWhat is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire? This book defends ‘desire-as-belief’, the view that desires are just a special subset of our beliefs: normative beliefs. This view entitles us to accept orthodox models of human motivation and rationality that explain those things with reference to desire, but nonetheless to also make room for our normative beliefs to play a role in those domains. And this view tells us to diverge from the orthodox view on which desires themselves can never be right or wrong. Rather, according to desire-as-belief, our desires can themselves be assessed for their accuracy, and they are wrong when they misrepresent normative features of the world. Hume says that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger, but he is wrong: it is foolish to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger, and this is foolish because this preference misrepresents the relative worth of these things
Load-bearing role of the human knee meniscus
No full textThesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University--Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Program in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics, 1990.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-203).by Gregory Alexander Brown.Ph.D
Disability as inability
Get PDFIf we were to write down all those things that we ordinarily categorise as disabilities, the resulting list might appear to be extremely heterogeneous. What do disabilities have in common? In this paper I defend the view that disabilities should be understood as particular kinds of inability. I show how we should formulate this view, and in the process defend the view from various objections. For example, I show how the view can allow that common kinds of inability are not disabilities, can allow that minor kinds of inability are rightly not described as disabilities, and can allow that socially imposed inabilities need not be disabilities. In the second half of the paper, I show that this theory is superior to rival theories. I criticize the wellbeing theory of disability (Kahane and Savulescu 2009, Savulescu and Kahane 2011, Harris 2001) and conventionalist theories of disability (e.g. Barnes 2016). Finally, I show how the inability theory is consistent with the best versions of the social model of disability
Why do desires rationalize actions?
Get PDFI begin the paper by outlining one classic argument for the guise of the good: that we must think that desires represent their objects favourably in order to explain why they can make actions rational (Quinn 1995; Stampe 1987). But what exactly is the conclusion of this argument? Many have recently formulated the guise of the good as the view that desires are akin to perceptual appearances of the good (Oddie 2005; Stampe 1987; Tenenbaum 2007). But I argue that this view fails to capitalize on the above argument, and that the argument is better understood as favouring a view on which desires are belief-like states. I finish by addressing some countervailing claims made by Avery Archer (2016)
Are all normative judgments desire-like?
Get PDFIn this paper I first argue against one attractive formulation of the motivation argument, and against one attractive formulation of non-cognitivism. I do so by example: I suggest that other-regarding normative judgements do not seem to have motivational powers and do not seem to be desires. After defending these two claims, I argue that other views can accommodate the motivational role of normative judgement without facing this objection. For example, desire-as-belief theories do so, since such theories only say that some normative judgements constitute desires, not that all such judgements do so. (I also briefly present similar reasoning in favour of the claim that desire-as-belief is superior to non-cognitivism with respect to the Frege-Geach objection.) In short, I argue that if we are seeking a theory that explains the motivational role of normative judgement, some theories are better than others insofar as they do so without committing to the claim that all normative judgements play such a motivational role
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