Why representationalists can’t be desire theorists (and vice versa)

When you sprain an ankle or eat a favorite dessert, the experience feels unpleasant or pleasant, prompting action to end or continue it. The standard view explains this by a second-order desire about the experience's quality—wanting the unpleasantness to stop or the pleasantness to continue. But a popular theory of phenomenal character, strong representationalism, holds that we are directly aware only of external objects, not the experiences themselves. This conflicts with the second-order desire account, which requires direct awareness of experiences. The author argues that desire theorists should instead adopt object-involving desires that require direct awareness of experiences, making representationalism and desire theory incompatible.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Say you undergo an ankle sprain, or you take a bite of your favourite dessert. In the ankle case, you’re prompted to take a painkiller to eliminate the painfulness. In the dessert case, you’re prompted to continue eating the dessert to get more pleasure. These sorts of experience-directed actions suggest three things. First, that experiences have affective qualities (e.g. unpleasantness and pleasantness). Second, that affective experiences are reason-providing. Third, that we are motivated to end or continue our affective experiences. The standard and currently dominant view of those three facts says that affect, its reason-giving force, and motivationality consists in a frustrated or satisfied second-order desire for the phenomenal quality of your experience (not) to occur. However, there is a highly popular view of the nature of phenomenal character, namely strong representationalism, which is incompatible with such second-order desire (SOD) explanations. I argue that SOD theorists ought to embrace object-involving desires, i.e. desires that constitutively involve the objects they are about. Furthermore, such desires require direct awareness of their objects, i.e. experiences. But representationalists typically embrace what is called ‘the transparency of experience’, the claim that experiences (and the features thereof) cannot be the objects of direct awareness. Hence, representationalists can’t be desire theorists, and desire theorists can’t be representationalists.