Talk:Second-order desire

I'm not sure how to do this, but all the capital, singular/plural, and with-or-without dashes variations of First order desires, second-order desire, and Higher order desire should redirect respectively. The account of second order desire here is more developed, so it would be nice to link to it from higher order desire, and first order desire, and so on.

Also, is it correct that there are only two orders of desire? Why is that supposed?

related to metacognition? the thinking of thinking? --dgd

dgd: yes, it is related to metacognition. Humans are capable of reflexive thought or reflexive desiring, and yet although there are an infinity of orders of such thoughts or desires, humans only ever occupy the lower few rungs (2-3 I guess). So, as to the claim that "there are only two orders of desire", it might not be 100% true, but it is certaintly very close to the truth. Maybe there are three instead of only two, but there are certaintly not 5 million. And yet, as a logical possibility, an infinite number exist. -- samkat

Much of the content in this article has a stream-of-consciousness flavor. It makes it hard to read, and probably is best defined as original research. I'm going to cut it out. Also, the list of combinations of first- and second-order desires is redundant, because "I desire x, but desire to desire ~x" has the same structure as "I desire ~x, but desire to desire x". -- Alan McBeth 19:11, 21 October 2005 (UTC)