The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional “informed desire” tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

: The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional "informed desire" tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional “informed desire” tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

This paper extends previous work of mine on a view of human well-being that is a hybrid of objective-list theories and desire theories. Though some of what I say traverses old ground, much of what I say is new – new, that is, not in terms of ultimate conclusions, but rather in terms of (a) routes toward these ultimate conclusions and (b) certain implications of these ultimate conclusions (e.g., implications concerning the measurement of well-being). There are two (...) different visions of what human beings are that I privilege and attempt to synthesize in this paper. One of these visions pushes us toward an objective-list theory. This vision is a broadly Aristotelian one according to which humans have various capacities that are central to their functioning well as the kinds of things they are, that is, as human beings. Though this broadly Aristotelian vision captures something necessary for well-being, it is, as it were, only half of the story. The other half of the story derives from a vision of human beings as unique individuals with different sets of intrinsic desires, and this desire-focused vision of humans is itself informed by Jacques Lacan and his view that each human self is constituted by a particular and dynamic chains-of-signifiers-plus-desire-flow structure. I start by briefly discussing mental state theories (section 1). Then I discuss objective-list theories at some length (sections 2-3), and, while doing this, I occasionally comment on pro-attitude theories (e.g., desire theories). After that, I present the hybrid theory of well-being that I favor and defend it against some objections (section 4). Lastly, I conclude the paper (section 5). (shrink)

This paper is a criticism of full-information theories of welfare. Such theories unsuccessfully attempt to accommodate an internalist intuition (that one's good depends in some way on one's desires or hypothetical desire) with a rationalist intuition (that only fully-informed desires are relevant to one's good).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deceit, Desire, and The Dunciad:Mimetic Theory and Alexander PopeAllan Doolittle (bio)Anxiety expressed over what is often termed "information overload"1 is by no means solely a phenomenon of our electronic age. Recent scholarship has traced this concern as far back as the early modern period. The increased production and dissemination of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a source of "wonder and anxiety"2 for authors and prompted (...) the need for a "substantial reorganization of the intellectual world."3 Seventeenth-century French scholar and critic Adrien Baillet gave warning of an impending barbarism unless there was a "separating [of] those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save."4 The most recognizable expression of this imperative to sort the printed wheat from the chaff comes from the voices of some of eighteenth-century England's most studied, most admired, yet also detested authors, the Scriblerians. From this celebrated literary group came "the three great Tory satires, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, John Gay's Fables and Alexander Pope's The Dunciad."5Christian Thorne, in his discussion of these works in relation to the rise of the public sphere in early modern England, defines the Scriblerian rallying cry as a protest against "the rise of print culture... in which signification will [End Page 1] run amok, flooding the polity with an undifferentiated mass of contradictory opinions and arguments and thus corroding traditional forms of citizenship or civic virtue."6 Pope saw the deluge of aspiring authors and their printed output as a destructive force, a force that had a leveling effect on what he perceived as the traditional structure of the cultural hierarchy. In this article, I will look specifically at the career of Alexander Pope and his lifelong struggle against all but a small number of those who populated what Samuel Johnson called the "Age of Authors."Pope's career is indelibly marked with conflict. This conflict stemmed from Pope's untiring efforts to regulate the field in which he worked, to promote himself and his friends, and to do everything at his disposal to thwart the efforts of those whom he saw as threatening his literary endeavors. His adversaries, most often the professional ranks of Grub Street writers and publishers, served as fodder for Pope's satire and were deeply entwined in Pope's literary output. However, the adversaries he most wanted to be rid of—the primary target of his purposeful and brilliant satire—were not the "hackney scribblers" typical of Grub Street but those most threatening to Pope's professional writing career: "verbal critics" or literary scholars.7 The threat came in the form of the newly emerging critical techniques of philological scholarship. It is my contention that the literary scholars possessed knowledge that Pope showed himself to be desirous of, but that he was incapable of attaining.In this paper I will apply René Girard's mimetic theory both to Pope's relationships with these scholars and to his depiction of them in The Dunciad. The application of Girard's theory helps to explain Pope's motivation in writing, expanding, and obsessing over a poem that was seemingly more trouble than it was worth. The publication history of the poem, which is "exceedingly complicated,"8 "cost [Pope] as much pains as anything [he] ever wrote"9 and brought down an avalanche of ridicule and abuse on him, prompting many to wonder "what can possibly have impelled him to do what he did?"10 This article will go some distance toward answering this question and will also provide insight into the way The Dunciad operated in the service of Pope's attempt to shape the literary culture of early-eighteenth-century England. I will do what no critic to date has yet attempted: I will use Girard's theory to clarify the relationship between Pope's work with the classics and that of his rival classical scholars, and to show how these two threads are woven into his magnum opus, The Dunciad.René Girard's insightful and controversial theory of the nature and origin of human culture may be grouped into three... (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that autonomous decision-making requires that the decision-maker’s desires are authentic, i.e., “genuine,” “truly her own,” “not out of character,” or similar. In this article, it is argued that a method to reliably determine the authenticity (or inauthenticity) of a desire cannot be developed. A taxonomy of characteristics displayed by different theories of authenticity is introduced and applied to evaluate such theories categorically, in contrast to the prior approach of treating them individually. The conclusion (...) is drawn that, in practice, the authenticity of desires cannot be reliably determined. It is suggested that authenticity should therefore not be employed in informed consent practices in healthcare. (shrink)

