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The Evaluative Content of Emotion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2019

Patricia Greenspan
Patricia Greenspan*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
*
[email protected]
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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 

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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

2 See Kenny, Anthony, Action, Emotion and Will (New York: Humanities Press, 1963)Google Scholar, 189f.

3 For the original version of the perceptual view see De Sousa, Ronald, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Deonna, Julien A. and Teroni, Fabrice, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 77–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See, e.g., Bain, David, ‘What Makes Pains Unpleasant?’, Philosophical Studies 166, Suppl. 1 (2013), S69–S89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For the classic statement see Solomon, Robert C., The Passions (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993)Google Scholar.

7 See Greenspan, Patricia S., Emotions and Reasons (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988)Google Scholar.

8 See Greenspan, , ‘A Case of Mixed Feelings: Ambivalence and the Logic of Emotion’, 191–204, in Rorty, A. O. (ed.), Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

9 See Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons, 31.

10 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1325–51. in McKeon, R. (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), 137830–31Google Scholar.

11 See Greenspan, , ‘Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body’, Philosophy 52 (2003), 113–25Google Scholar.

12 See Frege, Gottlob, ‘Űber Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892), 25–50Google Scholar; translated and reprinted as ‘On Sense and Reference’, The Philosophical Review 57 (1948), 209–230.

13 Cf. Greenspan, , ‘Learning Emotions and Ethics’, 539–560, in Goldie, P. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

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’.

15 See, e.g., Brady, Michael S., ‘Feeling Bad and Seeing Bad’, Dialectica, 69 (2015), 403–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Cf., e.g., Tye, Michael, ‘Another Look at Representationalism about Pain’, in Aydede, M. (ed.), Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2006)Google Scholar. On Tye's view pain itself has an intentional content, contrary to the usual view, which I assume here in contrast to emotion. Tye also allows for a view of pain as disturbance to the tissues, presumably in a sense that does not imply damage – which might fit the facts of my case, though not the experiential qualities in virtue of which I confirmed that what I felt was pain

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.

17 See, e.g., Solomon, The Passions, 88f., and Lyons, William, Emotion (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, e.g. 89.

18 Cf. Schachter, Stanley and Singer, Jerome, ‘Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State’, Psychological Review 69 (1962), 379–399CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, for a well-known (but apparently unreplicated) experiment suggesting that which emotion a subject attributes to himself – even whether it is positive or negative (euphoria versus anger), i.e. whether it involves discomfort – may be affected by how he explains the symptoms of emotion.

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.

20 See Hume, , A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, Bk. II.

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).