Belief, affective state and truth: pleasures of expectation in Plato’s Philebus
Abstract
The possibility of false pleasures is no doubt one of the most controversial issues in the contemporary literature on Plato’s Philebus. In this context, the crucial debate and a wide number of interpretations relate to those remarks specifically concerning the falsehood of pleasures of expectation (36c-41b). The available interpretative options vary depending on whether they conceive falsehood of expectations in terms of an “ontological”, “epistemological”, or a “moral” criterion of truth. This essay aims to show that, instead of resting on a single criterion, a correct understanding of pleasures of expectation should take into account the mutual interaction between all these different criteria: while ontological truth determines the content of expectations, epistemological truth (that is, the correction of the relevant belief state) and moral truth (that is, the goodness of the affective-dispositional state) jointly define the specific type of such pleasures. To model an explanation of this notion of truth, I shall borrow from Aristotle’s account of “practical truth”.
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