The aim of this special collection of essays, titled Intersubjectivity, Desire, and Mimetic Theory: René Girard and Psychoanalysis, is to reappraise the relationship between René Girard's thought and the psychoanalytic tradition. The tripartite structure of the title clearly echoes the English title of Girard's first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with which he introduced the psychological dynamics of mimetic desire as represented in modern European novels.1 Through the reference to the intentionally broad notions of "intersubjectivity," " (...) class='Hi'>desire," and "mimetic theory," our title also signals the intention to cover the multifarious aspects and issues that inform Girard's thinking in relation to core issues of... (shrink)

It seems to be a widely shared view that any defensible desire-fulfillment theory of welfare must be framed not in terms of what an agent, in fact, desires but rather in terms of what an agent would desire under hypothetical conditions that include improved information. Unfortunately, though, such accounts are subject to serious criticisms. In this paper I show that in the face of these criticisms the best response is to jettison any appeal to idealized information conditions: the (...) considerations put forward in support of the appeal to what would be desired in hypothetical circumstances of improved information do not, in fact, give adequate reason to make that appeal. (shrink)

This paper argues that, in light of Dead Sea apple cases, we should reject desire-fulfillment welfare theories (DF theories). Dead Sea apples are apples that look attractive while hanging on the tree, but which dissolve into smoke or ashes once plucked. Accordingly, Dead Sea apple cases are cases where an agent desires something and then gets it, only to find herself disappointed by what she has gotten. This paper covers both actual DF theories and hypothetical (or (...) idealized) DF theories. On actual DF theories the agent’s well-being is determined by her actual desires, while on hypothetical DF theories the agent’s well-being is determined by the desires that she would have if she were fully and vividly informed with respect to non-evaluative information. Various actual and hypothetical DF theory responses to Dead Sea apple objections are considered, and all such responses are argued to be inadequate. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 221 - 248 One of the peculiarities of Peter Abelard’s analysis of incomplete and non-assertive sentences is his use of the notion of desire: in both _Dialectica_ and _Glosses on Peri hermeneias_ the terms _desiderium_ and _desidero_ move to the foreground side by side with _optatio, expectatio, suspensio_ and the related verbs. Desire plays a structural role in Abelard’s descriptions of the compositional way in which the linguistic message is received, changing (...) step by step from incomplete to complete: the person who receives the incomplete message desires to get further information through other words since he knows that the purpose of such words or sequences of words is to combine with other words in order to form a complete sentence. On the other hand, the expression of the speaker’s attention to his inner affections renders the same semantic content a different complete sentence. (shrink)

This dissertation interprets the lack of uniqueness in probability representations of agents' degrees of belief in the decision theory of Richard Jeffrey as a formal statement of an important epistemological problem: the underdetermination of our attributions of belief and desire to agents by the evidence of their observed behaviour. A solution is pursued through investigation of agents' attitudes to information of a conditional nature. ;As a first step, Jeffrey's theory is extended to agents' conditional attitudes of belief and (...) class='Hi'>desire by introduction of a definition of conditional desirability. The second step is an analysis of agents' attitudes to conditionals. Following Adams it is argued that the probability of a conditional is the conditional probability of its consequent given the antecedent. Since numerous 'trivialization' results show that no proposition could be such that this were the case, it is proposed that conditionals express a variable proposition as a function of the context in which they are asserted. The consequent technical treatment of conditionals as proposition-valued functions of sets of possible worlds delivers Adams' thesis as a natural consequence without fear of trivialization. ;Conditionals are the underlying objects of the decision theory that is presented in the final chapter. A representation theorem is proven for preferences defined over sets of such conditionals satisfying certain closure conditions, where an agent is understood to prefer one conditional over another just in case she prefers that the former by true rather than the latter. The theorem establishes that a rational preference ranking of conditionals implies the existence of a unique probability function and a desirability function unique up to choice of scale, that agree with the preference ranking, and that these functions satisfy both the axioms of Jeffrey's decision calculus and Adams' thesis. The theorem is interpreted as saying that elicitation of an agent's choices amongst conditional options suffices to determine our attributions of belief and desire to them. (shrink)

Taking as a starting point for his quest the teaching received from the Hebrew prophets and transmitted by the people of Israel, Claude Tresmontant identifies in it the specific moment where an entirely new and creative thought is introduced in the history of mankind. Trained in philosophy of science and conscious of the discipline involved in a rigorous experimental method as a key to valid and true knowledge, Claude Tresmontant boldly recreated bridges, long destroyed, between science and philosophy of nature, (...) as well as metaphysics and theology. Following an immense effort, he has found back, stringently and often on his own, a unifying concept capable of integrating the experience and the questions of today's man: "...the central question is that of integrating the teaching of creation and that of revelation in the unity of an intelligible vision of the world, desirable, and verifiable..." as he said himself in the preface to L'histoire de l'univers et le sens de la Création. This immense, powerful and thought-provoking work is here presented by a young philosopher, long time correspondent of Claude Tresmontant, who benefited from decisive moments of encounter with him. (shrink)

