But if Mr. Kerry has tapped into voters' rational desire for a winner, Mr. Edwards appears to have touched something more visceral.
Mr. Andreessen argues on his blog that there is no bubble and that the high prices represent a rational desire to stake a claim in the potentially huge markets of the future.
Combined with a certain BBC journalist's rational desire to get ahead, it was the knowledge that the Bank of England would eventually have to fulfil its weekly compulsion to tell the world what it was up to that was the chief cause of the Northern Rock bank run.
Moreover, it does not establish that an evidential theory of rational desire agrees with a causal theory of rational desire.
This conflicted state or duality of personhood is explained by the nature of cognition, including rational desire.
The EU characterisation of rational desire is in many ways highly permissive, but it may be more controversial than first meets the eye.
In Lewis's argument, the result follows because of the differences between rational belief revision and rational desire (or motivation) revision within the decision-theoretic framework.
Parfit (1984) illustrates the point by supposing that you have the (rational) desire that a stranger's disease be overcome: the fulfilment of this desire advances the stranger's welfare, not yours.
