Abstract
The aim of this paper is to defend, and in so doing clarify, the claim that the affective component of emotional experience plays an essential explanatory role in the acquisition of evaluative knowledge. In particular, it argues that the phenomenally conscious affective component of emotional experience provides the subject with the epistemic access to the semantic value of evaluative concepts. The core argument relies on a comparison with the role played by the phenomenal character of perceptual experience in the acquisition of knowledge of colours. The upshot is that it is a disanalogy with perceptual experience that explains the essential role of affective experience in acquiring evaluative knowledge, namely its motivational component.
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Notes
The phenomenology, or phenomenal character, of an experience is that aspect of the experience that is often referred to as the “what it is likeness” of having that experience from a first person point of view. In this paper, I assume that emotional experience involves an evaluation of particular objects or states of affairs (for good reasons to assume this, see Deonna and Teroni 2012, pp. 40–42). By this I do not mean to include solely particulars occupying a spatio-temporal position in the actual world and which are present but also objects and states of affairs that are imagined, objects and states of affairs that belong to the past and future, conceivable states of affairs and objects, and so on.
Add-on views typically analyse emotions as a combination of a belief and a desire, plus feelings. For a classic example, see Lyons (1980).
Goldie borrows this expression from Adrian Moore (2006).
First, the concept of danger is ill suited to show an inextricable relation between feelings and evaluative concepts because it seems possible to specify its content independently of the feeling of fear. If so, then theoretical knowledge of the concept of danger would capture all there is to know about danger and the feeling fear would not provide any new knowledge. For this reason, some authors have opted to use the concept of fearsomeness when discussing fear (see, e.g., McDowell 1998). For this reason, in the next sections I will drop Goldie’s analogy and devise new ones. Second, as we shall see in Sect. 4, Goldie’s construal of the situation is modelled too closely to Jackson’s thought-experiment, a thought-experiment devised for knowledge of properties such as colour, and thus loses what is truly distinctive of evaluative knowledge, namely our motivational propensities.
Notice that Johnston frames the issue in terms of whether someone who has never been affected in the relevant manner can acquire the sort of understanding of value involved in pronouncing evaluative judgements, to which his answer is no. By contrast, Brady frames the issue in terms of whether feeling the emotion presently provides us with new knowledge regarding the relevant value even though we already possess the relevant evaluative concept. This is an importance difference as an essential part of the argument of this paper will be that appreciating the distinctive sort of evaluative knowledge that can be acquired only by means of affective experience necessitates looking at the role played by affective experience in acquiring the relevant evaluative concept, and not merely to ask oneself whether there is any difference between deploying an evaluative concept while undergoing an affective experience and deploying it without feeling the emotion. More on this in Sect. 3.
For a defence of the claim that emotional experience is a sort of perceptual experience of value, see Doering (2007), Pelser (2014), Tappolet (2016), Poellner (2016), Cowan (2016), and Mitchell (2017). In a later work, Goldie (2007) does argue that emotions are a sort of perception of deontic properties, but phenomenal character has no role in arguing for that claim. I will draw the implications of the argument in this paper for the Perceptual Model of Emotions in Sect. 6.
Nevertheless, Williams (1985) drew also an intimate connection between emotions and thick evaluative concepts when he argued that the sincerity of a subject’s deployment of such concepts, and thus of her commitment to the evaluative outlook expressed by that concept, necessitates reference to the underlying ‘emotional structure’ of the subject’s behaviour. In light of the argument of this paper to the effect that what renders distinctive the acquisition of thick evaluative concepts by means of emotional experience is the shaping of the subject’s motivational propensities, I believe that Williams’ claim is connected in important ways with the overall framework between emotion and evaluative concepts I am committing to.
See in particular Wiggins (1987b) and McDowell (1998). Both authors express the biconditional in terms of sentiments rather than emotions. It is worth mentioning that neither author draws a sharp distinction between a conceptual and an ontological reading of the biconditional. By contrast, some recent authors, such as Tappolet (2011), have argued that we can read the biconditional as expressing a conceptual claim regarding our understanding of value without committing to any claims regarding the ontological status of value. For the purposes of this essay, I will read the biconditional as a claim about evaluative concepts.
Although Campbell contrasts acquiring knowledge of red by testimony with acquiring knowledge of red by means of a phenomenally conscious experience of red as instantiated in one’s environment, one can think of cases where a subject acquires the latter sort of knowledge without needing the relevant property to be instantiated by the environment. As Lewis suggested, we can conceive of a neurological intervention that affects a subject’s daydreaming by including in it the colour red. The main point remains, though, that there is a distinction to be made between the conception of colour when acquires by testimony and the conception of colour one acquires either from having a phenomenally conscious experience of the property as instantiated in one’s environment or from the sort of cases Lewis had in mind. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
All this claim is meant to say is that the phenomenal character of experience provides the subject with first personal justification for the deployment of the relevant concept. I want to leave open the question of what is the precise relation between first personal justification provided by the phenomenal character of experience and the process of justification of relevant beliefs the subject forms in virtue of the experience. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for pressing me on this point.
