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The Evaluative Content of Emotion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2019
Abstract
The content of emotion sometimes seems to be conflated with its object, but we can distinguish between content and object on the model of Fregean sense versus reference. Fear, for instance, refers to something the subject of fear is afraid of and represents that object of fear as dangerous, so that the emotion can be said to have evaluative content. Here I attempt to clarify and defend my view of emotional discomfort or other affect as what does the evaluating. Some current accounts of the unpleasantness of physical pain take a similar view, but in application to emotion they call for an explanation of how emotional affect can simultaneously evaluate both the affective symptoms of emotion and the emotion's object. I suggest an explanation and indicate how it supports the link between emotional valence and motivational force.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 85: Passions and the Emotions , July 2019 , pp. 75 - 86
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019
Footnotes
I owe thanks to Andrew Fyfe, Moonyoung Song, and David Wasserman for very helpful comments on the talk from which this paper was drawn, along with a later draft. Let me also thank, to the Royal Institute of Philosophy for sponsoring the talk and the University of Maryland for the sabbatical that allowed for some of my work on it.
References
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14 David Wasserman suggests a case where you feel a vague aversion toward a cat but cannot identify it as disgust until you remember that earlier you saw it playing with a dead mouse. That affect gives you something to investigate – often causally, but with a sense of recognition when you discover its content – is sometimes the only sense in which an emotion serves to ‘hold a thought in mind’.
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Note, too, that someone undergoing the same dental procedure without anaesthetic would presumably feel unpleasant pain, even if he did not evaluate the disturbance as bad for him, though it certainly would feel bad.
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19 See Bain, ‘What Makes Pain Unpleasant’, 287, for a similar suggestion. In application to physical pain, though (with one's bodily state replacing the object of emotion), it rests on Tye's account of pain as a perception of bodily damage, which I find questionable.
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21 See Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons, 31.
22 Such a requirement also seems to be needed to avoid the objection to evaluativism about pain raised by Brady, ‘Feeling Bad and Seeing Bad’. On my account it is affect (here, discomfort) that does the evaluating, whereas Brady's objection seems to rest on taking the evaluation as cognitive.
23 I attempt to spell this out for moral evaluations in Greenspan, , ‘Craving the Right: Emotions and Moral Reasons’, 39–61, in Bagnoli, C. (ed.), Morality and the Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
24 For more on this issue in connection with work on reasons, see Greenspan, ‘Emotions in Practical Reasoning’, in R. Chang and K. Sylvan (eds), Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason (Now York: Routledge, forthcoming).