To desire something is a condition familiar to everyone. It is uncontroversial that desiring has something to do with motivation, something to do with pleasure, and something to do with reward. Call these "the three faces of desire." The standard philosophical theory at present holds that the motivational face of desire presents its unique essence--to desire a state of affairs is to be disposed to act so as to bring it about. A familiar but less standard (...) account holds the hedonic face of desire to reveal to true nature of desire. In this view, to desire something is to tend to pleasure if it seems that the desired state of affairs has been achieved, or displeasure if it seems otherwise, thus tying desire to feelings instead of actions. In Three Faces of Desire, Schroeder goes beyond actions and feelings to advance a novel and controversial theory of desire that puts the focus on desire's neglected face, reward. Informed by contemporary science as much as by the philosophical tradition, Three Faces of Desire discusses recent scientific discoveries that tell us much about the way that actions and feelings are produced in the brain. In particular, recent experiments reveal that a distinctive system is responsible for promoting action, on the one hand, and causing feelings of pleasure and displeasure, on the other. This system, the brain's reward system, is the causal origin of both action and feeling, and is the key to understanding the nature of desire. (shrink)

Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country). Mapping Desire explores the places and spaces of sexuality from body to community, from the "cottage" to the Barrio, from Boston to Jakarta, from home to cyberspace. Mapping Desire is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desires presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, (...) exploring how the heterosexed body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. Editors David Bell and Gill Valentine have brought together contributors with a wealth of approaches to ways in which the spaces of sex and the sexes of space are being mapped out across contemporary culture. Among the many sexual geographies covered are: Lesbians at home and on the streets; gay men on fantasy islands; bisexual identities; The heterosexualization of the workplace; bachelor farmers and spinsters; surveillance and sexuality; prostitution; queer politics; sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualized spaces: global/local; sexualized spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature. Mapping Desire will be a valuable and accessible travelogue of information for anyone interested in social, cultural and political geography, lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, or simply those who want to find out more about the sexual landscape of contemporary society. Contents: Part I: Cartographies/Identities; Resolving Riddles: The Sexed Body, Julia Cream ; Locating Bisexual Identities: Discourses of Bisexuality and Contemporary Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings; Of Moffies, Kaffiers and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State, Glen Elder; Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets (a Play on Whores), Alison Murray; Body Work: The Performance of Gendered and (Hetero)Sexualized Identities in City Workplaces, Linda McDowell; Part II: Sexualized Spaces: Global/Local; Whenever I Lay My Girlfriend That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments, Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine; The Lesbian Flaneur, Sally Munt; Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of Marooned Masculinities, Gregory Woods; Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis, Lawrence Knopp; Part III: Sexualized Spaces: Local/Global; "And She Told Two Friends...": Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space, Tamar Rothenberg; Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space, Jon Binnie; Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota, Jerry Lee Kramer; (Re)Constructing a Spanish Redlight District: Prostitution, Space and Power, Angie Hart; Part IV: Sites of Resistance; "Surveilliant Gays": HIV, Space and the Construction of Identities, David Woodhead; Sex, Scale and the "New Urban Politics": HIV-Prevention Strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver, Michael Brown; "Boom, Bye, Bye": Jamaican Ragga and Gay Resistance, Tracey Skelton; The Diversity of Queer Politics and the Redefinition of Sexual Identity and Community in Urban Space, Tim Davis; Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy, David Bell; Guide to Further Reading; Bibliography. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different approaches (...) to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

The note puts forward the idea of revealed desirability, a novel instrument, which like revealed preference is observable from choice and important for individual and social welfare. We provide the axiomatic underlying individual’s choice model, preliminary experimental results that support the idea, and an appealing allocation rule that uses the revealed desirability information along with the revealed-preference information.

A number of philosophers working under the rubric of “experimental philosophy” have recently begun focusing on analyzing the concepts of ordinary language and investigating the intuitions of laypersons in an empirically informed way.¹ In a series of papers these philosophers—who often work in collaboration with psychologists—have presented the results of empirical studies aimed at proving folk intuitions in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, free will, and the philosophy of action. In this paper, I contribute to this research program (...) by discussing the results of some new experiments that further probe folk intuitions about the relationship between desire, foresight, intent, intentional action, and moral considerations. (shrink)

