Alex Gregory's "Desire as Belief"

Alex Gregory is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He has published most frequently on the nature of desire, but also on other issues such as the nature of normative reasons, the nature of disability, and questions about wellbeing.

Gregory applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality, and reported the following:

From page 99:

A fourth way in which our beliefs can be irrational is that they can be recalcitrant. By this, I mean that they can persist over time even if conscious reflection concludes in their rejection. For example, you might consciously avow that women and men are intellectual equals, and yet still find yourself acting and making inferences as though they are not, as when you treat intelligent women as surprising outliers. Or for another example, imagine that you have been going to yoga on Wednesday nights for many years, but then give up. If you have been going for long enough, you might find yourself habitually believing that you have yoga on Wednesday, even though you consciously know this is mistaken. Such recalcitrance is obviously also possible with our normative beliefs. For example, you might consciously judge that planes are 100 per cent safe and yet still find yourself acting and making inferences as though they are not, such as by making the effort to check whether the wings look wobbly. Or, for another example, you might consciously judge that you have no significant reason to meet your ex-boyfriend, but persistently find yourself thinking that you should. In such cases, you might have desires that you consciously reject (see also §7.5, and Enoch 2011, 228–9).

In summary, our beliefs can be irrational because we form them quickly, because they are oversensitive to particularly salient facts, because they are biased by wishful thinking, and because they are recalcitrant. Desire-as-belief predicts that our desires can be irrational in these very same ways: they can be impulsive, oversensitive to the near, biased, and recalcitrant. To this extent, desire-as-belief predicts that our desires can be irrational. And to repeat, these were just illustrations of the more general point: according to desire-as-belief, any common failure with respect to belief formation is bound to also be a common failure with respect to desire formation. In this way, desire-as-belief is certainly not a view on which our desires are always rational. If the objections from underwanting and overwanting merely amount to the thought that we can be irrational in what we desire, then they are not objections to desire-as-belief at all.

Does this page give a good sense of the book as a whole? Yes and no. Yes, because the book defends a certain view about desire - "desire-as-belief" - and these passages are clearly engaged in that task. Obviously, this is just one very small part of the wider defence of that view, but as samples go it's probably as representative as any other small sample. In fact, possibly one of the main objections to the theory in the book is that desires can't be beliefs of any kind, because desires are too "hot": they are wildly fluctuating irrational features of our mental lives, in contrast to our cold and boring intellectual beliefs. The passages above are not the only thing I say about that objection, but they are part of the story: our beliefs can definitely be wild and irrational too, and so there's no straightforward problem here for the idea that desires might be a kind of belief.

But nonetheless it's not clear whether this passage gives a perfect sense of the book. One central problem is that someone coming to the book from the outside would have little idea what "desire-as-belief" was, or why we might be interested in it. That person would get no help from this particular passage, which focuses on the nitty gritty of one very specific objection to the view. The book is structured so that the opening chapter explains the view and the following chapters present some reasons for thinking it true, in part because it explains some interesting facts about human motivation and rationality. Those issues are of clear intrinsic interest. The later chapters of the book - including the one containing the quote above – are more defensive, and focus on explaining how the view can overcome various objections. I do think there is intrinsic interest to those chapters, but probably they are of *most* interest if you were already engaged in the broader topic. To put that another way, the book is really designed to be read from the start onwards. But the test was nonetheless fun! And I can see that you at least get a sense of the style of a book in this way - but in this case, you probably learn only that the book is (predictably) written in the style of much contemporary academic philosophy.

Visit Alex Gregory's webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue