On this view, to desire to have one more drink is the same as it seeming good to the subject to have one more drink. They are usually seen as attitudes toward conceivable states of affairs, often referred to as propositional attitudes. Techniques include creating a sense of lack in the viewer or associating the product with desirable attributes. They are seen as propositional attitudes towards conceivable states of affairs. To add desire to a word list please sign up or log in. The pain receded and the desire to play cricket returned.
Cognitivist versions, sometimes referred to as desire-as-belief theses, equate desires with beliefs that something is good, thereby categorizing desires as one type of belief. Value-based theories are of more recent origin than action-based theories and hedonic theories. Apart from this, there may also be bad or misleading desires whose fulfillment does not bring the pleasure they originally seemed to promise. In some extreme cases, such desires may be very common, for example, a totally paralyzed person may have all kinds of regular desires but lacks any disposition to act due to the paralysis. On the other hand, there are desires that do not incline us toward action. On the one hand, there are inclinations to act that are not based on desires.
Holistic theories combine various of the aforementioned features in their definition of desires. Pleasure-based or hedonic theories use this feature as part of their definition of desires. Another effect of special interest to psychology is the tendency of desires to promote reward-based learning, for example, in the form of operant conditioning.
She expressed a desire for more wriggle room in the spreadsheets against her self-imposed fiscal rules – so-called “headroom”. Origin of desire1 Like drama, a melodrama depends mostly on in-depth character development, interaction, and highly emotional themes. The role of the salespeople in these cases is simply to guide the customer towards making a choice; they do not have to try to “sell” the general idea of making a purchase, because the customer already wants the products. Instead, he holds that it should be understood as a positive reality in the form of an affirmative vital force. As a person matures, Lacan claims that they still feel separated from themselves by language, which is incomplete, and so a person continually strives to become whole.
Occurrent desires are either conscious or otherwise causally active, in contrast to standing desires, which exist somewhere in the back of one’s mind. Intrinsic desires concern what the subject wants for its own sake while instrumental desires are about what the subject wants for the sake of something else. While many researchers roughly agree on these general features, there is significant disagreement about how to define desires, i.e. which of these features are essential and which ones are merely accidental.
But many of her other desires, like to sell her old car or to talk with her boss about a promotion, are merely standing during this conversation. But we have many desires that are not relevant to our present situation and do not influence us currently. Desires corresponding to constitutive means are sometimes termed “realizer desires”. He would not do all these things were it not for his intrinsic desire to watch the movie. For example, Haruto enjoys movies, which is why he has an intrinsic desire to watch them.
Articles Related to desire
Desires present their objects in a favorable light, as something that appears to be good. They aim to change the world by representing how the world should be, unlike beliefs, which aim to represent how the world actually is. Desires are states of mind that are expressed by terms like “wanting”, “wishing”, “longing” or “craving”.
Desire
According to psychological hedonism, it is the only thing desired intrinsically. Propositional desires are directed at possible states of affairs, in contrast to object-desires, which are directly about objects. Occurrent desires are causally active while standing desires exist somewhere in the back of one’s mind. M. Scanlon, who holds that desires are judgments of what we have reasons to do. A more promising approach identifies desires not with value-beliefs but with value-seemings.
It is a form of caring about oneself, of being concerned with who one is and what one does. Most agree that being a person has to do with having certain mental abilities and is connected to having a certain moral and legal status. A closely related issue in morality asks not what reasons we have but for what reasons we act. A strength of these positions is that they can give a straightforward explanation of how practical reasons can act as motivation.
More meanings of desire
In De Anima, Aristotle claims that desire is implicated in animal interactions and the propensity of animals to motion; at the same time, he acknowledges that reasoning also interacts with desire. One objection to the death-of-desire thesis comes from the fact that our preferences usually do not change upon desire-satisfaction. The death-of-desire thesis holds that desires cannot continue to exist once their object is realized.
A great variety of features are ascribed to desires, like that they are propositional attitudes, that they lead to actions, that their fulfillment tends to bring pleasure, etc. Attention-based theories take the tendency of attention to keep returning to the desired object as the defining feature of desires. Action-based theories define desires as structures that incline us toward actions. Learning-based theories define desires in terms of their tendency to promote reward-based learning, for example, in the form of operant conditioning.
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Desire for a product is stimulated by advertising, which attempts to give buyers a sense of lack or wanting. He uses the term “jouissance” to refer to the lost object or feeling of absence (see manque) which a person believes to be unobtainable. Freud used the Greek myth of Oedipus to argue that people desire incest and must repress that desire. According to the early Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha stated that monks should “generate desire” for the sake of fostering skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel claimed that “self-consciousness is desire”. In philosophy, desire has been identified as a philosophical problem since antiquity.