Background:Psychiatric nurses are regularly confronted with the uses and effects of control interventions such as mechanical restraints. Although there are evident tensions in the literature regarding the use of mechanical restraints, very little research has focused on the lived and embodied experience of their use, whether from the patient’s perspective or the perspective of nursing staff responsible for their application.Research aims: to gain access to the bodily phenomenon of being placed in mechanical restraints; to give voice to the intimate experiential (...) understanding of this experience; and through phenomenological interpretation, to understand the subjective processes and meaning-making of this experience.Research design:For this research, we adopted a distinctly ethics-oriented application of the methodology known as interpretative phenomenological analysis, that is, the interpretive dimension of the research focused on ethical practice in mental healthcare – one that is informed by experiential accounts of the lived body.Participants and research context:A total of 40 in-depth semi-structured, nondirected interviews with both nurses and patients we conducted to meet the aims of this article. Participants were recruited from an inpatient psychiatric unit of a Canadian general hospital.Ethical considerations:The research received research ethics board clearance from both the hospital where the study took place and the University of Ottawa.Findings:The comparative analysis is presented under the following headings: context of care, meaning of quality of care, emotional reactions and nurse–patient relationship, meeting the needs and need for alternatives.Discussion/conclusions:The research findings are discussed in light of current literature and implications for practice. (shrink)

The brain is composed of electrically excitable neuronal networks regulated by the activity of voltage-gated ion channels. Further portraying the molecular composition of the brain, however, will not reveal anything remotely reminiscent of a feeling, a sensation or a conscious experience. In classical physics, addressing the mind–brain problem is a formidable task because no physical mechanism is able to explain how the brain generates the unobservable, inner psychological world of conscious experiences and how in turn those conscious experiences steer the (...) underlying brain processes toward desired behavior. Yet, this setback does not establish that consciousness is non-physical. Modern quantum physics affirms the interplay between two types of physical entities in Hilbert space: unobservable quantum states, which are vectors describing what exists in the physical world, and quantum observables, which are operators describing what can be observed in quantum measurements. Quantum no-go theorems further provide a framework for studying quantum brain dynamics, which has to be governed by a physically admissible Hamiltonian. Comprising consciousness of unobservable quantum information integrated in quantum brain states explains the origin of the inner privacy of conscious experiences and revisits the dynamic timescale of conscious processes to picosecond conformational transitions of neural biomolecules. The observable brain is then an objective construction created from classical bits of information, which are bound by Holevo’s theorem, and obtained through the measurement of quantum brain observables. Thus, quantum information theory clarifies the distinction between the unobservable mind and the observable brain, and supports a solid physical foundation for consciousness research. (shrink)

Contemporary Information Systems management incorporates the need to make explicit the links between semiotics, meaning-making and the digital age. This focus addresses, at its core, pure rationality, that is, the capacity of human interpretation and of human inscription upon reality. Creating the new real, that is the motto. Humans are intrinsically semiotic creatures. Consequently, semiotics is not a choice or an option but something that works like a second skin, establishing limits and permeable linkages between: human thought and human's infinite (...) world of imagination; and human action, with its correspondent infinite world of intentionality, of desire and of unexplored possibilities. Two instances are contrasted as two reading lenses of current business reality: IS governance and industry 4.0. These phenomena correspond to the need to take accountability, transparency and responsibility into account, when designing IS and when using such systems through the ecology of connectivity, Big Data and the Internet of Things. Political, social and cultural dimensions are brought into the equation, when addressing the question of the relevance and adequateness of IS theory and practice to respond to contemporary challenges. The message is that what has already been achieved is but a shadow, a pale vision, of what might be achieved in the age of the new Renaissance. (shrink)

Desire-based theories of well-being claim that a person's well-being consists of the satisfaction of her desires. Many of these theories say that well-being consists of the satisfaction of desires that she would have if her desires were "corrected" in various ways. Some versions of this theory claim that the corrections involve having "full information" or being an "ideal observer." I argue that well-being does not depend on what one would desire if she were an “ideal observer.” (...) Rather, it depends on what she would desire if she had as much information as she could have and still maintain her identity as the particular person she is. The paper attempts to spell out this suggestion by constructing a notion of integrity. Roughly, integrity is preserved if one’s most central projects, commitments, and character traits are left in tact. I argue that desire-based theories of well-being should define well-being in terms of the satisfaction of those desires that one would have if one’s epistemic situation were idealized as much as would be consistent with maintaining her integrity. (shrink)

This paper analyzes certain technical details of Floridi’s Theory of Strongly Semantic Information. It provides a clarification regarding desirable properties of degrees of informativeness functions by rejecting three of Floridi’s original constraints and proposing a replacement constraint. Finally, the paper briefly explores the notion of quantities of inaccuracy and shows an analysis that mimics Floridi’s analysis of quantities of vacuity.

This paper analyzes certain technical details of Floridi’s Theory of Strongly Semantic Information. It provides a clarification regarding desirable properties of degrees of informativeness functions by rejecting three of Floridi’s original constraints and proposing a replacement constraint. Finally, the paper briefly explores the notion of quantities of inaccuracy and shows an analysis that mimics Floridi’s analysis of quantities of vacuity.

