True emotions

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 224, 2006, Pages 382-405

  Salmela, Mikko ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949422366     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2006.00448.x     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. P. Goldie, 'Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World', in R.C. Solomon (ed.), Thinking about Feeling (Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 91-106, at p. 99
2. cf. B. Helm, Emotional Reason (Cambridge UP, 2001), p. 64: 'an emotion is warranted just in case it has gotten the world right'
3. R. Roberts, Emotions (Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 147: 'In emotions, as in sense perceptions, qualities are attributed to "the world", qualities that the world may or may not have. And it is largely in virtue of these attributions that we judge emotions to be appropriate and inappropriate. Emotions can succeed in fitting the world, or fail to fit it.'
4. J. D'Arms and D. Jacobson, 'The Moralistic Fallacy: on the "Appropriateness" of Emotions', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61 (2000), pp. 65-90, at p. 69
5. See R. de Sousa, 'Emotions - What I Know, What I'd Like to Think I Know, and What I'd Like to Think', in Solomon (ed.), Thinking about Feeling, pp. 61-75
6. and his 'Emotional Truth', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 76 (2002), pp. 247-63
7. Martha Nussbaum also suggests that emotions are evaluative judgements with the mind-to-world direction of fit, and therefore 'like other beliefs, [they] can be true or false': Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge UP, 2001), p. 46
8. C.J.G. Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Harvard UP, 1992), pp. 8-9
9. J. Prinz, Gut Reactions: a Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford UP, 2004)
10. See Helm, pp. 63-4
11. L. Zagzebski, 'Emotion and Moral Judgement', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66 (2003), pp. 104-24
12. M. Salmela, 'Emotional Feelings as Twofold Representations', in Å. Carlson (ed.), Philosophical Aspects of Emotions (Stockholm: Thales, 2005), pp. 275-93
13. See de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (MIT Press, 1987), p. 122
14. J. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Harvard UP, 1998), pp. 143-4
15. Goldie, 'Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World', p. 94
16. F. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (MIT Press, 1981), pp. 142, 153
17. Likewise, Philip Pettit argued in his presentation 'Response-Dependence and Permutation Problems' (University of Turku, 16 May 2005) that the behaviour of non-linguistic animals suggests that they are capable of believing universal propositions of the type 'All xs are G' in sensu diviso, that is, case by case, even if they do not master the concepts of x or G, and thus cannot believe the same universal proposition in sensu composito, that is, as a general principle
18. See also S. Döring, 'Explaining Action by Emotion', The Philosophical Quarterly, 53 (2003), pp. 214-30
19. L. Charland, 'Feeling and Representation: Computational Theory and the Modularity of Affect', Synthese, 105 (1996), pp. 273-301
20. R. Solomon, 'Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World', in Solomon (ed.), Thinking about Feeling, pp. 76-88
21. M.M. Adamos, 'How Are the Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Aspects of Emotion Related?', Consciousness and Emotion, 3 (2002), pp. 183-95
22. Dretske, 'Sensation/Cognition', in J. Dancy and E. Sosa (eds), A Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 472-5
23. J. Lambie and A. Marcel, 'Consciousness and the Varieties of Emotion Experience: a Theoretical Framework', Psychological Review, 109 (2002), pp. 219-59, at p. 223
24. R. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions (Cambridge UP, 1987), pp. 32-43. There is an obvious flaw in Gordon's account of factive emotions. For people need only believe that they know that p in order to feel a factive emotion that p. If Gordon were right, Romeo could not have mourned Juliet's death because Juliet was not in fact dead at the time when Romeo believed this to be true
25. and A. Ben-Ze'ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000), p. 543, have made the same point against Gordon
26. I propose a distinction between emotional authenticity and truth here. If my emotion is warranted by the totality of evidence available for me, the emotion is true for me even if it may not fit the world. See my 'What is Emotional Authenticity?', Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 35 (2005), pp. 209-30
27. See, e.g., Y. Gunther, 'Emotion and Force', in Y. Gunther (ed.), Essays on Non-Conceptual Content (MIT Press, 2003), pp. 279-88
28. C. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (Yale UP, 1947)
29. A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936)
30. For a more detailed discussion of Gunther's argument, see S. Döring, Gründe und Gefühle: Rationale Motivation durch emotionale Vernunft (Universität Essen, 2004), pp. 260-7
31. See D. Pugmire, Sound Sentiments (Oxford UP, 2005), esp. pp. 55-6
32. Döring, Gründe und Gefühle
33. Helm, Emotional Reason, p. 64
34. Roberts, 'What an Emotion Is: a Sketch', Philosophical Review, 97 (1988), pp. 183-209
35. see also A. Morton, 'Emotional Truth', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 76 (2002), pp. 265-75
36. T. Crane, 'The Non-Conceptual Content of Experience', in T. Crane (ed.), Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception (Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. 136-57
37. D. Davidson, Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004)
38. See also Pugmire, Sound Sentiments, p. 45
39. See J. Fodor, Modularity of the Mind (MIT Press, 1983), pp. 64-86
40. See, e.g., A.T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (New York: Meridian, 1979)
41. R.L. Leahy (ed.), Contemporary Cognitive Therapy: Theory, Research, and Practice (London: Guilford Press, 2004). In like manner, Robert Roberts points out in his forthcoming book Emotions and Virtues that human emotions fall on a continuum of 'sensory significance'
42. Sound Sentiments, p. 181. Actually, I think that persistent and warranted emotional ambivalence is possible for an individual belonging to two or more communities of sensibility whose feeling rules contradict each other. These people often include members of minority groups, whether cultural, ethnic or sexual. However, this is not a problem for my account of emotional truth because it is cast in terms of warranted assertability within a community of sensibility. This allows contrary emotions to be true within different communities of sensibility
43. See Wright, Truth and Objectivity, pp. 104-6
44. See, e.g., de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion
45. P. Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons (London: Routledge, 1988)
46. D'Arms and Jacobson, 'The Moralistic Fallacy'
47. I believe that the proposed account of emotional truth is also compatible with a projectivist interpretation of emotional perception so far as it accepts that emotions are warranted by reasons that render the actual object of emotion fitting for the emotional response: see, e.g., A. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), esp. ch. 7
48. S. Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
49. Wright, 'Truth in Ethics', in B. Hooker (ed.), Truth in Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 1-18, at p. 10
50. See Blackburn, Ruling Passions, pp. 304-10