Doxastic desire and Attitudinal Monism

Type of content
Journal Article
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
en
Date
2018
Authors
Campbell, Douglas
Abstract

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht How many attitudes must be posited at the level of reductive bedrock in order to reductively explain all the rest? Motivational Humeans hold that at least two attitudes are indispensable, belief and desire. Desire-As-Belief theorists beg to differ. They hold that the belief attitude can do the all the work the desire attitude is supposed to do, because desires are in fact nothing but beliefs of a certain kind. If this is correct it has major implications both for the philosophy of mind, with regards the problem of naturalizing the propositional attitudes, and for metaethics, with regards Michael Smith’s ‘moral problem’. This paper defends a version of Desire-As-Belief, and shows that it is immune to several major objections commonly levelled against such theories.

Description
Citation
Campbell DI (2018). Doxastic desire and Attitudinal Monism. Synthese. 195(3). 1139-1161.
Keywords
Propositional attitudes, Belief, Desire, Motivational Humeanism, Cognitivism, Internalism
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Fields of Research::50 - Philosophy and religious studies::5003 - Philosophy::500305 - Epistemology
Rights
All rights reserved unless otherwise stated