Findings about the desire for health-risk information are heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory. In particular, they seem to be at variance with established psychological theories of information-seeking behavior.The present paper posits the decision about treating illness with medicine as the causal determinant for the expected net value of information, and attempts to explain idiosyncrasies in information-seeking behavior by using the notion of decision sensitivity to incoming information.Furthermore, active information avoidance is explained by modeling the expected emotional distress potentially brought (...) about by “bad news” as a disutility factor in pay-off maximization.In this context two notions of uncertainty are distinguished: an epistemic uncertainty related to the prognostic probability assigned to the risk, and an emotional uncertainty related to the expected damage. Health-risk information can both reduce epistemic and increase emotional uncertainty, giving rise to idiosyncratic processing strategies. (shrink)

This paper explores the cultural value of desiring nature through reading the travel narratives of Val Plumwood and Alphonso Lingis with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. As Game suggests this textual practice produces different ways of writing the social that undoes the nature/culture opposition informing popular discourses and much cultural theory. Rethinking the value of nature/culture relations has tended to be the domain of environmental philosophy. Yet a cultural analysis also has much to contribute to current debates around value (...) and identity, embodiment and representations of desire. Such a shift requires rethinking the sensory relation between self and nature through the mediation of language. Two quite distinctive experiences of awe provide texts for this analysis. In the desire to know non‐human nature as other, Lingis and Plumwood are moved by a wish to become nearer, to move beyond the bounds of an identity premised on a cultural relation of mastery over nature. These are compelling narratives, for they do not simply indulge the reader in a romantic appreciation of nature's wildness, as if nature was simply an object of aesthetic contemplation and background to the unfolding drama of human identity. These journeys involve disturbing transformations of self; Plumwood travels into the dangerous waters of the crocodile's territory in Kakadu National Park, Australia, while Lingis encounters the uninhabitable terrain of the Antarctic. The reverberating effects of awe produce a movement of becoming ‐ becoming‐animal, becoming‐nature, which contests the Hegelian desire for mastery of nature and the teleological structure of desire itself aimed at unity. Awe as a profoundly disturbing relation, threatens to undo the dominant fantasy of human identity as pure culture, separate from the realm of nature, body and materiality. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with subjective theories of well-being. My goal is to unpack the two leading subjective theories of well-being – informed desire satisfaction accounts and experiential accounts – and to argue that experiential theories should have pride of place. In the course of the paper I also respond to the Experience Machine objection, which is widely taken to be one of the strongest arguments against experiential accounts of well-being. Importantly, I am (...) not claiming that experiential theories of well-being are the best theories of well-being all things considered. My thesis is more modest: if one is attracted to well-being subjectivism, there are good reasons to consider experiential theories superior to informed desire satisfaction theories. (shrink)

Both accessible and definitive, Deleuze and Guattari provides a critical examination of the writing of two notoriously difficult thinkers. This important introduction is divided into three sections--knowledge, power, and desire--and provides a systematic account of the intellectual context as well as an exhaustive analysis of the key themes informing Deleuze and Guattari's work. Providing a framework for reading the important and influential study Capitalism and Schizophrenia, this volume is attentive to the needs of the student by providing a lexicon (...) of the difficult ideas used in Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of philosophy, art, and politics. Deleuze and Guattari is an important addition to the critical literature on some of the most challenging work in recent social theory. It will be the standard introduction to Deleuze and Guattari for students of philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mimetic Desire and the Nigerian Novel:The Case of Chike Momah's Titi: Biafran Maid in GenevaTerri Ochiagha (bio)René Girard's mimetic theory was first informed by Western canonical novels. Girard's paradigm, with its psychological, anthropological, and historical backing, provides explanations for universal phenomena like rivalry, violence, scapegoat mechanisms, and the religious processes of sin and redemption. While it is not reflected in his choice of literary subjects, Girard has (...) endeavored to assert the universality of mimetic desire and its implications in "Other," non-Western cultures. However, little or no attention has been paid to novels that do not circulate primarily within Western canonical circles. To start redressing this gap in the literature, I use Girard's mimetic theory to study a Nigerian novel, Chike Momah's Titi: Biafran Maid in Geneva and show how the paradigm is suited to a novel so distant in space, time, and culture from the famous works that first inspired it. Apart from identifying the nature and phases of mimetic desire that appear in the novel, I propose other possible triangulations of desire, separating out the mimetic from the nonmimetic, and address the possible implications of the homosexual nature of the novel's interracial triangular desire. [End Page 205]A First Encounter with the NovelSince I assume that neither the author nor the novel under discussion are well known to the readers of this article, I will briefly discuss the author and trace the outline of the plot, in order to allow for an uninterrupted flow in my explication of the dialectics of mimetic desire.The situation of Chike Momah in Nigerian letters is singular. He belongs to the Ibadan golden generation of authors, heralded by Chinua Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), and his contemporaries at University College, Ibadan, including the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, plus Chukwuemeka Ike, Elechi Amadi, Christopher Okigbo, Flora Nwapa, and J. P. Clark, among others. Despite his talent, Momah did not join the literary movement that his fellow alumni inaugurated. Almost 40 years later and two years prior to his retirement from his United Nations position in 1990, he began his literary career, which has yielded five novels and several essays. Being a firsthand witness to the birth of Nigerian written literature, he was sought after by biographers and conference organizers. However, his oeuvre has not garnered sufficient attention. This could be the result of a number of factors: first, the distribution of most of his novels has been limited; second, his writings began to emerge at a time when the literary reputations of his contemporaries had long since arrived at their zenith; and third, novels that primarily seek to entertain, as most of his do, are often disregarded in the realm of postcolonial criticism.Titi: Biafran Maid in Geneva (1999) is Momah's second novel. It is the sole Nigerian Civil War novel to portray the horrors of the conflict from the viewpoint of a Biafran family living in Geneva, the Okekes. Its excellent exploration of war trauma frames an entertaining story line. This involves Titi, the Okekes' maid, and her multiple love affairs. Mimetic desire sets in during the course of her relationship with Eddy Mafa and the love triangle that ensnares them with Suzanne, Eddy's European lover. This tangled web provides the perfect substrate on which to test Girard's theory of mimetic desire.Suzanne, Titi, and Eddy: The Genesis of Mimetic DesireAccording to Girard, mimetic desire occurs when we crave for an object, place, status, or person simply because someone else desires it. The resulting rivalry can bring us into conflict with the models we imitate. According to this theory, [End Page 206] the romantic concept of spontaneous desire is illusory since it is learned from the Other. One therefore learns the value of desired objects from desiring subjects. Mimetic desire is schematized by a triangle. However, as we will see, not all love triangles are triangulations of mimetic desire.In Titi: Biafran Maid in Geneva, the eponymous protagonist meets Eddy at the Okekes' house. They begin a relationship, which does not show many signs of prospering beyond its physicality. Apart from the fact that both... (shrink)

