Year: 1984
Type: article
Abstract: One question asked about the relationship between feelings and emotion is whether feelings are a feature necessary to constitute emotion.Answers vary from James's assertion that they are so central as to be emotion, to Bedford's and Solomon's insistence that they are irrelevant to emotion.More moderate answers, however, have emerged, views in which feelings have a place with regard to emotion-at least some of the time.Assuming that feelings do have some status with regard to emotion, a further question is to be asked.When feelings are a feature relevant to emotion, what is their status with regard to the (other) features of the complex that are said to be emotion?Modern analytic philosophers seem to adopt a two-part solution.First, when feelings are relevant to or constituents of emotion, they depend upon other factors for their identity and nature.Second, they depend upon judgments.1 I shall call these the dependency and judgmental theses respectively.2My purpose is to criticize both parts of this solution.* This paper is held in copyright by its author and the Review of Metaphysics.I would like to thank the latter for the right to reprint this paper here.1 Although judgments are the usual subject of dependency, theorists often move indifferently among judgments, evaluations, beliefs, etc.For purposes here, I shall do the same.The important claim is that the subject of dependency is something cognitive. IWe must begin with the alleged agreement within modern analytical philosophy on a two-part solution.William Lyons makes it clear that feelings are never independent enough to individuate emotion when he says: For, as I will argue later in detail, behavior and feelings need not be present on all occasions of an emotional state, but, even when they are present, they do not form any sufficiently consistent and distinct patterns which would enable one to distinguish different emotions by reference to such patterns.(p. 81) 3 Rather, evaluations are in control.Emotions are not specified by their objects or targets but by what the subject of the emotion thinks of the object or target.Your emotion will be fear if you believe that you are in danger of being exposed by this woman as a thief and a liar and this belief causes your emotional reaction.It will be embarrassment if you believe that the woman knows that you are the one who rejected her application for compassionate leave, and in consequence you believe the situation to be one of extreme awkwardness, and this belief causes your emotional reactions.Your emotion will be love if the reaction
Author: Stephen Leighton
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2555067414