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 ...

We developed a gift-giving task requiring children to identify their mother's desire, when her desire differed from theirs. We found a developmental change: 3- and 4-year-olds performed more poorly than 5-year-olds (Experiment 1). A modified version of this task (Experiment 2) revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds whose desires had been fulfilled chose an appropriate gift for their mothers sign...

It turned out that there was no phlogiston, no caloric fluid, and no luminiferous ether. Might it turn out that there are no beliefs and desires? Patricia and Paul Churchland say yes. ~ We say no. In part one we give our positive argument for the existence of beliefs and desires, and in part two we offer a diagnosis of what has misled the Churchlands into holding that it might very well turn ou...

We describe a framework for specifying conditional desires “desire CY by E degrees if ,8” and evaluating preference queries “would you prefer ~1 over ~2 given $” under uncertainty. We refine the semantics presented in (Tan & Pearl 1994) to allow conditional desires to be overridden by more specific desires in the database. Within this framework, we also enable consideration of surprising worlds...