Abstract: Peterson (2019) presents a puzzle about desire: (1) All desires are dispositional states; (2) We have privileged access to at least some of our desires; (3) We don’t have privileged access to any dispositional state. At least one of these propositions must be rejected to solve the puzzle. Peterson opts to deny (1). He argues that some desires are occurrent and these are the desires we have privileged access to.
In this talk, I show that Peterson’s solution suffers a double-counting problem and a more promising route is to deny (3). I argue for the view that dispositions and manifestations are not numerically distinct entities. Rather, manifestations are properties of dispositions. Desires don’t cause manifestations, they themselves become manifest. When dispositional desires manifest themselves, we have privileged access to them.
