Reading Desires

Realistic desires

Realism for agents with unconditional beliefs, desires and intentions (BDI agents) has been analyzed in modal logic. This paper provides a logical analysis of realism for agents with conditional beliefs and desires in a rule based approach analogous to Reiter’s default logic. We distinguish two types of realism, which we call ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ realism. We analyze whether these two n...

Dynamic Desires

Instrumental Desires , Instrumental Rationality

The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more obl...

Desires, Scope and Tense

I want to discuss a certain argument for the claim that definite descriptions are ambiguous between a Russellian quantificational interpretation and a predicational interpretation.1 The argument is found in James McCawley’s (1981) book Everything Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know about Logic (but were ashamed to ask). The argument has also been resuscitated by Richard Larson and Gabriel Sega...

Stereotypes, Desires, and Constructions

This paper develops a semantic analysis of the three constructions: (i) the subjectoriented adverb construction (Wisely, John left early), (ii) the ‘Adj. + to Inf.’ construction (John was wise to leave early), and (iii) the ‘Adj. + of NP’ construction (It was wise of John to leave early), which all involve three semantic components: (i) an individual a (John), (ii) a property P1 that describes ...