Kael McCormack

In recent work, Alex Gregory defends the unorthodox view that desires are beliefs about reasons for action. While Gregory offers compelling arguments in its defense, this paper critically examines how his desire-as-belief view can explain the phenomenon of recalcitrant desires. Taking inspiration from a debate about the cognitive status of emotions, I define recalcitrant desires as desires that persist despite the agent believing they have no reason to do what they desire. I argue that explaining the seeming irrationality involved in this type of recalcitrance presents a challenge to philosophical accounts of desire in general, and Gregory’s desire-as-belief view in particular. In Gregory’s framework, having a recalcitrant desire must ultimately be understood as simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs. Gregory embraces this conclusion and argues that it is simply a feature of our limited rationality, citing other examples of conflicting beliefs. I argue that these examples are misleading. Unlike normal conflicting beliefs, recalcitrant desires also persist despite the agent’s awareness of the conflict. Taking this into account, Gregory’s view cannot successfully explain recalcitrant desires because it must ascribe an implausible kind of contradiction.

Descartes holds that when you perceive something with perfect clarity, you are compelled to assent and cannot doubt. (This is a psychological claim.) Many commentators read him as endorsing Psychologism, according to which this compulsion is a matter of brute psychological force. I show that, in Descartes’s view, perfect clarity provides a reason for assent—indeed a perfect reason, which precludes any reason for doubt. (This is a normative claim.) Furthermore, advancing a view I call Rational Force, he holds that the normative claim explains the psychological one: since your will is naturally responsive to reasons, you are compelled to assent because you have a perfect reason to assent. This coheres with his view that will is essentially active, self-determined, and free. The force that clarity exerts on the will is not the brute push of an efficient cause, but the rational pull of a final cause.

I argue that the direct perception of emotion (DP) is best conceived in terms of event perception, rather than fact perception or object perception. On neither of these two traditional models can the perception of emotion be as direct as its counterpart in ordinary perception; the proponent of DP must either drop the ‘direct’ claim or embrace a part-whole model of emotion perception and its problems. But our best account of how we perceive events directly can be applied to emotion perception without any loss in directness. Not only this but there are good reasons to think that such a conception better respects both empirical evidence and the phenomenology of emotion perception.