Based on the belief that computational modeling (thinking in terms of representation and computations) can help to clarify controversial issues in emotion theory, this article examines emotional experience from the perspective of the Computational Belief–Desire Theory of Emotion (CBDTE), a computational explication of the belief–desire theory of emotion. It is argued that CBDTE provides plausible answers to central explanatory challenges posed by emotional experience, including: the phenomenal quality,intensity and object-directedness (...) of emotional experience, the function of emotional experience and its relation to cognition and motivation, and the relation between emotional experience and emotion. In addition, CBDTE avoids most objections that have been raised against cognitive theories of emotion. A remaining objection, that beliefs are not necessary for the emotions covered by CBDTE, is rejected as empirically unsupported. (shrink)

I argue that emotions are belief/desire sets characterized by strong desire.

This work develops an approach to the emotions suitable for addressing issues in moral psychology. It tries to answer two questions: What is an emotion? What are the functions of emotion? The proposed theory is based in part on the Cartesian theory of the passions and is developed within the framework of a functionalist analysis of mental states. Its central claims are: that an emotional state involves a person being affected in typical ways; that 'being affected (...) emotionally' involves tendencies: to be preoccupied with, or have one's attention focused on, the object of emotion; to overevaluate the object of emotion, where this overvaluation is relative to one's nonemotional beliefs; 'mental' feelings which are aspects of intentional states like evaluations and desires. ;The work contains six chapters. The first discusses sceptical doubts about the possibility of a general theory of emotion and suggests a way of drawing a distinction between emotions and attitudes. The second chapter considers a traditional analysis of BAE--the so-called feeling theory of emotion--and three standard objections to that theory. The chapter goes on to investigate a contemporary approach, the 'comprehensive theory of emotion' , which seeks to avoid these objectives. CT, endorsed by William Alston and William Lyons , is an amalgam of the cognitive view and the feeling theory; it analyses an emotion in terms of several casually related components: evaluative beliefs, desires, physiological changes and bodily sensations. ;Chapter Three offers a critique of CT, on the grounds that CT's explanation of emotional action is inadequate. CT analyses BAE in terms of bodily changes and sensations, but these components of emotion have no central role in causing action; rather CT holds that the evaluational and appetitive aspects of emotion give rise to action. This account, it is argued, underestimates the degree to which emotional action is frequently unreasonable or irrational, and severs the intuitive link between BAE and action. ;The remaining chapters develop a neo-Cartesian theory as an alternative to CT. Chapter Four defends Descartes' theory of the passions against traditional objections, and shows how two aspects of emotion he discusses--focus of attention and overvaluation--offer a more promising explanation of emotional action. Chapter Five explores the relation between feelings and emotions, and argues that many emotions essentially involve 'mental' pain or pleasure. In Chapter Six some consideration is given to the implications of the proposed theory for moral issues, and it is suggested that commonly held views on responsibility for emotions and the value of the emotional life bear re-examination. (shrink)

An important, but relatively neglected, aspect of human theory of mind is emotion inference: understanding how and why a person feels a certain why is central to reasoning about their beliefs, desires and plans. The authors review recent work that has begun to unveil the structure and determinants of emotion inference, organizing them within a unified probabilistic framework.

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engagingly written book, Martha Nussbaum maintains that these Hellenistic schools have been unjustly neglected in recent philosophic accounts of what (...) the classical "tradition" has to offer. By examining texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm - including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca - she recovers a valuable source for current moral and political thought and encourages us to reconsider philosophical argument as a technique through which to improve lives. In describing the contributions of Hellenistic ethics, Nussbaum focuses on each thinker's treatment of the question of emotion. All argued that many harmful emotions are based on false beliefs that are socially taught, and that good philosophical argument can transform emotions, and, with them, both private and public life. Written for general readers and specialists, this book addresses compelling issues ranging from the psychology of human passion through rhetoric to the role of philosophy in public and private life. (shrink)

We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure of (...) emotion and show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires—they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it. (shrink)

