In this paper I offer a defense of the motivational theory of desire. According to the motivational view, a desire is basically a disposition to bring about the desire's content. First, I argue that two rival views on the nature of desire, the evaluative theory and the deontic theory, fall prey to the problem of the death of desire and that, when one tries to develop a plausible version of these theories which is able to overcome this problem, one ends (...) up with a view that is not relevantly different from the evaluative view. Second, I respond to some objections to the claim that motivations are sufficient for desire, namely, the Radioman objection and the objection that some motivational states like intentions and habits are not desires. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Charles L. Stevenson’s metaethical view. Since his metaethical view is a form of emotivism, I will start by explaining what the core claims of emotivism are. I will then explore and comment on the specific claims of Stevenson’s proposal. Last, I will offer an overview of the objections that have traditionally been raised against emotivism.

This article intends to analyze, in general, the romantic roots of Wittgenstein thought and, specifically, what could have been the position of Wittgenstein, especially the second Wittgenstein, on the philosophical problem of the language-reality relationship. No doubt it is a bold exercise, since Wittgenstein did not openly deal with this question, and would have considered it nonsense. However, its elucidation- the idea that Wittgenstein was committed to antirealism- seems to make his conception of language more understandable, and in particular how (...) private languages would not be possible. (shrink)

A total of 104 children aged between 41 and 47 months were selected to study the relationship between language and false belief understanding. Participants were assigned to four different training conditions: discourse, labelling, control, and sentential complements. Post-test results showed an improvement in children"s false belief understanding in the discourse and the labelling conditions, but not in the sentential complements with non-deceptive objects or the control group. Furthermore, the most remarkable improvement in false belief understanding occurred in the labelling group. (...) These results suggest that some types of linguistic experience promote the development of false belief understanding, provided that differing perspectives are confronted. (shrink)

Previous research has found a link between theory of mind and cooperation. The aim of this study is to deepen into this relationship, to identify which theory of mind skills are more related to the cooperative capacity on a referential communication task. A total of 50 children from first and fifth grade completed a battery of theory of mind tasks, and also a cooperative task where children worked in pairs to build block models. Each pair was composed by a builder (...) and a guide, who gave instructions to his partner about how to build a replica of the model. The results show a significant relationship between the theory of mind skills and cooperation. Specifically, we found that the second-order false-belief task was the variable most related to cooperation after controlling the effect of age. In addition, we observed that the mentalist skills were more important for cooperation in the builders than in the guides. Finally, we discuss the findings of this study and make suggestions for the future. (shrink)