Daniel Skibra

The dominant paradigm in contemporary philosophical theorizing about intentional states like belief and desire analyzes them as representational states. In turn, these representational states are to be understood as being comprised of a content (the information being represented) and a psychological mode (the relation to the content characteristic of the mental state), thus separating the representation from how it is represented. Philosophy has found this "mode-content schema" attractive for a number of reasons; particularly for how it allows the analysis of mental states to interface with questions about language and communication. But the dominant way of understanding the schema constitutes a dramatic oversimplification. This is best illustrated by focusing on the case of desire, which has more complex representational features than adherents of the schema tend to appreciate, and presents difficult challenges to the schema. The project will mount a defense of the mode-content schema for desire, but will do so while acknowledging its limitations. It will set out a new account of desire, making precise how desire represents its content, and giving an appropriate characterization of desire's psychological mode. Such an account will manage to navigate the considerable challenges currently facing an adequate implementation of the mode-content schema.