Affect, motivational states, and evaluative concepts
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Affect, motivational states, and evaluative concepts Daniel Vanello1 Received: 19 September 2018 / Accepted: 31 January 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
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. Keywords Affect · Evaluative concepts · Peter Goldie · David Wiggins · Motivation
1 Introduction In his early works, Peter Goldie argues that we should conceive emotional experience as “feelings towards” (Goldie 2000, 2002). At the heart of Goldie’s notion of “feeling towards” is the claim that ‘emotional feelings are inextricably intertwined with the world-directed aspect of emotion, so that an adequate account of an emotion’s intentionality, of its directedness towards the world outside one’s body, will at the same time capture an important aspect of its phenomenology. Intentionality and phenomenology are inextricably linked’ (Goldie 2002, p. 242). Goldie envisages the intentionality of emotional experience as evaluative in kind. For instance, when I experience anger at a remark, I evaluate the remark as offensive. At the same time, Goldie characterises the phenomenal character of emotional experience as
* Daniel Vanello [email protected] 1
Philosophy Department, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
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affective. For instance, in feeling sad at my friend’s death, the affective component of the experience of sadness is what we might metaphorically express when saying “It hurts that my friend died”.1 Goldie’s notion of “feelings towards” is therefore meant to capture the thought that our emotional experiences are not cold-blooded evaluations of an object or situation contingently coated with an affective phenomenal character, a claim committed to by what he terms “add-on” views of emotional experience.2 Rather, according to Goldie, the affective phenomenology of emotional experience should be seen as playing an essential role in the way that we evaluatively relate to the world. The motivation behind Goldie’s claim is the intuition that in the absence of the affective component of emotional experience we miss a distinctive sort of evaluative knowledge about the object, a sort of knowledge that can be acquired solely in virtue of our experience having an affective component. This motivation comes to the surface when Goldie attempts to argue for his claim by drawing an analo
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