  Some philosophers hold that only occurrent desires are real desires. So-called standing desires are really just dispositions to generate desires, on this way of thinking. One difficulty for this position is that standing desires seem to be good components of causal explanations of various mental processes. For instance: why does the new tin of tea on the counter of her boyfriend's kitchen catch Nora's attention? It might be that it caught her attention because she has a standing desire to know about the tea that is available to her, and the tin in her boyfriend's kitchen is relevant to this desire. Why is Nora delighted to see the tin? Because she has a standing desire to try new kinds of tea, and she has just seen that the tin contains a new kind of tea. And so on. The ground of the disposition to generate occurrent desires can do for these sorts of explanations, but it is truer to ordinary thinking about the mind to say that this ground just is a desire—a standing desire—than to say that it is anything else.