Abstract

A prominent number of contemporary theories of emotional experience—understood as occurrent, phenomenally conscious episodes of emotions with an affective character that are evaluatively directed towards particular objects or states of affairs—are motivated by the claim that phenomenally conscious affective experience, when appropriate, grants us epistemic access not merely to features of the experience but also to features of the object of experience, namely its value. I call this the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. The aim of this paper is to clarify the sort of assumptions about experience that we ought to avoid if we want to be able to argue that for the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. There are two core arguments in this paper. First, I argue that Mark Johnston’s account of affect as a disclosure of value, due to its naïve realist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objection put forward by some naïve realists against intentionalist accounts of perceptual experience. Second, I argue that Michelle Montague’s account, due to its phenomenal intentionalist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objections put forward against qualia theories of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. The upshot of the paper is that the core assumptions embedded in the three dominant models of experience—namely naïve realism, different versions of intentionalism, and qualia theory—are problematic as found in contemporary accounts of affect as a disclosure of value.

Highlights

  • In her papers ‘‘The Logic, Intentionality, and Phenomenology of Emotion’’ (2009) and ‘‘Evaluative Phenomenology’’ (2014), Michelle Montague defends the view that the affective and evaluative components of emotional experience are inextricably intertwined.1 Towards the end of her ‘‘Evaluative Phenomenology,’’ there is a passage that expresses Montague’s underlying thought about the phenomenon she seeks to capture through a defence of her inextricability claim: So, one may be able to know intellectually that the death of a friend is of disvalue, and that such a death is sad without feeling an emotion, one can experience the disvalue of the friend’s death in this distinctive way only if one has an emotional experience

  • In the case of Johnston, I argued that his commitment to a naıve realist model of experience leads him to a position that is vulnerable to the same objection as the one put forward by naıve realists against intentionalist models of perceptual experience

  • In the case of Montague, I argued that her account is unable to secure the inextricability between phenomenology and intentionality and is unable to deliver the promise of phenomenal intentionalism not to relapse in positions vulnerable to the same charge put forward against qualia theories of experience

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Summary

Introduction

In her papers ‘‘The Logic, Intentionality, and Phenomenology of Emotion’’ (2009) and ‘‘Evaluative Phenomenology’’ (2014), Michelle Montague defends the view that the affective and evaluative components of emotional experience are inextricably intertwined (see Montague 2016, ch. 9). Towards the end of her ‘‘Evaluative Phenomenology,’’ there is a passage that expresses Montague’s underlying thought about the phenomenon she seeks to capture through a defence of her inextricability claim: So, one may be able to know intellectually (in some sense) that the death of a friend is of disvalue, and that such a death is sad without feeling an emotion, one can experience the disvalue of the friend’s death in this distinctive way only if one has an emotional experience. While in the first case it follows that if we alter the representational properties of the experience necessarily we alter its phenomenal character, and vice versa, in the second case it is at the very least conceivable that we can alter the phenomenal character (qualia) of the experience without altering its representational properties Opting for the latter strategy is problematic for an account that wants to argue that phenomenally conscious experience plays an essential role in granting us epistemic access to the features of the object of experience rather than merely of the experience itself. It is unclear how the phenomenal character of Mary’s experience is playing an essential role in her acquisition of knowledge regarding what redness is

Naıve realism and the ‘‘as-structure’’ of experience
Affect and the as-structure of experience
Phenomenal intentionalism and resemblance
Phenomenal intentionality and qualia
Conclusion
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