The subject of this article is to compare and analyze the meanings of the sentiments in Spinoza’s Ethica and sheng yi sim’s The change of humans. The problem of emotion in modern society is an important social problem. In this atmosphere, Spinoza is attracting attention. Modern society emphasizes desire and emotion rather than reason. Emotions should now be viewed from a positive perspective, not a negative view. The study of emotion in the 20th century was largely (...) dominated by cultural theory. Emotions, like languages, are culturally transmitted and learned. According to modern language philosophical insights, language constitutes experience, not reflection. If this language philosophical insight is correct, then the role of language is crucial in understanding and experiencing emotions. Language has a temporal and spatial context. Language has historicity and sociality. In order to understand the emotional aspects of what is happening in our society, we must understand the historical and social context of the emotional expressions in our language. The emotional expression in our language has our own East Asian history. In this regard, it is necessary to study our language, which is different from Western studies, in historical context. In order to understand our emotions in the historical and social context of a language other than the West, we are paying attention to sheng yi sim’s The change of human, the literature of the period of the 17th-18th century Joseon Dynasty, similar to that of Spinoza. (shrink)

The Structure of Emotions argues that emotion concepts should have a much more important role in the social and behavioural sciences than they now enjoy, and shows that certain influential psychological theories of emotions overlook the explanatory power of our emotion concepts. Professor Gordon also outlines a new account of the nature of commonsense (or ‘folk’) psychology in general.

This paper argues that emotions can play an epistemic role as justifiers of evaluative beliefs. It also presents the heuristics theory of emotion as an empirically informed explanation of how emotions can play such a role and why they in practice usefully complement non-affective evaluative judgments. As such, the heuristics theory represents a form of moderate rationalism: it acknowledges that emotions can be epistemically valuable, even privileged in some sense, but denies that they would be uniquely privileged. (...) I argue that judgments and emotional responses pick out different but correlated kinds of evaluative properties and therefore emotional responses and non-affective evaluative judgments play mutually complementary rather than mutually exclusive roles. It follows that emotional responses can be legitimately drawn upon to support evaluative beliefs, but they lack supreme epistemic authority. (shrink)

Emotion theory includes attempts to reduce or assimilate emotions to states such as bodily feelings, beliefs-desire combinations, and evaluative judgements. Resistance to such approaches is motivated by the claim that emotions possess a sui generis phenomenology. Uriah Kriegel defends a new form of emotion reductivism which avoids positing irreducible emotional phenomenology by specifying emotions’ phenomenal character in terms of a combination of other phenomenologies. This article argues Kriegel’s approach, and similar proposals, are unsuccessful, since typical emotional (...) experiences are constituted by sui generis feelings towards value. (shrink)

We investigated people's ability to infer others’ mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents’ desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants’ ability to recover the agent's beliefs depended on the evidence they got. When the agent caused the event, participants’ judgments also depended on the probability of the action ; when actions were improbable given the mental states, people failed to recover the agent's (...) beliefs even when they saw her react to both the anticipated and actual outcomes. A Bayesian model captured human performance throughout, consistent with the proposal that people rationally integrate information about others’ actions and emotional reactions to infer their unobservable mental states. (shrink)

This paper argues that Donald Davidson''s account ofassertions of evaluative judgments contains ahere-to-fore unappreciated strategy forreconciling the meta-ethical ``inconsistenttriad.'''' The inconsistency is thought to resultbecause within the framework of thebelief-desire theory assertions of moraljudgments must have conceptual connections withboth desires and beliefs. The connection withdesires is necessary to account for theinternal connection between such judgments andmotivation to act, while the connection withbeliefs is necessary to account for theapparent objectivity of such judgments.Arguments abound that no class of utterancescan coherently (...) be understood as having suchconceptual connections to attitudes of bothsorts, hence that an inconsistency results. Buton Davidson''s account assertions of evaluativejudgments have just such connections to boththe relevant desire and a belief concerning anevaluative matter of fact. I argue that thisaccount has the resources to respond tostandard objections, and at least meritsconsideration as one among other plausiblealternatives. (shrink)

Henry Wellman and colleagues have provided evidence of a robust developmental progression in theory-of-mind (or as we will say, “mindreading”) abilities, using verbal tasks. Understanding diverse desires is said to be easier than understanding diverse beliefs, which is easier than understanding that lack of perceptual access issues in ignorance, which is easier than understanding false belief, which is easier than understanding that people can hide their true emotions. These findings present a challenge to nativists about mindreading, and are (...) said to support a social-constructivist account of mindreading development instead. This article takes up the challenge on behalf of nativism. Our goal is to show that the mindreading-scale findings fail to support constructivism because well-motivated alternative hypotheses have not yet been controlled for and ruled out. These have to do with the pragmatic demands of verbal tasks. (shrink)

