<i>Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality</i> , by Alex Gregory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A traditional Humean view about motivation says that only desires motivate action. This theory meshes with the familiar ‘directions of fit’ metaphor: while beliefs aim to fit the world, desires aim to change it. In this way, desires and beliefs appear to be different types of mental state. But such appearances may be misleading. The central aim of Alex Gregory’s Desire as Belief is to defend the unorthodox thesis that desires (or equivalently, wants) are nothing more than beliefs with a particular normative content, an idea with Aristotelian and Stoic roots (see p. 20). In particular, the proposal is that to desire something amounts to believing that you have a reason to bring it about. It is beliefs of this sort, combined with instrumental beliefs, that explain motivation. Gregory’s book is a consistently impressive defence of what he calls desire-as-belief. Chapter 1 clarifies desire-as-belief by way of an analogy with the mental state of disbelieving. To talk of disbelief, on a straightforward analysis, is to talk jointly of an attitude and a content. That is, disbelieving that p doesn’t seem to refer to a sui generis attitude of disbelieving but rather a belief, namely a belief that not-p. In similar fashion, desire-as-belief says that my desiring that p consists of an attitude – belief – with a certain content – that I have a reason to bring about p. Such first-personal beliefs about reasons are special in that they have both aforementioned directions of fit. They aim to conform to the world insofar as they are correct just in case the belief is true; and they aim to change it insofar as such beliefs dispose the desirer to act according to the relevant reasons.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".