Thagard, P. (forthcoming). Desires are not propositional attitudes. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review. Tim Schroeder’s Three Faces of Desire is an excellent contribution to naturalistic

Thagard, P. (forthcoming). Desires are not propositional attitudes. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review. Tim Schroeder's Three Faces of Desire is an excellent contribution to naturalistic philosophy of mind, in the grand tradition of Aristotle, Hume, Quine, and Patricia and Paul Churchland. He develops a rich and plausible theory of desire with strong connections both to neuroscience and to everyday cases. This theory ties desire to reward rather than just to behavioral dispositions or the experience of pleasure. Far from abandoning the ordinary concept of desire, he enhances and expands it through the development of a generally convincing neuropsychological theory. However, there is one crucial respect in which Schroeder has failed to throw off the intellectual shackles of linguistic philosophy. He assumes, in keeping with the understanding of mental states that derives from Frege and Russell, that desires are propositional attitudes. He states his Reward Theory of Desire as follows: " To have an intrinsic (positive) desire that P is to use the capacity to perceptually or cognitively represent that P to constitute P as a reward. " (Schroeder, 2004, p. 131). All the desires discussed by Schroeder are desires that something. Taking desires as propositional attitudes is implausible for humans, and even more implausible for animals with more limited representational capacities. Here are some examples: Andrew desires a beer. Ron desires ice cream.