The philosophy of emotions has long been dominated by the view called «cognitivism». According to it, emotions are characterized not by mere physical impulses but by a cognitive evaluation of their object. However, despite their success, cognitive theories have to deal with various objections and are divided on how to answer to them. In this essay I want to defend the form of cognitivism claimed by Martha Nussbaum from the most common criticisms. After a brief summary of her account, I (...) confront some of the objections that have been raised against it. In Section 2 I deal with the classic problem of emotions in infants and animals, which lack linguistic abilities. Later, I confront the potential problem represented by cases in which one’s emotion and reasoned judgment seem to differ: in paragraph 3 I consider irrational phobias and fears, to show how they can be accounted for in terms of judgments and thoughts, and not only of perceptions; in paragraph 4 I deal with the objection that «judgementalist» theories violate the «principle of charity», for they ascribe an excessive irrationality to people. I argue that experimental evidence suggest that it is not implausible to assume that people have contradictory beliefs under conditions of uncertainty, and that perceptual theories of emotion fail to account for some fundamental aspects of these phenomena. Finally, in paragraph 5, I deal with the objection according to which a cognitive-evaluative theory cannot explain the sense of passivity that we commonly experience in emotions. (shrink)

On Hume’s account of motivation, beliefs and desires are very different kinds of propositional attitudes. Beliefs are cognitive attitudes, desires emotive ones. An agent’s belief in a proposition captures the weight he or she assigns to this proposition in his or her cognitive representation of the world. An agent’s desire for a proposition captures the degree to which he or she prefers its truth, motivating him or her to act accordingly. Although beliefs and desires are sometimes entangled, they (...) play very different roles in rational agency. In two classic papers (Lewis 1988, 1996), David Lewis discusses several challenges to this Humean picture, but ultimately rejects them. We think that his discussion of a central anti-Humean alternative – the desire-as-belief thesis – is in need of refinnement. On this thesis, the desire for proposition p is given by the belief that p is desirable. Lewis claims that ‘[e]xcept in trivial cases, [this thesis] collapses into contradiction’(Lewis 1996, p. 308). The problem, he argues, is that the thesis is inconsistent with the purportedly plausible requirement that one’s desire for a proposition should not change upon learning that the proposition is true; call this the invariance requirement. In this paper, we revisit Lewis’s argument. We show that, if one carefully distinguishes between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions, the desire-asbelief thesis can be rendered consistent with the invariance requirement. Lewis’s conclusion holds only under certain conditions: the desire-as-belief thesis conflicts with the invariance requirement if and only if there are certain correlations between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions. But when there are such correlations, we suggest, the invariance requirement loses its plausibility. Thus Lewis’s argument against the desire-as-belief thesis appears to be valid only in cases in which it is unsound. (shrink)

The theory of emotions as affective position-takings (PT) is investigated from the perspective of a computational model of the belief-desire theory of emotions (CBDTE) proposed by the author. Both theories assume that a core subset of typical emotion episodes are the products of an evaluation process in which cognized states of affairs are evaluated for their congruence with the person's desires; and that emotions are, on the conscious level, feelings of pleasure and displeasure. However, according (...) to PT the evaluation is a concern-based construal and emotional feelings are intrinsically object-directed, whereas according to CBDTE, the evaluation is performed by a hardwired mechanism that produces nonintentional feelings. Furthermore, CBDTE suggests that hedonic feelings are simultaneously reactions to the detection of value, and representations of the detected value. (shrink)

In this paper I maintain that Spinoza systematizes independently credible accounts of belief-formation, affect, and desire into an intriguing general theory of how the mind works. His account also explains disparate downstream psychological phenomena, including: (1) emotional responses to fiction; (2) belief perseverance; (3) the reduction of cognitive dissonance; (4) epistemic conservativism that opens us up to confirmation bias, identity protection, and intolerance. Given the promise of Spinoza’s program, I conclude with a plea for further philosophical (...) engagement. (shrink)

