True emotions

Philosophical Quarterly 56 (224):382-405 (2006)
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Abstract

Philosophers widely agree that emotions may have or lack appropriateness or fittingness, which in the emotional domain is an analogue of truth. I defend de Sousa's account of emotional truth by arguing that emotions have cognitive content as digitalized evaluative perceptions of the particular object of emotion, in terms of the relevant formal property. I argue that an emotion is true if and only if there is an actual fit between the particular and the formal objects of emotion, and the emotion's propositional content is semantically satisfied, or the target of the emotion exists. Emotions meet the syntactic and disciplinary requirements of minimally truth-apt states. Appropriate fit occurs when lower-level properties of particular objects of emotion provide sufficient warrant to make ascription of the relevant formal properties superassertable.

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Citations of this work

Emotional Justification.Santiago Echeverri - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):541-566.
Insights and Blindspots of the Cognitivist Theory of Emotions.Andrea Scarantino - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (4):729-768.
Emotions about Emotions.Dina Mendonça - 2013 - Emotion Review 5 (4):390-396.
A new role for emotions in epistemology.Georg Brun & Dominique Kuenzle - 2008 - In Georg Brun, Ulvi Dogluoglu & Dominique Kuenzle (eds.), Epistemology and Emotions. Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 1--31.

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References found in this work

The Moralistic Fallacy.Daniel Jacobson - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1):65-90.
What an emotion is: A sketch.Robert C. Roberts - 1988 - Philosophical Review 97 (April):183-209.
Explaining action by emotion.Sabine A. Döring - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):214-230.
Emotion and moral judgment.Linda Zagzebski - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1):104–124.

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