Abstract
Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified whereas, mutatis mutandis, fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not. But there is a difficulty in understanding why emotions are epistemically assessable. It is clear why beliefs, for instance, are epistemically assessable: epistemic assessability is, arguably, assessability with respect to likely truth, and belief is by its nature concerned with truth; truth is, we might say, belief’s “formal object.” Emotions, however, have formal objects different from truth: the formal object of fear is danger, the formal object of indignation is injustice, and so on. Why, then, are emotions epistemically assessable too? Here we make a negative claim and a positive claim. On the negative side, we consider how cognitivist and perceptualist accounts of emotion may respond to this challenge, and argue against those responses. On the positive side, we develop an alternative picture of the domain of the epistemically evaluable, according to which any mental state which is constitutively evidence-responsive is epistemically assessable, regardless of whether its formal object is truth.
Highlights
Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified, mutatis mutandis, whereas fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not
After considering how a number of different accounts of emotion might account for the epistemic assessability of emotion, we develop a novel account of the domain of the epistemically assessable, according to which any mental state which is constitutively
The formal object of a mental state type is what individuates it: what makes a mental state token belong to the type it does is that token’s formal object
Summary
Suppose you sit in a dark bunker during an enemy air raid and suddenly wonder whether outside the bunker the sun is shining and the birds are singing. Ticklish, it is hard to see in what sense your nausea/tickle experience could be epistemically justified or unjustified Emotions seem in this respect more like beliefs than like nausea: they can be legitimately assessed epistemically. She does not think that it makes sense for him to be happy that some particular team won a game given that he does not care about baseball. When Bob says that his cousin plays for the Red Sox, he offers a epistemic reason for his happiness that the Red Sox won: he provides evidence supporting the claim that the win is good for him. If we denied that emotions are epistemically assessable, the practices of (epistemic-)rational critique and (epistemic-) reason giving surrounding emotion would be misguided. That community’s practice seems misguided in a way ours does not
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