Putting together Kant's theory of emotion is complicated by two facts: (1) Kant has no term which is an obvious equivalent of "emotion" as used in contemporary English; (2) theorists disagree about what emotions are. These obstacles notwithstanding, my dissertation aims to provide the foundation for a reconstruction of Kant's theory of emotion that is both historically accurate and responsive to contemporary philosophical concerns. In contrast to available approaches which rest on contested assumptions about emotions, (...) I start from the generally accepted and reasonable premise that what we call "emotions" refers in Kant to a set of mental states, some of which he associates with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure ("feelings"), others with the faculty of desire ("desires"). I then proceed to examine the nature of these two kinds of mental states and their proper treatment. I argue that Kantian feelings are representations of objects' relation to the subject, that have a felt quality, and dispose their subject to certain behaviors. While feelings can only motivate action by causing desires and have no temporal direction, desires - except for certain wishes - are future-directed, which allows them to motivate actions immediately (but they need not bring action about). Equipped with this account of feelings and desires, I proceed to examine the kind of treatment Kant prescribes for them, and argue that feelings (except affects) should be cultivated, that is, acquired and improved so that they could be used to pursue rational ends, while inclinations, i.e., habitual sensuous desires, should generally be disciplined, that is, constrained by rules. The resultant picture is compelling because it rests on minimal assumptions about emotions and successfully incorporates the phenomenological, evaluative, and dispositional functions traditionally associated with emotions. (shrink)

Chapter I: The background to Aristotle's theory is provided by Aristophanes' Clouds in the debate between the traditionalists and Socratics on moral education. Aristotle steers a middle course between the old and new educations, preserving on the one hand, the role of filial ties in the transmission of values, and on the other, the importance of practical reason in providing a critical assessment of attachments. ;Chapter II: Here I argue against a common reading of Aristotle that views moral training (...) as merely a matter of habituation and practice whereby certain skills become second-nature. I propose instead that moral training is a training of "right pleasures and pains", or attachments to certain ends and objects of value. These I argue are transmitted through antecedent attachments to family. ;Chapter III: A theory of the development of character requires an analysis of emotions and desires constitutive of character. Aristotle regards emotions as intentional, where by intentional he means directed at certain objects regarded by an agent selectively, as the result of certain beliefs, perceptions, and phantasia. Thus, emotions have desiderative and cognitive elements, and training is directed at each. ;Chapter IV: Another aspect of moral training is paideia through music and tragedy. Both ensure for the transmission of a common core of cultural values, and thus extend training beyond the family to the city. At the heart of this paideia is the notion of mimesis. In music, mimesis is a process is one of association, whereby the pleasurable quality of music reinforces an attachment to the characters which music expresses. In tragedy, the identification is more complex. Katharsis through pity and fear requires that we identify not merely with characters, but with choice and actions and deliberations which lead to them. ;Chapter V: I conclude by studying Aeschylus' Oresteia as a tragedy which illustrates the notion of identification, as well as Aristotle's general belief that moral training takes place within the family. Through tragedy we see the complexities that develop within philia, and are forced, through pity and fear, to examine our own filial sentiments and obligations. (shrink)

In this paper, we take issue with the belief–desire model of second- and third-person action interpretation as it is presented by both theory theories and cognitivist versions of simulation theory. These accounts take action interpretation to consist in the (tacit) attribution of proper belief–desire pairs that mirror the structure of formally valid practical inferences. We argue that the belief–desire model rests on the unwarranted assumption that the interpreter can only reach the agent's (...) practical context of action through inference. This assumption betrays a deep-seated bias toward disengaged, observational interpretation strategies. On our alternative picture, the interpreter can start off on the assumption of a shared practical context and proceed to reason discourse in those cases in which this assumption runs aground. Following Brandom's non-formalist account of reason discourse, we suggest that interpreting other people's actions in terms of reasons is not a matter of following the principles of formally valid practical syllogisms, but of endorsing practical material inferences that are correct in virtue of a shared practical world. (shrink)

I present and explore a normative theory of non-doxastic attitudes like desire, hatred, and admiration. The viewpoint is general and abstract: independent of any particular flavor or source of normativity, I explore general features any acceptable way of forming these attitudes would have, especially in contrast to doxastic attitudes like belief. The first three chapters present a relatively unified picture of non-doxastic attitude formation, grounded in types of non-doxastic attitudes we can have in contrast to their impossible (...) doxastic analogues. In particular, I defend a kind of externalism; I apply it to a specific attitude, desire, to show how the approach works; and then based on a different aspect of the view, I present what I take to be some of the best ways to motivate the view, and some of the best ways to criticize it, as well. In the last chapter, I develop a theory about how these attitudes are best communicated, this time meant to capture how belief is best communicated, too, though it is inspired by certain features of non-doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

In this article we take issue with theory theory and simulation theory accounts of folk psychology committed to (i) the belief-desire (BD) model and (ii) the assumption of universality (AU). Recent studies cast doubt on the compatibility of these commitments because they reveal considerable cross-cultural differences in folk psychologies. We present both theory theory and simulation theory with the following dilemma: either (i) keep the BD-model as an account of the surface properties (...) of specific explicit folk psychologies and give up AU in light of the cross-cultural evidence; or (ii) defend AU with respect to core capacities underlying different culture-specific folk psychologies, and explain why the BD-model will be genuinely explanatory at this level. (shrink)