A case from 1996 in Oregon in which citizens' legally publicmotor vehicle information was disseminated on a World Wide Website is considered. The case evoked widespread moral outrageamong Oregonians and led to changes in the Oregon records laws.The application of either consequentialist ornon-consequentialist moral theories to this and otherinformational privacy cases is found to be inadequate.Adjudication of conflicting desires is offered as the appropriateanalytical model for moral disputes. The notion of adjudicationoffered here diverges from traditional moral theories in (...) itsindeterminate nature. (shrink)

Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...) attributions, which play a systematic role in the action–prediction hierarchy. On this view, when we apply a stereotype to an individual, we rapidly attribute to her a cluster of generic character traits on the basis of her perceived social group membership. These traits are then used to make inferences about that individual’s likely beliefs and desires, which in turn inform inferences about her behavior. (shrink)

RATIONAL ALTRUISM. A PRUDENTIAL THEORY OF RATIONALITY AND ALTRUISM - STRUCTURE: "Rational altruism" is the attempt to develop and rationally justify moral principles - with a very strong emphasis on this justification. The concept of justification is developed in a metaethical part (ch. 2); it requires recourse to prudential decisions and to information about our decision-making procedures. The actual normative ethics (Ch. 6 and especially 7) is therefore still based on a prudential desirability theory (Ch. 4 and Sections 5.5-5.6) and (...) this in turn on an empirical action theory (Ch. 3 and Sections 5.1-5.4). - METAETHICS (Ch. 2): In the metaethical part of the book, conditions of adequacy for cogent moral justifications are first developed and justified, which demand, among other things, an information-stable motivation through cogent moral justifications (internalist moral justification). After an examination of various approaches to justification in ethics with regard to this adequacy condition and the negative outcome of this examination, an alternative solution strategy is presented. Among other things, the rationality requirements of profane rational reasoning approaches in ethics are to be systematically reinforced by a prudential desirability theory that aims at information-stable evaluations. - EMPIRICAL THEORY OF ACTION (Chapter 3 and Sections 5.1-5.4): The empirical theory of action developed here therefore provides a detailed analysis of the regularities and leeway of our decisions, especially the influence of information on decision-making paths. - PRUDENTIAL DESIRABILITY THEORY (Chapter 4 and Sections 5.5-5.6): In the prudential desirability theory, the 'individual desirability' of events, especially actions, is then defined in such a way that, of the various evaluation possibilities, the one that is stable in terms of information is always chosen. This procedure far exceeds the rationality requirements of rational decision theory, for example. - NORMATIVE ETHICS (chap. 6 and especially 7): Finally, in the actual normative ethics, a prioritarian standard for the moral evaluation of actions, norms and entire social orders is developed, called "Utilex". Utilex is based on compassion and, like compassion, is partial to the worse off, the poor and unfortunate, but without neglecting the interests of the better off. (shrink)

