How (Not) to Think of Emotions as Evaluative Attitudes

Müller, Jean Moritz

doi:10.1111/1746-8361.12192

Cited by 52 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…59 I am not sure emotions entail a representation of value by the agent, rather than (say) the natural properties underlying the relevant evaluative property (Deonna and Teroni 2012). But if they did, we have good reasons for thinking that the relevant representation would be distinct from emotions, given that the epistemic access to reasons for a certain kind of response R are generally provided by responses other than R (Müller 2017). 60 As noted earlier, the argument in the text is not meant to cast doubt on direct arguments to the effect that emotion and perception have a similar epistemic profile.…”

Section: How About Intentionality Phenomenology and Passivity?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion: More like Action than Perception

Naar

2020

Erkenn

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Although some still advance reductive accounts of emotions—according to which they fall under a more familiar type of mental state—contemporary philosophers tend to agree that emotions probably constitute their own kind of mental state. Agreeing with this claim, however, is compatible with attempting to find commonalities between emotions and better understood things. According to the advocates of the so-called ‘perceptual analogy’, thinking of emotion in terms of perception can fruitfully advance our understanding even though emotion may not be reducible to ordinary perception. In this paper, I spell out and motivate a different analogy—that between emotion and action—an analogy which I think can do some important theoretical work. In particular, it constitutes a theoretically fruitful way to think about core aspects of emotions and might in fact be employed to provide a better account of certain aspects of emotions than the one based on the perceptual analogy. Emotions might not be a matter of seeing the world a certain way, but a matter of behaving internally in response to it. In a slogan form: Emotion is the inward counterpart of bodily movement.

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Section: How About Intentionality Phenomenology and Passivity?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion: More like Action than Perception

Naar

2020

Erkenn

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“…If they disclose, they will be responded to with belief and support. 17 I have elaborated this notion of acknowledgment in Müller (2017). which, at least typically, we cannot have or get rid of an emotion at will.…”

Section: Assessing Dancy's Proposalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptualism and the epistemology of normative reasons

Müller

2020

Synthese

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According to much recent work in metaethics, we have a perceptual access to normative properties and relations. On a common approach, this access has a presentational character. Here, ‘presentational’ specifies a characteristic feature of the way aspects of the environment are apprehended in sensory experience. While many authors have argued that we enjoy presentations of value properties, thus far comparatively less effort has been invested into developing a presentational view of the apprehension of normative reasons. Since it appears that this view would offer much the same theoretical benefits as presentational views of the apprehension of value, it seems worthwhile redressing this imbalance. My paper aims at doing so, focusing on concern-dependent practical reasons. After clarifying the central commitment of this view, I assess a recent proposal by Dancy (Ethics 124(4):787-812, 2014) which provides a detailed characterization of the relevant type of cognition. I argue that Dancy ignores one of the central features of a presentational access to normative reasons and therefore misidentifies which actual psychological phenomena are apt to play this role. In this context, I also assess and reject further candidates that might seem fitting for this purpose. In the remainder of the paper, I then offer a more adequate account which specifies an actual form of presentational access to concern-dependent practical reasons and provide the contours of a more substantive account of its nature.

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“…9 Additionally, as Moritz Müller has persuasively argued, the suggestion that an attitude can provide the epistemic access to values -a common claim among advocates of FEC-is difficult to make sense of, and potentially incoherent, if values are supposed to be normative reasons for emotions (Müller, 2017(Müller, , 2019. 10 In the philosophy of emotion, this is a minority position accepted by, e.g., Müller (2017Müller ( , 2019 and that I tentatively endorse in Naar (forthcoming). 11 Another consequence is that we no longer have any clear rationale for countenancing the notion of correctness-as understood by advocates of FEC-when engaging in the philosophy of emotion.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Their notion of correctness is broader than that of representational correctness.19 At least if paired with the claim that the representation involved in emotions provides an epistemic access to values. SeeMulligan (2010),Müller (2017Müller ( , 2019, and Naar (forthcoming).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Alternative ways to put the point include that one fails to possess the relevant reasons (e.g.,Lord, 2018) and that no reasons are available to one(Kiesewetter, 2017).43 For an argument for the claim that personal criticism is a matter of the violation of normative reasons, seeKiesewetter (2017, p. 25).44 SeeMulligan (2010) andMüller (2017Müller ( , 2019. I flirt with this idea in Naar (forthcoming).…”

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The fittingness of emotions

Naar

2021

Synthese

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We often assess emotions as appropriate or inappropriate depending on certain evaluative aspects of the world. Often using the term ‘fittingness’ as equivalent to ‘appropriateness’, many philosophers of emotion take fittingness assessments of emotions to be a broadly representational matter. On this sort of view, an emotion is fitting or appropriate just in case there is a kind of representational match between the emotion and the object, a matching analogous to truth for belief (or veridicality for perception). This view provides an account of the relationship between emotion and value that many have found plausible. In this paper, I argue that the fittingness of emotions should not be understood in representational terms. Rather, as is common in the literature on fittingness, we should interpret the notion in normative terms. After providing four arguments against the representational interpretation, and for a normative interpretation, of emotional fittingness, I discuss two ways to develop the normative picture of emotional fittingness. I also clarify the relevant issues that will have to be tackled by philosophers of emotion in the future, issues which cannot be tackled without attending to action theory and the philosophy of normativity.

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How (Not) to Think of Emotions as Evaluative Attitudes

Cited by 52 publications

References 42 publications

Emotion: More like Action than Perception

Emotion: More like Action than Perception

Perceptualism and the epistemology of normative reasons

The fittingness of emotions

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