Most moral theorists agree that it is one thing to believe that someone has slighted you and another to resent her for the insult; one thing to believe that someone did you a favor and another to feel gratitude toward her for her kindness. While all of these ways of responding to another's conduct are forms of moral appraisal, the reactive attitudes are said to 'go beyond' beliefs in some way. We think this claim is adequately explained only when we (...) take seriously the fact that reactive attitudes are emotions. In this paper, we appeal to insights of the emotions literature to highlight one key way in which reactive attitudes go beyond beliefs: beliefs about a person and her morally significant conduct merely ascribe to the person the property of having performed a morally significant action, while reactive attitudes are ways of experiencing that person as having performed a morally significant action. We then suggest that appreciating this is a crucial first step toward understanding why reactive emotions play roles in our practices around responsibility that beliefs do not. (shrink)

In Emotions and Reasons, Patricia Greenspan offers an evaluative theory of emotion that assigns emotion a role of its own in the justification of action. She analyzes emotions as states of object-directed affect with evaluative propositional content possibly falling short of belief and held in mind by generalized comfort or discomfort.

Wayne A. Davis uses his theory of happiness to clarify and deepen Rand's theory of emotion. He distinguishes belief from knowledge, volitive from appetitive desire, and occurrent thinking from believing. He suggests that values in Rand's sense are things we volitively desire. Happiness is defined in terms of the sum of the products of the degree of belief and desire functions over all thoughts. Davis then evaluates such Randian maxims as that happiness (...) cannot be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims, and that emotions are not tools of cognition, but products of one's premises—one's philosophy. (shrink)

Rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental. Therefore it is important to understand the sort of rationality at issue here. It is often assumed that rationality just is instrumental rationality, but this leaves us with too thin a notion of desire: Desires centrally involve the notion of things mattering or being significant, for their objects must normally be worth pursuing to the subject. Such significance is simply unintelligible in terms of instrumental rationality. Consequently, understanding significance and its rational (...) connections to desire and action is essential to understanding rationality as a constitutive ideal. In particular, it is a crucial step in vindicating the idea of animal thought. ;I argue that significance, as well as desire, must be understood in part in terms of the emotions. Many prominent theories of emotions illegitimately conceive of significance as conceptually prior to the capacity for having emotions, in that things can be significant to a creature that does not have any emotions at all. In contrast, I argue first that a creature must have the capacity for emotions in order to be a subject of significance because to be significant is in part to be a suitable object of emotions generally. Second, emotions are essentially feelings not because they "involve" bodily sensations but because they are a distinctive kind of awareness of the significance of the world to the subject; particular occurrent emotions therefore presuppose that things are already significant to the subject. Consequently, emotions and significance form a conceptual package, with neither being prior to the other: Significance and the emotions emerge together in a pattern of instrumental and non-instrumental rationality that can be articulated in terms of their interconnected explanatory roles. ;Being a subject of beliefs and desires therefore requires more than simply rationally mediated goal-directedness, as Dennett believes. Rather, it requires being open, through the emotions, to the significance of the world and to the reasons that significance provides for action. This conclusion is shown to have important ramifications for our understanding both of a minimal sense of agency and of what it is to be a person. (shrink)

Many philosophers sharply distinguish emotions from feelings. Emotions are not feelings, and having an emotion does not necessitate having some feeling, they think. In this paper I reply to a set of arguments people use sharply to distinguish emotions from feelings. In response to these people, I endorse and defend a hedonic theory of emotion that avoids various anti-feeling objections. Proponents of this hedonic theory analyze an emotion by reference to forms of cognition (e.g., thought, (...) belief, judgment) and a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling. Given this theory,emotions are feelings in some important sense of "feelings", and these feelings are identified as particular emotions by reference to their hedonic character and the cognitive state that causes the hedonic feelings. (shrink)

Preliminary draft of November 2010—please do not circulate without permission.

