The Epistemic Significance of Emotional Experience

Ballard, Brian

doi:10.1177/1754073920957082

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 74 publications

(105 reference statements)

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“…3, Brogaard and Chudnoff [39], and Vanello [40]. Note as well that emotions might be thought to provide other epistemic benefits aside from perceptual justification (for a sense of the options, see Ballard [41] and McMartin and Pickavance [42]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Non-Arbitrary Link between Feeling and Value: A Psychosemantic Challenge for the Perceptual Theory of Emotion

Ballard

2024

Philosophies

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This essay raises a challenge for the perceptual theory of emotion. According to the perceptual theory, emotions are perceptual states that represent values. But if emotions represent values, something should explain why. In virtue of what do emotions represent the values they do? A psychosemantics would answer this, and that’s what the perceptual theorist owes us. To date, however, the only perceptual theorist to attempt a psychosemantics for emotion is Jesse Prinz. And Prinz’s theory, I argue, faces an important difficulty: It makes the pairing of any given emotion with its respective value entirely arbitrary. But that’s a problem. It seems—and this is a major contention of this essay—that an emotion, in virtue of how it feels, bears a natural or non-arbitrary link to the value it represents. And this datum makes it all the more difficult to provide a viable psychosemantics for the evaluative content of emotion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Non-Arbitrary Link between Feeling and Value: A Psychosemantic Challenge for the Perceptual Theory of Emotion

Ballard

2024

Philosophies

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“…From this coarse description of these variants of the common look model, it does not seem particularly promising (Deonna & Teroni, 2012). Still, the worries raised by the conceptual model provide a motivation to explore it further (Ballard, 2020). If the common look model is viable, then it may provide indirect additional reasons for favouring attitudinalism about the emotions.…”

Section: Reactions To What?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotions and Their Correctness Conditions: A Defense of Attitudinalism

Deonna

Teroni

2022

Erkenn

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In this paper, we contrast the different ways in which the representationalist and the attitudinalist in the theory of emotions account for the fact that emotions have evaluative correctness conditions. We argue that the attitudinalist has the resources to defend her view against recent attacks from the representationalist. To this end, we elaborate on the idea that emotional attitudes have a rich profile and explain how it supports the claim that these attitudes generate the wished-for evaluative correctness conditions. Our argument rests on the idea that emotional attitudes manifest a sensitivity to evaluative evidence and that this sensitivity secures the kind of normativity we expect of the emotions. We bring our discussion to a close by assessing whether the psychological underpinnings of this sensitivity to evaluative evidence are such as to threaten the foundation of attitudinalism: the idea that emotions do not represent values. Given the available models of how we might access values prior to emotional experience, we conclude that the attitudinalist is still in the game.

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“…For a helpful recent overview, see Ballard (2021). and Terroni (2012) suggest that emotions are "intimately connected with types of action readiness" (p. 79) that cover "the tendency to attend to an object, to submit or be drawn to it, to disengage from it," etc.…”

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confidence: 99%

Affective Reason

McMartin

Pickavance

2022

Episteme

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This paper contributes to the recent explosion of literature on the epistemological role of emotions and other affective states by defending two claims. First, affective states might do more than position us to receive evidence or function as evidence. Affective states might be thought to appraise evidence, in the sense that affective states influence what doxastic state is rational for someone given a body of evidence. The second claim is that affective evidentialism, the view that affective states function rationally in this way, is not just possible but plausible and fruitful. We offer two arguments in favor of affective evidentialism.

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The Epistemic Significance of Emotional Experience

Cited by 10 publications

References 74 publications

The Non-Arbitrary Link between Feeling and Value: A Psychosemantic Challenge for the Perceptual Theory of Emotion

The Non-Arbitrary Link between Feeling and Value: A Psychosemantic Challenge for the Perceptual Theory of Emotion

Emotions and Their Correctness Conditions: A Defense of Attitudinalism

Affective Reason

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