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

282 WILUTZKY
unwarranted, for representing something as a success in emotion already is an evaluation of
the state of affairs. (This does not mean that one cannot represent the conditions of
someone’s success in a non-emotional way, e.g by coolly analyzing the situation’s implications
without any personal investment. But when one perceives something as a success in emotion,
it is not first represented non-evaluatively.)
In this respect Bennett Helm’s (2009) account of the evaluative nature of emotions’
intentionality advances over Montague’s. For Helm, the framing or, in his terminology, the
representation of a state of affairs relative to a subject’s focus already gives the evaluative
content of an emotion, due to its inherent relatedness to the subject’s interests and concerns:
Jane only feels joy over her successful application because she regards it as something
desirable and something that is of import to her. She cares about winning the grant and this
caring commits Jane not only to feel joy when winning it, but also to an entire range of
emotions, such as hoping to win the grant, fearing that she will not get it and being
disappointed if she should not get it. All these emotions arise from one and the same focus,
namely that winning the grant has import to her. Any failure of Jane’s to respond emotionally
in such ways under the respective circumstances would entail either a failure in rationality or
that winning is in fact not of import to her. Likewise, if, for whatever reason, Jane was hoping
not to win she would be disappointed upon hearing that she won, even though according to
Montague Jane’s framing of the situation (i.e. her being successful) would have to be the
same as in the original scenario. Montague fails to provide an explanation of why one and the
same framing would be associated with such disparate evaluative contents. In fact,
Montague’s proposal has the even greater difficulty of explaining why a non-evaluative,
cognitive framing of a situation is at all associated with an evaluative content and thereby
leads to an emotion, whereas other framings of situations could go by without any emotional
response at all. This is what Helm has termed the “problem of import”: why are certain
cognitive states infused with emotionality, whereas others remain “cold” and lead to no
emotional response? Helm’s answer is that certain evaluative aspects (such as import and
concern) must be in place before a situation is cognitively assessed, as any post-hoc addition
of evaluative contents would only return to the problem of import (cf. Helm 2009, 250). In
other words: you have to value something first in order to have any kind of emotional
response at all. Situations are not assessed from an “emotional nowhere” and then eventually
lead to an emotion. Rather, there is always a background of import and concern out of which
emotions arise and which scaffold the cognitive content. A subject’s focus on those things that
are of import to her direct her attention and guide her perception of a situation, thereby
making Montague’s proposal of a fully non-evaluative, cognitive framing as the first step in
constructing an emotion’s intentionality nonviable.
The same point can be made by appeal to an established distinction of the intentional objects
of emotions: the target and the formal object of emotion. The target of an emotion is that
which an emotion is directed at in a particular situation (e.g. Jane’s winning the grant),
whereas the formal object is the relation in which the experiencing subject stands to the target
and which makes the emotion intelligible (e.g. winning the grant is a success). 2 It is widely
held that emotion types are characterized by different kinds of formal objects, so that the
formal object of fear for instance is the evaluation of a target as dangerous to one and in
sadness a target object is assessed as irretrievably lost. Seemingly unbeknown to Montague,
the notion of a formal object resembles her concept of framing, as is, inter alia, suggested by
a possibility. If this were indeed Montague’s claim, then her account would by no means square well
with studies on how attention and perception mechanisms are guided by emotions (cf. Lewis 2005).
2
I will leave it open here whether the formal object requires the reference to a belief (e.g. the belief that
a certain target is dangerous, as Anthony Kenny proposed) or whether it is a property of the situation
(as Ronald de Sousa has suggested), and furthermore whether formal objects are in fact characteristic of
emotion types (i.e. that the formal object of fear is to evaluate something as dangerous, that of anger is
to evaluate a target as offensive etc.).