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I was going to revisit an old post about how I dislike people who say “if there’s global warming, then why am I so cold?” I literally just heard this on TV from a rugby league commentator. Sadly, I could not find the post, so instead I will talk about how I think rugby league is the most boring sport ever.
We went to an aussie rules football match last Sunday, and it is exciting! It’s quick, skilled, and brutal. If I have any athletic ability, I would try to play it. I don’t know why it hasn’t been spread more. So I have aussie rules football as my top Australian winter sport. Second place is rugby union. Australia won’t be playing in the Tri-Nations while I am here, so it won’t get that crazy, but I would like to catch the All Blacks vs Springboks match next weekend. Lastly, we have rugby league. Boring as sin. It lacks both the physical contest for the ball in rugby union and the speed in aussie rules football. Luckily an AFL game will be on soon, so it’ll be time to change the channel.
Update 06/28/08: I also watched some indoor bocce on TV and that was more exciting than rugby league.
Desire-like imagination, or I-Desire, is said to be analogous to desire in the same way that belief-like imagination, or imagination, is analogous to belief. There are a few different arguments for positing desire-like imagination in print. Greg Currie has given a few on the grounds of inference to the best explanation: he argues that desire-like imagination can best help us explain phenomena including affective response toward fiction and seemingly conflicting desires toward fiction (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002), and imaginative resistance (Currie 2002, in Gendler & Hawthorne). Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan similarly argue that desire-like imagination can best help us explain behaviors of pretenders who are immersed in the fiction of the pretense (Doggett and Egan 2007). I am unconvinced by these arguments and remain skeptical of desire-like imagination. But in a reading group today, I tried to provide a new motivation for positing desire-like imagination.
Take as the starting point the analogy at the beginning of this post: desire-like imagination is to desire as (belief-like) imagination is to belief. There is a tradition of differentiating belief and desire by their “directions of fit”. Belief is said to have a mind-to-world fit: the aim of belief is to represent a fact about the actual world. Desire is said to have a world-to-mind fit: the aim of desire is to make the world as the non-actual state of affairs represented. Arguably, we can also say that imagination has a direction of fit, at least when we are exercising the faculty in pretense or engagement with fiction. Imagination, I want to claim, has a mind-to-fictionality fit: the aim of imagination is to represent a fact about the (relevant) fictional world. The relationships between belief, desire, and imagination are summarized by the following table:
| belief-like mental states | desire-like mental states | |
| real world | belief (mind to world) | desire (world to mind) |
| fictional world | imagination (mind to fictionality) | ??? |
Now it seems natural to fill out ??? with a mental state that is both desire-like and about the fictional world. Desire-like imagination fits. Following through with the analogies, desire-like imagination has a fictionality-to-mind direction of fit: the aim of desire-like imagination is to make the fictional world as the non-fictional state of affairs represented.
A space.com article reports that astronomers are on the verge of finding earth’s twin.
Pfft. Philosophers found twin earth decades ago. Take that, science.
