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Wanting to know whether

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

It is argued that that the desire attributed to an agent, X, in sentences of the form ‘X wants to know whether P’, is not X’s overall desire for ‘X knows that P or X knows that “not P”’, but rather X’s expected conditional desire for knowing the truth about P, given the truth. An implication of this account for distributive justice is discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)389-397
Number of pages9
JournalAnalysis
Volume85
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • conditional desire
  • desire attribution
  • desire to know
  • distributive justice

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