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...

In theory of mind research, there is a long standing dispute about whether children come to understand the subjectivity of both desires and beliefs at the same time (around age 4), or whether there is an asymmetry such that desires are understood earlier. To address this issue, 3-year olds’ understanding of situations in which two persons have mutually incompatible desires was tested in two stu...

Traditional models of agents based on Beliefs, Desires and Intentions usually only include either desires or goals. Therefore the process whereby goals arise from desires is given scant attention. In this paper we argue that the inclusion of both desires and goals in the same model can be important, particularly in a Multi-Agent System context, where other sources of individual motivation such ...

Children can recover beliefs from knowledge of an agent’s actions and desires, or desires from her actions and beliefs. However, both beliefs and desires are sometimes unknown and underdetermined by agents’ actions. Here we ask how emotional expressions might support mental-state inferences that are otherwise ambiguous given agents’ actions. We present two experiments, showing that children (me...

In intentional agents, actions are derived from the mental attitudes and their relationships. In particular, preferences (positive desires) and restrictions (negative desires) are important proactive attitudes which guide agents to intentions and eventually to actions. In this paper, we present a general logical framework to represent and reasoning about gradual notions of desires and intention...

As part of an effort to define a unified formal semantics for beliefs, desires and action, this paper sketches a model theory for the axiological aspects of agent theory: hedonic states, likes, goals and values. Particular attention is paid to modelling the intensity of likes. The main intuition underlying the model theory is that the axiological aspects of agent theory can be modelled through ...

It is generally thought that living things have desires for conformity as well as desires for differentiation, which makes their preferences show fashion. Recently, it was shown that there were fashion in preferences of how female birds chose their mates. We think fashion in female preferences for a mate is related to their desires and that the strengths of desires among living species are gene...

Plato links pleasure with illusion, and this link explains his rejection of the view that all desires are rational desires for the good. The Protagoras and Gorgias show connections between pleasure and illusion; the Republic develops these into a psychological theory. One part of the soul is not only prone to illusions, but also incapable of the kind of reasoning that can dispel them. Pleasure ...