In this paper I consider Franz Brentano’s theory of emotion. I focus on three of its central claims: (i) emotions are sui generis intentional phenomena; (ii) emotions are essentially evaluative phenomena; (iii) emotions provide the basis of an epistemology of objective value. I argue that all three claims are correct, and I weave together Brentano’s arguments with some of my own to support them. In the course of defending these claims, Brentano argues that ‘feeling and will’ are united (...) into the same fundamental class. I summarize two of his arguments for this claim, what I call ‘the nature of desire’ argument and ‘the transition’ argument. I show how a central plank of these arguments relies crucially on Brentano’s epistemology of value. (shrink)

In De Anima, Aristotle, following his predecessor Plato, argues that the human soul has two parts, the rational and the irrational. Yet, unlike Plato, he thinks that the two parts necessarily form a unity. This is mostly evident in emotions, which seem to be constituted by both, a cognitive element, such as beliefs and expectations about one's situation, as well as, non-cognitive elements such as physical sensations. Indeed, in de Anima Aristotle argues that beliefs, bodily motion and physiological changes, constitute (...) the emotion. Hence, he avoids making sharp divisions between the cognitive (or rational) and non-cognitive or (non-rational) elements of emotion. Aristotle treats emotions as purposeful responses to our world, and in doing so, he avoids the problems that afflict the (until recently prominent) physiological theories according to which emotions are just irrational, uncontrolled responses to situations. Although our emotions can be irrational, more often than not they are rational. This is most evident in Aristotle's discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics, in which correct emotion is a large part of virtue. For instance, a courageous person when in a dangerous situation is neither fearless nor overwhelmed by fear. The complexity of Aristotle's view of emotion is nowhere more evident than in his analysis of anger in the Rhetoric. There, Aristotle argues that anger requires certain moral beliefs about the wrongness of contempt, spite and insolence, beliefs about our status and how we should be treated, a desire for revenge, and pleasure in the contemplation of revenge. Only the last thirty years or so psychologists and philosophers have started to develop theories of emotion of such complexity. Indeed, in psychology the prominent view seems to be the Schachter and Singer theory, which to a great extent resembles Aristotle's view. Schachter and Singer in their paper "Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State" argue against the then prominent James-Lange view, according to which emotions are bodily sensations and physiological changes. Schachter and Singer believe, like Aristotle, that emotions cannot be just dumb responses to situations. Although they recognize that emotion may be a physiological change or bodily sensation, they think that there must be another factor that would account for the variety of our emotions and our ability to distinguish and identify them. Schacther and Singer argue, as Aristotle did, that emotions involve both cognitive and non-cognitive elements in various degrees of complexity. According to them a subject identifies his physiological states of arousal as emotions in terms of the cognition offered to him or her. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate both views, and argue that Aristotle's account of emotion, not only resembles contemporary theories such as Schachter and Singer's, but also in many respects, it is paramount in complexity and insight. (shrink)

Deep appreciation of the relevance of emotion to epistemology requires a rich account of how emotional mental states such as happiness, sadness and desire interact with cognitive states such as belief and doubt. Analytic philosophy since Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell has assumed that such mental states are propositional attitudes, which are relations between a self and a proposition, an abstract entity constituting the meaning of a sentence. This chapter shows the explanatory defects of the doctrine of (...) propositional attitudes, and proposes instead that beliefs, desires, and emotions should be construed naturalistically using current understanding of brain mechanisms. Mental states are patterns of neural activity, not relations between dubious entities such as selves and propositions. From this perspective, it becomes easy to see how cognition and emotion are intertwined, and hence how emotions can be integral to epistemology. I begin by reviewing some of the ways in which emotions are relevant to epistemology: as frequent contributors to the growth of knowledge, as sometime impediments to knowledge acquisition, and as components of knowledge about persons and morality. I then argue that propositional attitudes do not exist, because the selves and the propositions that they purportedly relate do not exist. Thus the doctrine of propositional attitudes is as useless for epistemology as it is for explaining human action. I argue for an alternative construal of mental states as patterns of neural activity, and July 23, 2007 describe how it is possible to give a theoretically rich and empirically supported account of the neurophysiological interconnections of cognition and emotion. Finally, I discuss the epistemological significance of this naturalistic, materialist reconstrual of cognitions and emotions. (shrink)

Weiner’s attribution theory of motivation and emotion assumes emotions are determined by beliefs about causality. Individuals share a naïve understanding of this linkage between causal attribution and emotions and use it in order to draw inferences from and influence others’ emotions. Evidence for such uses is provided and recent research and theory that goes beyond the attribution–emotion linkage is discussed. Specifically, recent research considers the naïve use of a larger set of emotions and appraisals and their (...) connections, and the role of context in this process. However, still missing is a fuller understanding when this naïve knowledge is employed and how and when it is based on an explicit understanding of the emotion–appraisal linkage rather than more automatic processes. (shrink)