- Such an obligation would constitute a practical reason to act accordingly even for people who feel no desire to do so.
- An often-cited one is the wrong kind of reason problem, which is based on the consideration that facts independent of the value of an object may affect whether this object ought to be desired.
- If Dhanvi is busy convincing her friend to go hiking this weekend, for example, then her desire to go hiking is occurrent.
- In the field of marketing, desire is the human appetite for a given object of attention.
Standing desires remain part of the mind even while the subject is sound asleep. Instrumental desires are usually about causal means to bring the object of another desire about. So if Haruto was a driving enthusiast, he might have both an intrinsic and an instrumental desire to drive to the cinema. It is possible to desire the same thing both intrinsically and instrumentally at the same time. He desires to do all these things as well, but only in an instrumental manner.
General features
This is sometimes expressed by saying that the object is desirable, appropriately desired or worthy of desire. But an important objection is that we may have reasons to do things without a desire to do them. An influential theory of personhood holds that only entities with higher-order desires can be persons. Various definitions and theories of other concepts have been expressed in terms of desires. A related doctrine is also found in the Hindu tradition of karma yoga, which recommends that we act without a desire for the fruits of our actions, referred to as “Nishkam Karma”.
Conscious desires are usually accompanied by some form of emotional response. Scarlett desires love, money, the attention of men, and the vision of being a virtuous “true lady”. Brontë’s characterization of Jane Eyre depicts her as torn by an inner conflict between reason and desire, because “customs” and “conventionalities” stand in the way of her romantic desires. In some cases, the potential buyer already has the desire for the product before they enter the store, as in the case of a decorating buff entering their favorite furniture store. Nike’s “Just Do It” ads for sports shoes are appealing to consumers’ desires for self-betterment.
Instead, from a Kantian perspective, it should be performed out of a desire to do one’s duty. On this view, donating a significant portion of one’s income to charities is not a moral action if the motivating desire is to improve one’s reputation by convincing other people of one’s wealth and generosity. The notion of practical reasons is closely related to motivation and desire.
- In some extreme cases, such desires may be very common, for example, a totally paralyzed person may have all kinds of regular desires but lacks any disposition to act due to the paralysis.
- Gilles Deleuze rejects the idea, defended by Lacan and other psychoanalysts, that desire is a form of lack related to incompleteness or a lost object.
- M. Scanlon, who holds that desires are judgments of what we have reasons to do.
- While many researchers roughly agree on these general features, there is significant disagreement about how to define desires, i.e. which of these features are essential and which ones are merely accidental.
- Cognitivist versions, sometimes referred to as desire-as-belief theses, equate desires with beliefs that something is good, thereby categorizing desires as one type of belief.
- In some religions, all desires are outright rejected as a negative influence on our well-being.
It has been suggested that to prefer one thing to another is just to have a stronger desire for the former thing. Actions depend on desires and moral praiseworthiness is sometimes defined in terms of being motivated by the right desire. An agent wants something inauthentically, on the other hand, if the agent is not fully identified with this desire, despite having it. Existentialists sometimes distinguish between authentic and inauthentic desires. But other strands in Hinduism explicitly distinguish lower or bad desires for worldly things from higher or good desires for closeness or oneness with God.
Their disagreement concerns which of these features belong to the essence of desires and which ones are merely accidental or contingent. Theories of desire aim to define desires in terms of their essential features. According to fitting-attitude theories of value, an object is valuable if it is fitting to desire this object or if we ought to desire it. There is disagreement whether desires should be understood as practical reasons or whether we can have practical reasons without having a desire to follow them. Propositional desires are directed at possible states of affairs while object-desires are directly about objects.
This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word desire.
An often-cited one is the wrong kind of reason problem, which is based on the consideration that facts independent of the value of an object may affect whether this object ought to be desired. A closely related view holds that desires are not reasons themselves but present reasons to the agent. Some philosophers, often from a Humean tradition, simply identify an agent’s desires with the practical reasons he has. So it seems that, when pressed for the details, object-desire-theorists have to resort to propositional expressions to articulate what exactly these desires entail.
It has been argued that desire is the more fundamental notion and that preferences are to be defined in terms of desires. The focus on preferences instead of desires is very common in the field of decision theory. In such a situation, it is fitting for the agent to desire the demon in order to save her family, despite the fact that the demon desire does not possess positive value. According to them, an object is valuable if it is fitting to desire this object or if we ought to desire it. One important position in this field is that the praiseworthiness of an action depends on the desire motivating this action.
