How Is Wishful Seeing Like Wishful Thinking?

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2):408-435 (2017)
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Abstract

This paper makes the case that when wishful thinking ill-founds belief, the belief depends on the desire in ways can be recapitulated at the level of perceptual experience. The relevant kinds of desires include motivations, hopes, preferences, and goals. I distinguish between two modes of dependence of belief on desire in wishful thinking: selective or inquiry-related, and responsive or evidence-related. I offers a theory of basing on which beliefs are badly-based on desires, due to patterns of dependence that can found in the relationship between experiences and desires as well. This conclusion brings us a large part of the way to the conclusion that like beliefs, experiences can be ill-founded by depending on a desire.

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Author's Profile

Susanna Siegel
Harvard University

References found in this work

Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
The Modularity of Mind.Robert Cummins & Jerry Fodor - 1983 - Philosophical Review 94 (1):101.
Knowledge and its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):200-201.
What is inference?Paul Boghossian - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 169 (1):1-18.
The epistemic impact of the etiology of experience.Susanna Siegel - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 162 (3):697-722.

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