The question why Bevir's account of intentionality is conceptualized purely in terms of individual beliefs is important as such a conceptualization appears to depart from standard accounts of intentionality within the philosophy of mind, that include reference to individual desires. It is beliefs and desires which are usually considered the rock?bottom components of individual intentional states, yet Bevir defines weak intentions solely in terms of the former while explicitly rejecting attention to the latter. There are a number of difficulties which (...) an account of meaning that excludes reference to desires faces. Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons for historians of ideas to embrace a theory of meaning that includes reference to beliefs but not desires. Through an extension of a different argument put forward by Bevir, it is suggested that such a belief?based definition of the nature of meaning is made defensible through reference to an account of the identity of the history of ideas as a discipline, a distinct area of academic enquiry that can be ? and for good reasons is ? individuated from the history of human action. (shrink)

This book defends the much-disputed view that emotions are what Hume referred to as ‘original existences’: feeling states that have no intentional or representational properties of their own. In doing so, the book serves as a valuable counterbalance to the now mainstream view that emotions are representational mental states. Beginning with a defence of a feeling theory of emotion, Whiting opens up a whole new way of thinking about the role and centrality of emotion in our lives, (...) showing how emotion is key to a proper understanding of human motivation and the self. Whiting establishes that emotions as types of bodily feelings serve as the categorical bases for our behavioural dispositions, including those associated with moral thought, virtue, and vice. The book concludes by advancing the idea that emotions make up our intrinsic nature - the characterisation of what we are like in and of ourselves, when considered apart from how we are disposed to behave. The conclusion additionally draws out the implications of the claims made throughout the book in relation to our understanding of mental illness and the treatment of emotional disorders. (shrink)

In this book Zagzebski gives an extended argument that the self-reflective person is committed to belief on authority. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. She argues that epistemic and emotional self-trust are rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, and that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, modeled on the well-known principles of authority of Joseph Raz. These principles (...) apply to authority in the moral and religious domains. (shrink)

How we evaluate things and what we desire are closely connected. In typical cases, the things we desire are things that we evaluate as good or desirable. According to evaluation theories of desire, this connection is a very tight one: desires are evaluations of their objects as good or as desirable. There are two main varieties of this view. According to Doxastic Evaluativism, to desire that p is to believe or judge that p is good. According (...) to Perceptual Evaluativism, to desire that p is to perceive p as being good (or for p to seem good). The present paper poses a puzzle for such views. The puzzle should be familiar to theorists interested in the normativity and metaphysics of the emotions, but I am unaware of its application to desire. The aim of the present paper is to present the puzzle as it applies to desire, which should be of independent interest, but I also hope that by shining a light on the puzzle in this domain, we might put ourselves in a better position to offer a solution in all cases. At the end of the paper, I gesture towards a promising way ahead that departs from relying on contradictory contents. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I investigate the development of the ethical theory of emotions in two ancient Chinese Confucian texts, Lúnyǔ (the Analects of Confucius) and Mèngzǐ (Mencius). Departing from much of the previous scholarship on ancient Chinese emotion, which has exclusively focused on the single Chinese term ‘qíng’ 情 (“emotion”), I closely analyze a number of Chinese terms for particular emotions in the textual and historical contexts of Lúnyǔ and Mèngzǐ. The leading question of my dissertation is (...) what role emotions (especially good emotions such as compassion) play in moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral cultivation for Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.) and Mencius (390–305 B.C.E.), and against the dominant theoretical positions in recent work on Chinese philosophy I argue that in the Mencius, 1) moral emotions provide an important but only partial basis for all-things-considered ethical judgment; 2) not only is the virtuous person in full control of his own desires, but his moral autonomy is not compromised even by his moral emotions; and 3) Mencius’ theory of emotional cultivation is significantly based on the inculcation of social values which are not originally embodied in moral emotions. (shrink)

