Was sollen wir tun? Was dürfen wir glauben? - bei DuEPublico ...

EVALUATIVE AND AFFECTIVE INTENTIONALITY OF EMOTIONS 279
respects promising, she, unfortunately, misconstrues the role which the evaluative and
affective aspects play in bringing about an emotion’s intentionality. As will be shown, the
main problems of Montague’s account are (1) that the cognitive contents of emotions cannot
be construed independently from the evaluative contents, and (2) that the affective content of
an emotion may not be understood as the result of a previously established cognitive and
corresponding evaluative content, but that the affective content instead can contribute to an
emotion’s cognitive and evaluative properties. The critical discussion of Montague’s account
is meant to illustrate the immense difficulty of explaining how the cognitive, evaluative and
‘affective’ aspects of emotions are intricately intertwined and that an account of emotions
which fails to acknowledge the substantial contribution of the evaluative and affective aspects
to the intentionality of emotions is untenable.
2. Affective, Evaluative, and Cognitive Content of Emotions
As this paper’s main concern is the interdependence of cognitive, evaluative and affective
contents in emotions, the first point of order is a clarification on what is meant by these
terms. In the emotion literature affect is generally understood as the (foremost bodily) feeling
which is present in emotions, moods and other so-called affective phenomena. When in an
affective state we are influenced, moved or ‘affected’ to a greater extent by an event than by
regular perception or thought. We experience some kind of bodily arousal in form of bodily
feelings; e.g. when afraid, we feel our muscles tense, the palms of our hands getting sweaty,
our hearts beating faster, maybe feel the urge to run away etc. While in the empirical emotion
research the term affect usually refers to these bodily changes themselves (e.g. the galvanic
skin response or rate of heart beat is measured), in the philosophy of emotions ‘affect’ denotes
the feeling and experience of these bodily changes. Feeling these bodily changes does not
necessarily entail that one is aware of the particular physiological reactions that one is
experiencing, and insofar feelings are not necessarily about the occurring physiological
changes. As Peter Goldie (2000) has convincingly argued, these feelings and their affective
content can be directed towards objects and events in the world, so that, e.g., the feeling of
one’s churning stomach when disgusted at something is not about the current state of one’s
digestive system but is in part the way in which one thinks of that object or experiences it as
disgusting. An emotion’s affective phenomenology is inextricably linked with the emotion’s
intentionality, and thus, if emotions are directed towards events and objects in the world and
not only at one’s bodily constitution, affective content too has content that is about or
directed at something beyond the body.
Emotions are also evaluative, that is, in emotion a state of affairs is experienced as something
of value or disvalue, as good or bad for oneself. To again make this point exemplarily: being
happy about a certain event involves some kind of recognition that the event in question is of
positive value for oneself or conducive to one’s goals; when afraid of something, that
something is evaluated as a potential threat or danger to oneself or one’s goals etc. The
central role which evaluation plays in emotion has led some philosophers of emotion to
equate emotions with evaluative judgments (cf. e.g. Solomon 1993 or Nussbaum 2001). Such
theories, however, have typically treated emotions as a kind of belief or a judgment that is
made on the basis of beliefs, which, as we will see shortly, leads to an inadequate
characterization of emotions’ intentionality. Furthermore, such so-called cognitivist or
reductive accounts of emotion have been criticized for ‘over-intellectualizing’ emotions (cf.
Goldie 2002), disregarding emotions’ possible ‘inferential encapsulation’ (cf. de Sousa 1987),
and neglecting the role of the pronounced bodily or affective nature of emotions. But although
it thus appears that emotions are best not characterized as full-blown, rational judgments or
beliefs about value, there is nonetheless some evaluative contents that they bear: some
emotions (such as joy, hope, love) feel good, whereas other emotions (such as fear, anger,