This article synthesizes the current theoretical attempts to understand human-machine interactions and introduces seven premises to understand our emerging dynamics with increasingly competent, pervasive, and instantly accessible algorithms. The hope that these seven premises can build toward a social theory of human-AI cocreation. The focus on human-AI cocreation is intended to emphasize two factors. First, is the fact that our machine learning systems are socialized. Second, is the coevolving nature of human mind and AI systems as smart devices form an (...) indispensable part of our cognitive scaffolds, thus, shaping how we perceive the world and ourselves. The seven premises include: primacy of social structures; human’s desire for freedom and autonomy; AI systems will form inseparable parts of our cognitive/affective scaffolds and can change our self-understanding; philosophy and humanistic foundations on human flourishing as a guide to human-AI interaction; mindsponge information-filtering process; acculturative process of how values change and emerge from human-AI interaction; overlapping Venn diagram of the human-human, human-nature, and human-machine interactions. This article concludes with a discussion on human agency in our entanglements with socialized machines and the illusoriness of the Cartesian agent view of the mind. (shrink)

The interventionist account of causation offers a criterion to distinguish causes from non-causes. It also aims at defining various desirable properties of causal relationships, such as specificity, proportionality and stability. Here we apply an information-theoretic approach to these properties. We show that the interventionist criterion of causation is formally equivalent to non-zero specificity, and that there are natural, information-theoretic ways to explicate the distinction between potential and actual causal influence. We explicate the idea that the description of causes should be (...) proportional to that of their effects. Then we draw a distinction between two ideas in the existing literature, the range of invariance of a causal relationship and its stability. The range of invariance is related to specificity and range of causal values. Stability concerns the effect of additional variables on the relationship between some focal pair of cause and effect variables. We show how to distinguish and measure the direct influence of background variables on the effect variable, and their influence on the relationship between the focal cause and the effect variable. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the information-theoretic approach, and offer prospects for complementary approaches. (shrink)

The interest in the relationship between pedagogy of the classroom informed by psychoanalytic discourse has grown in recent years to the point where there is a critical mass of educators who are utilizing neo-Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalytic theory in their educational research.

Convergent realists desire scientific methods that converge reliably to informative, true theories over a wide range of theoretical possibilities. Much attention has been paid to the problem of induction from quantifier-free data. In this paper, we employ the techniques of formal learning theory and model theory to explore the reliable inference of theories from data containing alternating quantifiers. We obtain a hierarchy of inductive problems depending on the quantifier prefix complexity of the formulas that constitute the data, (...) and we provide bounds relating the quantifier prefix complexity of the data to the quantifier prefix complexity of the theories that can be reliably inferred from such data without background knowledge. We also examine the question whether there are theories with mixed quantifiers that can be reliably inferred with closed, universal formulas in the data, but not without. (shrink)

Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a (...) hierarchical system for action prediction, and serves to inform hypotheses about agents’ beliefs and desires, which are in turn used to predict and interpret behavior. (shrink)

Violence presents a paradox. There is evidence that violence is universal in all in human societies. However, in writing mostly from the standpoint of relatively peaceful social spaces, violence often appears exceptional, and a product of the breakdown of integrating social institutions and conventions. Norbert Elias persuasively identified growing thresholds of repugnance towards violence with the transition to modernity, although understanding the balance between formalization and informalization poses some critical questions about his thesis. The discussion begins with these as a (...) means of opening a broader discussion of theories of violence which are developed through a critical analysis of Girard’s and Gans’ theories. It is argued that these may offer a way of addressing the informalization problem in a context of mimetic consumption desires in a context of apparent but false equalization in contemporary societies. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's essay "Reflections on Little Rock" sparked massive criticisms, accusing Arendt of holding racist views. In it, Arendt constructs the motivation of black parents whose children integrated into white schools as a desire for social climbing, and not as a political struggle for the right to equal education.1 Kathryn Sophia Belle, in Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, argues that Arendt's judgment in "Reflections on Little Rock" was not accidental to her writing, but expressive of an underlying current (...) of antiblackness informing her work from The Origins of Totalitarianism onward.2 Belle's criticism leads her to reject Arendt's theory of judgment as inherently flawed.3 I want to hold on to Arendt's... (shrink)

Norms—that is, specifications of what we ought to do—play a critical role in the study of informal argumentation, as they do in studies of judgment, decision-making and reasoning more generally. Specifically, they guide a recurring theme: are people rational? Though rules and standards have been central to the study of reasoning, and behavior more generally, there has been little discussion within psychology about why (or indeed if) they should be considered normative despite the considerable philosophical literature that bears on this (...) topic. In the current paper, we ask what makes something a norm, with consideration both of norms in general and a specific example: norms for informal argumentation. We conclude that it is both possible and desirable to invoke norms for rational argument, and that a Bayesian approach provides solid normative principles with which to do so. (shrink)

Emerging action perspectives on psychopathology depict individuals as actively shaping those environmental conditions that then impact on their risk for psychopathology, resilience in the face of it, and successful recovery from it. This view, although having important implications for research and clinical practice, has yet to be articulated in terms of its underlying philosophical framework. To begin to address this challenge, we situate action theory in the context of the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, who, in their seemingly anti-psychiatric series (...) entitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, argue for the central role of human agency as a fundamentally active force in determining subjective life. Within this context, they propose an alternative approach to the current deficit focus of much psychopathology research, replacing the notion of deficit with a fundamentally productive notion of desire (what they call “desiring-production”). After our exposition of this philosophical perspective on human agency, implications of this approach for action-informed research and clinical practice are discussed. (shrink)

