desire mentalization is factive

Ad-hoc response to this paper^ written by a friend.

"Akshan wants a pizza;" "Akshan's favorite color is blue." These propositions are readily understood by young children because they are treated as brute facts independent of any need to perform nonfactive modeling about Akshan's mental state. Equally, "Akshan wears my hat", or even "Akshan has the same hat as me" (referring to the same product but not the same item) appear just as cognitively complicated as "Akshan wants to wear my hat" (cf. Celtics and Pistons). They both require abstract cognitive modeling involving multiple-representation of what might have been an essentially-unitary concept at an earlier developmental stage; I struggle to recognize a profound difference because the one is about desire while the other is not: practically-speaking, desire is just another fact in the sentence which happens to relate to Akshan. This is why desire is not a wrinkle: agents generally interpret it as a factive bare-truth in the world, rather than a proposition requiring deep/difficult/complicated mentalization. I don't need a model of your mind to know that you want a pizza, I can just take this to be true because you say it and it accords with your instantaneous social behaviors. The Williamson definition for factivity succeeds for desire when taken this way, so long as we acknowledge that socially-mature agents can treat desire with a more-sophisticated nonfactive mentalization when required (though as I mention below, I think they usually don't).

By contrast, "Akshan thinks that my hat is blue" requires nonfactive mentalization to evaluate the truth-status of the proposition. I need to know something about the internals of his mind in order to myself form a belief about it. Desire in most cases doesn't work this way; it doesn't function like it requires an internal model of mind, instead acting as if it's a bare, immediate social percept which allows the one party to black-box the mental workings of the other. I suggest that's specifically in order to avoid contending with the cognitive complexity of nonfactive reasoning and to dramatically simplify socialization.

While adults are able to nonfactively model more complex desire structures than children, these nonfactive notions are largely socially inoperative, and I conjecture aren't part of the same cognitive facility. When an agent is emotionally hard-to-read, even if he tells us his desires explicitly, it's hard to act as if the desires are real until they're backed up with affective evidence; in some sense I feel non-affected (and hence non-immediate) desires aren't intuitively perceived as desire at all, though adults are able to intentionally intellectually assimilate the information. The framing I'm aiming at is that desire and desire-signaling are social tools used specifically in order to avoid the overhead of true mentalization, so it's unsurprising that they don't look like beliefs.

Separately, I find it interesting to note wrt. the initial discussion in the paper that, despite the attribution of knowledge being common and less complicated than belief attribution, what this typically signifies is merely that we've identified another's belief that accords with our own. In the framing of justified true belief, I don't think we generally have access to our peers' justifications, and we are rarely rigorous with our thresholds for truth; I might say "Akshan knows that pizza is at the door" even if I have only inferred that the pizza is probably at the door without strong epistemic grounding. What I'm signifying by the imputation of Akshan's knowledge is actually that he agrees with my claimed-true belief that the pizza is at the door, not that he (or I) knows it in a rigorous sense.

This is I think the central intuition behind the decoupling thesis: attribution of belief isn't difficult, but the attribution of subjectively-foreign belief is (whether perceived as false, too complex, etc. -- anything outside the subject's belief-set). Desire doesn't pose a problem for this model because it simply isn't taken to contain a doxastic or causal proposition in most cases. When it is (because you're trying to attribute a formal cause for the desire or model it as belief-like), that process alone requires non-factive mentalization. Because children don't do this, desire attribution is essentially always a factive activity for them; because adults strongly prefer it, it's usually factive for them.