Hoerl (2001) is preoccupied with showing that the phenomenology of episodic recollection, that is, recollection of particular past events, plays an essential epistemological role in our ability to display a particular grasp of the reality our beliefs are answerable to. Indeed, he also draws an analogy with perceptual experience of colour to argue that the sort of ability he believes is bestowed upon us by the phenomenology of episodic recollection is different from the abilities we acquire from memories that do not entail remembering particular past events. He also employs the notion of the justification for holding our beliefs in order to qualify the sort of knowledge acquired by episodic recollection and the role played in it by its phenomenology. I think Hoerl is after the same intuition Campbell is in relation to perceptual experience and I am in relation to affective experience.
For a critical discussion of Campbell, see Smith (1993).
In fact, Soteriou (2013, ch. 1) clearly shows that the notion of experience acquainting us with a property, where acquaintance is understood as a non-representational psychological relation, originated with sense-datum theories. Relationism, or naïve realism, adopts this intuition but argues that the relevant property with which experience acquaints us is of an object independent of experience.
It might be objected that we do have to commit to Campbell’s’ Relation View of Experience if we want to show how the phenomenal character of experience acquaints us with properties of the object of experience rather than merely of the experience itself. This is also misguided since intentionalist views of experience can also coherently attempt to capture the intuition that phenomenally conscious experience acquaints us with the property of the object of experience. See, e.g., Chalmers (2010, ch. 8). For a closer look at the debate between Campbell’s Relational View and an intentionalist view of experience, see Campbell and Cassam (2014). Notice also that Goldie’s intuition, when not interpreted in its stronger version, is compatible with a qualia theory of experience.
An anonymous reviewer suggested the following: What about cases where the object with the evaluative property is the experience itself? For example, it seems plausible that experience can provide us knowledge of the disvalue of headaches. My aim is not to deny these cases. Rather, the point is the following. My aim here is to make salient the distinction between (i) experience acquainting us with, and thus providing us with knowledge of, objects distinct from experience and (ii) experience acquainting us with, and thus providing us with knowledge of, the experience itself. Arguing for the possibility of (i) does not entail arguing against (ii). That is, one can (and, I think, should) maintain that experience acquaints us, and thus provides us with knowledge of, objects distinct from experience, but can also acquaint us, and thus provide us with knowledge of, the experience itself. This allows for cases, as pointed out by the reviewer, in which experience gives us (ii). The point of mentioning qualia theories is that qualia theories allow only for (ii) but not for (i) and thus provide us with a good illustration of theoretical positions that we need to avoid if we want to capture Goldie’s intuition. Again, this is not to deny that, as the reviewer correctly points out, there are cases in which experience gives us evaluative knowledge of experience. I would like to thank this anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
But see views according to which perceptual experience involves some kind of motivational states, in particular in the form of perceptual experiences of affordances e.g. Heidegger (1962).
It might be asked why I am not using the notion of valence to describe the phenomenal character of affective experience. As Giovanna Colombetti (2005) has shown, the notion of valence has been used in myriad different ways in the literature on emotions. Both philosophers and psychologists have stuck to their own conception of valence the reference of which ranged from hedonic tone, to behavioural tendencies, to properties of the objects of experience as positively and negatively charged, to the quality of evaluations and even to the qualities of facial expressions. Colombetti convincingly argues that many authors have conflated different notions of valence depending on their own target of research. For instance, theorists that were interested in the relation between emotion and action employed the term valence to refer to the behavioural aspects of emotions, in particular whether an emotion manifested positive behavioural tendencies like approach, retaining and tolerance, or negative like withdrawal, escape, refusal. In light of these delicate issues, I have decided not to use the notion of valence or dichotomise the character of motivational states into positive and negative. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
For Johnston’s own account of value, see Johnston (1989).
Bear in mind that the formation of our motivational propensities is rationally intelligible and therefore its constitutive connection is with the sort of valuing that belongs to a subject open to rational assessment.
“Valuing” here refers to the sort of practical valuing that is the topic of this paper. There might be other sorts of valuing that apply to the case of colour. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
I would like to thank Naomi Eilan, Peter Poellner, Fabrice Teroni, David Wiggins and in particular Matthew Soteriou for invaluable comments at different stages in the preparation of this paper.
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Vanello, D. Affect, motivational states, and evaluative concepts. Synthese 197, 4617–4636 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02120-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02120-0