In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of "mindreading." He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participate in social behavior and communication. We ascribe mental states to people: states such as thoughts, desires, knowledge, and intentions. Building on many years of research, Baron-Cohen concludes that children with autism, suffer from "mindblindness" as a result of a selective impairment in (...) mindreading. For these children, the world is essentially devoid of mental things. Baron-Cohen develops a theory that draws on data from comparative psychology, from developmental, and from neuropsychology. He argues that specific neurocognitive mechanisms have evolved that allow us to mindread, to make sense of actions, to interpret gazes as meaningful, and to decode "the language of the eyes." A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Richard Jeffrey regarded the version of Bayesian decision theory he floated in ‘The Logic of Decision’ and the idea of a probability kinematics—a generalisation of Bayesian conditioning to contexts in which the evidence is ‘uncertain’—as his two most important contributions to philosophy. This paper aims to connect them by developing kinematical models for the study of preference change and practical deliberation. Preference change is treated in a manner analogous to Jeffrey’s handling of belief change: not as mechanical outputs of combinations (...) of intrinsic desires plus information, but as a matter of judgement and of making up one’s mind. In the first section Jeffrey’s probability kinematics is motivated and extended to the treatment of changes in conditional belief. In the second, analogous kinematical models are developed for preference change and in particular belief-induced change that depends on an invariance condition for conditional preference. The two are the brought together in the last section in a tentative model of pratical deliberation. (shrink)

Emerging action perspectives on psychopathology depict individuals as actively shaping those environmental conditions that then impact on their risk for psychopathology, resilience in the face of it, and successful recovery from it. This view, although having important implications for research and clinical practice, has yet to be articulated in terms of its underlying philosophical framework. To begin to address this challenge, we situate action theory in the context of the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, who, in their seemingly anti-psychiatric series (...) entitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, argue for the central role of human agency as a fundamentally active force in determining subjective life. Within this context, they propose an alternative approach to the current deficit focus of much psychopathology research, replacing the notion of deficit with a fundamentally productive notion of desire (what they call “desiring-production”). After our exposition of this philosophical perspective on human agency, implications of this approach for action-informed research and clinical practice are discussed. (shrink)

My thesis is simple. The right of informational privacy, the great modern achievement often attributed to the classic Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis article, “The Right to Privacy” , asserts an individual's right not to have private personal information circulated. Warren and Brandeis claimed that individual dignity in a modern society requires that people be able to keep their private lives to themselves and proposed that the common law should be understood to protect this dignity by making dissemination of private (...) information a tort. As broadly stated, this right not to have private information distributed directly conflicts with a broadly conceived freedom of speech and of the press. My claim is that, in cases of conflict, the law should reject the Warren and Brandeis innovation. Speech and press freedom should prevail; the privacy tort should be ignored. This conclusion requires a normative argument concerning the appropriate basis and status of speech freedom that this essay will not really provide but for which I have argued elsewhere. Here, instead, I will describe that theory of speech freedom, explore its implications for informational privacy, and finally suggest some reasons to think that rejection of the privacy tort should not be so troubling and is, in fact, pragmatically desirable. (shrink)

The project 'Facing Forward' started with a collaboration between five institutions: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, De Appel arts centre, W139, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the art magazine Metroplis M. Having previously organized the lecture series and publications 'Right About Now: Art & Theory in the 1990s' (2005/2006) and 'Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century' (2008/2009), the organizing committee decided to take the final (...) step in this timeline and turn its attention to the far horizon. Informed by a shared interest in the role that history, speculation, and utopianism play in the field of contemporary art and design (as well as the larger context of global, socio-economic and political developments), a selection of seven themes emerged from the conversations of the initial organizers. These would eventually shape the seven lecture and discussions events - collected in this volume of essays - publicized under the banner Art & Theory From a Future Perspective. A great number of internationally renowned speakers were invited to reflect on the proposed themes during often sold-out events, which were presented at the Oude Lutherse Kerk in Amsterdam in 2011/2012. Yet, however compelling our desire as organizers to go beyond the framework of contemporary events and the current interest, well-nigh obsession, with history, it is obviously an illusion to think that we can escape the past by means of a turn towards the future."--Page 8. (shrink)

This article discusses the current ‘popularity’ of trauma research in the Humanities and examines the ethics and politics of trauma theory, as exemplified in the writings of Caruth and Felman and Laub.Written from a position informed by Laplanchian and object relations psychoanalytic theory, it begins by examining and offering a critique of trauma theory's model of subjectivity, and its relations with theories of referentiality and representation, history and testimony. Next, it proposes that although trauma theory's subject matter—the sufferings (...) of others—makes critique difficult, the theory's politics, its exclusions and inclusions, and its unconscious drives and desires are as deserving of attention as those of any other theory. Arguing that the political and cultural contexts within which this theory has risen to prominence have remained largely unexamined, the article concludes by proposing that trauma theory needs to act as a brake against rather than as a vehicle for cultural and political Manicheanism. (shrink)