Desire-as-belief revisited

Desire-as-belief revisited

On Humeís account of motivation, beliefs and desires are very di§erent kinds of propositional attitudes. Beliefs are cognitive attitudes, desires emotive ones. An agentís belief in a proposition captures the weight he or she assigns to this proposition in his or her cognitive representation of the world. An agentís desire for a proposition captures the degree to which he or she prefers its trut...

Richard Bradley and Christian List Desire - as - belief revisited

1 Desire beyond Belief

David Lewis [1988, 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the ‘Desire-as-Belief Thesis’. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis’. We explore ways of being antiHumean that evade a...

Belief-desire reasoning as a process of selection.

Human learning may depend upon domain specialized mechanisms. A plausible example is rapid, early learning about the thoughts and feelings of other people. A major achievement in this domain, at about age four in the typically developing child, is the ability to solve problems in which the child attributes false beliefs to other people and predicts their actions. The main focus of theorizing ha...

The Belief-Desire-Intention Model of Agency

Australian AI Institute, Level 6, 171 La Trobe St Melbourne, Australia 3000 [email protected] † RIACS, NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000, USA [email protected] ‡ Department of Computer Science/Intelligent Systems Program University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA [email protected] # Computer Science Department/ISI, University of Southern California 4676...