Abstract:

What is it to want one thing more than another? This is important because, as a matter of common sense, and according to some philosophical theories, wanting something is sometimes gives a reason to pursue it. And when wants conflict, common sense, at least, tells us it's more reasonable to pursue what we want more.

The dissertation argues first that wanting more cannot be more primitive than wanting--i.e., desire does not reduce to preference. Such a reduction is unable to account for conflicts in desire. So wanting more, preferring, must depend on properties of the underlying desires.

What are the relevant properties? The dissertation goes on to argue that a mere behavioral disposition to choose one option over another cannot be enough. Moreover, these behavioral dispositions are often unstable, quickly changing over time and varying according to trivial features of the situation. The phenomenology of desire--that is, what it feels like to want something, and to have that want gratified or frustrated--is similarly unstable.

The dissertation argues that the strength of one desire compared to another is indeterminate, when one simply considers the phenomenological and motivational properties. The missing ingredient is self-interpretation. The motivational and phenomenological aspects of an agent's desires create a range of permissible interpretations of how strong those desires are relative to one another. But the interpretation the agent settles on is privileged. The agent will tend to act in accord with his interpretation of his desires, so the self-interpretation will create a bias towards its own truth.

Autonomy, the dissertation argues, is a capacity to form a self-interpretation.

The dissertation finally expands on this basic argument. Many other properties of attitudes are similarly indeterminate. An agent's self-interpretation imposes greater determinacy on an otherwise indeterminate psychology. From this, we can explain certain special features of self-knowledge. The theory offered can capture the insights of the Avowal Theory of attitude self-ascription, while maintaining that self-knowledge is still primarily a matter of making accurate judgments about one's own psychology.

Keywords . Practical reason, rationality, preference, desire, autonomy, attitude, self-knowledge.