Ashley Shaw

I am an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin. I received my PhD from the Dept. of Philosophy at UCL in 2019.

I work primarily in the Philosophy of Mind and Action. My research is about motivation in rational self-conscious agents. I am interested in the nature of desire, rational agency, reasons, and how they are related. I have been working on the concept of need, self-control, self-knowledge of desire and the emotions. I aim to connect my research with insights from other disciplines like linguistics and psychology.

Publications

1. Focus on Slurs (with Poppy Mankowitz) | ±
   forth. Mind & Language, 1-29.

Slurring expressions display puzzling behaviour when embedded, such as under negation and in attitude and speech reports. On one hand, they frequently appear to retain their characteristic qualities, such as offensiveness and propensity to derogate. On the other hand, it is sometimes possible to understand them as lacking these qualities. A theory of slurring expressions should explain this variability. We develop an explanation that deploys the linguistic notion of focus. Our proposal is that a speaker can conversationally implicate metalinguistic claims about the aptness of a focused slurring expression. The inclusion of a sentential operator in the sentence (e.g., negation) affects the aptness claim conveyed, resulting in the availability of non-pejorative metalinguistic construals (e.g., that the slurring expression is not apt for certain purposes). The resulting explanation of variability relies on independently motivated mechanisms and is compatible with any theory of slurring expressions.

2. Desire and What it's Rational to Do | ±
   2021. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 99 (4): 761-75.

It is often taken for granted that our desires can contribute to what it is rational for us to do. This paper examines an account of desire that promises an explanation of this datum, the guise of the good. I argue that extant guise-of-the-good accounts fail to provide an adequate explanation of how a class of desires—basic desire—contribute to practical rationality. I develop an alternative guise-of-the-good account on which basic desires attune us to our reasons for action in virtue of their biological function. This account emphasises the role of desire as part of our competence to recognise and respond to normative reasons.

3. Do Affective Desires Provide Reasons for Action? | ±
   2021. Ratio, 34 (2): 147-57.

This paper evaluates the claim that some desires provide reasons in virtue of their connection with conscious affective experiences like feelings of attraction or aversion. I clarify the nature of affective desires and several distinct ways in which affective desires might provide reasons. Against recent accounts proposed by Ruth Chang, Declan Smithies and Jeremy Weiss, I motivate doubts that it is the phenomenology of affective experiences that explains their normative or rational significance. I outline an alternative approach that centralises the function of such experiences.

4. Desire and Satisfaction | ±
   2020. The Philosophical Quarterly, 70 (279): 371-384.

Desire satisfaction has not received detailed philosophical examination. Yet intuitive judgments about the satisfaction of desires have been used as data points guiding theories of desire, desire content and the semantics of 'desire'. This paper examines desire satisfaction and the standard propositional view of desire. First, I argue that there are several distinct concepts of satisfaction. Second, I argue that separating them defuses a difficulty for the standard view in accommodating desires that Derek Parfit described as "implicitly conditional on their own persistence", a problem posed by Shieva Kleinschmidt, Kris McDaniel and Ben Bradley. The solution undercuts a key motivation for rejecting the standard view in favour of more radical accounts proposed in the literature.

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