Ludwig’s Punch and Bertie’s Comeback: Reconciling Russell and Wittgenstein on the Content of Desires
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Desires are contentful mental states. But what determines the content of a desire? Two different classic answers were proposed by Russell and by Wittgenstein, starting in the s. Russell proposed a behaviourist account according to which the content of the desire is fixed by the type of state that puts an end to the relevant kind of behaviour which was triggered by some initial discomfort. The desire's content consists in its "satisfaction conditions". Wittgenstein criticized such an account for neglecting the crucial point that the relation between a desire and its content is a conceptual, internal one, not an external contingent one. Desires specify their own contents, their "fulfillment conditions". Even though there is a lot to say in favour of Wittgenstein's criticism, this paper argues that Russell pointed at an important aspect of desires which plays a crucial role for accounts of self-knowledge of one's own desires. It turns out fulfillment conditions and satisfaction conditions are tied together in rational self-knowledge of one's own desires. In this sense, the views of Russell and Wittgenstein can be combined in a fruitful way.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".