TSA Colloquium August 20
Format: Online
On Zoom. Please register to obtain the link.
Speakers:
- Michael Devitt (City University of New York)
- Jeremy Pober (University of Lisbon)
Everyone welcome. To register, email [email protected]
Program
15:00–16:10 - Jeremy Pober
16:10–16:20 - break
16:20–17:30 - Michael Devitt
17:30 - Wrap-up (open debate)
Abstracts
Jeremy Pober – Obstacles Specific to Sharing Desires
While we often think of beliefs and desires as 'mirror' states differing only in 'direction of fit' (Searle 1993), this is not the case according to leading naturalistic theories of desire which understand desire in terms of reward-based learning and motivation (Pober, forthcoming). In this talk, I focus on how these "reward theories" of desire (e.g., Arpaly and Schroeder 2014; Haas 2022; Pober 2026) result in challenges specific to sharing desires. If reward theories are correct, then the possible contents of desires include not only the possible contents of beliefs, but possible contents of perceptual states unavailable to deliberation in linguistic terms (Schroeder 2004). Further, most--if not nearly all--of our desires have such contents, and we are quite often mistaken about the contents of our own desires as a result. This feature of desires makes sharing desires much more unlikely in two ways: first, by making us wrong about the contents of our desires most of the time, and second, by limiting our ability to express or communicate the contents to the rare cases where successful extra-linguistic communication is possible, such as music (Peacocke 2025). More importantly, it means that there is an asymmetry between occurrent desires and their standing or dispositional counterparts not found in belief: we can only share our occurrent desires.
Michael Devitt – Reference Borrowing and the Sharing of Thoughts and Concepts
What is it to share thoughts and the concepts that constitute them? Why should we care? My approach to these questions is naturalistic. So, I am guided by what I take to be the best empirical theories, particularly of reference. I conclude that concepts and thoughts can be “coarse”-shared or “fine”-shared. Coarse-sharing is a matter of shared referents. Fine-sharing is a matter of shared modes of reference. The latter is made possible by reference borrowing. I reach these conclusions via a discussion, first, of the inner representational states of nonhuman organisms; then, of the nature of human concepts and thoughts; then, of their intra-subjective sameness; finally, of their inter-subjective sameness. An unusual feature of my discussion is that Frege’s famous criterion of difference receives only passing mentions. Rational relations between thoughts are important but the focus in discussing thoughts should be on their role in causing behaviors.
Work produced with the support of a 2025 Leonardo Grant for Scientific Research and Cultural Creation, from the BBVA Foundation. The Foundation takes no responsibility for the opinions, statements and contents of this project, which are entirely the responsibility of its authors.