Speaker: Milo Phillips-Brown (MIT) Time: Wednesday, November 16th, 1-2pm Place: 32-D831 Title: Some-things-considered desires
Lu has a test coming up. She believes she’ll pass only if she studies. Studying is boring.
(1) Lu wants to pass. (2) But she doesn’t want to study. (1) and (2) are fine together, but standard semantics for ‘want’ predict that they are incompatible. I’ll propose a way to make them compatible. My guiding idea is that when Lu considers what it would be like to pass but ignores what it would be like to study, she prefers passing to not; when she considers what it would be like to study but ignores what it would be like to pass, she prefers not studying to studying. These are some-things-considered (other-things-ignored) desires. We can model them with coarse worlds (= propositions), in place of worlds. Where defined, every proposition, or its negation, is true at a given world. But not every proposition, or its negation, is entailed by a given coarse world. When neither a proposition nor its negation is entailed by a coarse world, it is considered; otherwise it is ignored.