Finding out why we have beliefs and desires is important for a thorough understanding of the nature of our minds (and those of other animals). It is therefore unsurprising that several accounts have been presented that are meant to answer this question. At least in the philosophical literature, the most widely accepted of these are due to Kim Sterelny and Peter Godfrey-Smith, who argue that beliefs and desires evolved due to their enabling us to be behaviourally flexible in a way (...) that reflexes do not—which, they claim, is beneficial in epistemically complex environments. However, as I try to make clear in this paper, upon closer consideration, this kind of account turns out to be theoretically implausible. In the main, this is because it fails to give due credit to the powers of reflex-driven organisms, which can in fact be just as flexible in their behaviour as ones that are belief/desire-driven. In order to improve on this account, I therefore propose that beliefs and desires evolved, not due to their enabling us to do something completely different from what reflexive organisms can do, but rather due to their enabling us to do the same things better. Specifically, I argue that beliefs and desires evolved for making the generation of behaviour more efficient, since they can simplify the necessary cognitive labour considerably. I end by considering various implications of this account. (shrink)

In our everyday psychologising, emotions figure large. When we are trying to explain and predict what a person says and does, that person’s emotions are very much among the objects of our thoughts. Despite this, emotions do not figure large in our philosophical reconstruction of everyday psychological practice—in philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. Barry Smith has noted this point: We frequently mention people’s emotional sates when assessing how they behave, when trying to understand why they (...) say and do the things they say and do, and when deciding how to deal with them. A large part of our awareness of others and our ability to make sense of them depends on their emotional make-up and our appreciation of how this affects their thoughts and actions. All of this is missing from the standard accounts of folk psychology, and the key question is why? (2002, 111-2). Before beginning to answer to Smith’s question, I want to say more to characterise the approach in philosophical psychology which he is questioning. There are many detailed philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. My aim here isn’t to examine these details, but to characterise a certain species of philosophical psychology—one which holds that one can explain the rational production and control of behaviour in terms of a narrow set of mental state types: belief, desire (and perhaps a few others: perception or intention). Hence my label for this species: ‘Humean psychology’. The orthodox Humean view is that rational agency can be explained adequately by appeal to the agent’s beliefs and desires. So, to borrow an example from Davidson (1978), we can explain a person’s adding salt to the stew by citing her desire that the will stew taste better and her belief that if.. (shrink)

My concern here is with the Humean claim that no purely cognitive state could, in combination with appropriate other beliefs, but with nothing else, originate a process of rational motivation. The starting point of such motivation must always include some other element: a desire. Let's call this claim, following David McNaughton the belief-desire theory, or BDT for short. The theory is widely believed but intensely controversial. I argue here that it is true.

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the (...) mind, including the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the (...) mind, including the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the (...) mind, including the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being. (shrink)

One of Jerry Fodor’s many seminal contributions to philosophy of mind was his inner sentence theory of belief and desire. To believe that p is to have a subpersonal inner sentence in one’s “belief-box” that means that p, and to desire that q is to have a subpersonal inner sentence in one’s “desire-box” that means that q. I will distinguish between two accounts of box-inclusion that exhaust the options: liberal and restrictive. I will show (...) that both accounts have the mistaken implication that in certain cases there can be radical but “secret” changes in a subject’s beliefs and desires. I will suggest that the correct moral to draw is that we should instead accept what Eric Schwitzgebel has called a “surface-level” theory of belief and desire. (shrink)

The experience of emotion is a fundamental part of human consciousness. Think, for example, of how different our conscious lives would be without such experiences as joy, anger, fear, disgust, pity, anxiety, and embarrassment. It is uncontroversial that these experiences typically have an intentional content. Anger, for example, is normally directed at someone or something. One may feel angry at one=s stock broker for provid- ing bad advice or angry with the cleaning lady for dropping the vase. But it (...) is not un- controversial that emotional experiences are always intentional. John Searle, for exam- ple, remarks, AMany conscious states are not Intentional, e.g., a sudden sense of elation...@. Moreover, many animals experience emotions and it is natural to sup- pose that such emotions lack the sophistication of beliefs or thoughts. When a dog ex- periences delight in seeing its master after an absence of several days, the suggestion that at least part of the dog=s experience of delight is a belief that its master has returned home seems to import into the experience something that at best is associ- ated with it and perhaps is not really a state to which the dog is subject at all. And even in the case of human beings, emotional experience often does not seem to involve thought. Consider the experience of disgust, to take one obvious example.1 Nor is a sali- ent belief required. One may have a strong fear of spiders and yet not believe that spi- ders typically pose any risk to humans. But if emotional experiences need not involve beliefs or thoughts, then just how are they intentional?2. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that for various reasons there must be psychological laws governing beliefs and desires. One of the few serious examples that they offer is the _belief-desire law_, which states, roughly, that _ceteris paribus_ people do what they believe will satisfy their desires. This paper argues that, in fact, there is no such law. In particular, decision theory does not support the contention that there is such a law.