Meaning Meeting - Will Zumchak / On ascribing conflicting desires
Meaning Meeting - Will Zumchak / On ascribing conflicting desires
Wednesday September 23, Will presents recent work on puzzles in the ascription of contradictory desires. Quārē id faciat fortasse requīris? Nesciŏ, but come and find out!
It has been observed that it is possible to truthfully attribute a desire for a proposition p and its negation ~p to the same desire-holder (Phillips-Brown, 2025):
(1) Context: John is very tired, but has an assignment he needs to finish ASAP.
a. John wants to take a nap.
b. John doesn't want to take a nap.
It has been suggested that these cases can be dealt with by appealing to a level of context-sensitivity: these sentences are each true relative to a specific QUD (Phillips-Brown, 2025) or set of alternative propositions (Villalta, 2008). However, these proposals have difficulties dealing with apparent conflicts within the same utterance, as in (2):
(2) John does and doesn't want to take a nap.
I consider a few possible ways to deal with this problem, and their consequences.