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EVALUATIVE AND AFFECTIVE INTENTIONALITY OF EMOTIONS 283
the examples of framing that she uses (e.g. winning the grant being framed as a success, the
sadness of one’ cat’s death). However, the relation of the formal object to the target object
(i.e. whether a dog charging at you is perceived as dangerous or whether your cat’s death is
considered sad or whether Jane regards winning the grant as a success) can only be
established with respect to the subject’s focus on that object, that is, what import or value the
target has for the subject (cf. Helm 2009, 5). Thus, the target of Jane’s joy (winning the grant)
can only be framed as a success, and thereby establish the formal object, because Jane’s focus
on the target object is of such a kind that she regards it as something that she values and
deems desirable. In order for emotions to occur, certain evaluative aspects must be in place
from the very beginning and shape any further cognitive assessment of a situation. 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. Montague’s proposal of a non-evaluative or “neutral”
framing prior to evaluative content is simply irreconcilable with these considerations.
To use a cognitively less loaded and affectively more salient example, imagine you are
watching a small child that you are fond of being approached by a large, barking dog. Because
the child has import to you, it is an object worth of your attention and, if so required, also
your action. You are constantly vigilant and prepared to act on its behalf, so that watching the
dog coming close to the toddler is bound to grab your attention and, if so required, also your
action. You are afraid for the child, and this fear is not merely a response to the barking dog
being associated with a danger, possibly through some inborn instinct, but arises from your
concern for the child. The dog is perceived as a threat or danger to the child, not as a potential
threat or danger that just happens to be in the child’s vicinity. In other words, the dog is
perceived as a danger not because he has a general property of ‘dangerousness’ which can be
cognitively and non-evaluatively assessed or framed, but because it stands in a certain
relation to an object that has import to you.
What seems to lie at the root of Montague’s problematic proposal that a situation can be nonevaluatively
framed as joyful, sad etc. is her assumption that perceptions of value may be true
or false, or, put differently, that value can be correctly or incorrectly represented. “[W]hether
the state of affairs in question has been legitimately or accurately framed”, in Montague’s
opinion, depends on the correct representation of “the evaluative features of the state of
affairs in question” (Montague 2009, 181). For Montague values seem to be out there in the
world and need only be detected. Hence, framing is merely a representation of what is given
in the world itself and not an active evaluation of the situation performed by the subject. That
this assumption of the objectivity of value is untenable when wanting to explain the evaluative
intentionality of emotions should be evident by now, given Helm’s considerations on the
importance of a subject’s concerns in determining a situation’s value for a subject. To repeat,
the value of a situation for a subject can only be determined with respect to her other
evaluations and concerns.
4.2. Second Problem: Affective, Evaluative and Cognitive Contents as distinct from one
another
Secondly, Montague treats the cognitive, evaluative and affective contents of emotion as
distinct components and, what is more, even as distinct objects in the experience of emotions.
Considering the example of being sad over a cat’s death, Montague claims that the nonevaluative
framing of the cat’s death as sad is “experienced as something as objective” and is
an object which the subject stands in an intentional relation to (ibid 183). This intentional
relation in which the subject stands to the “objective sadness” of the situation gives rise to a
second intentional object, the affective content. Montague wishes to surpass those emotion
theories which regard affectivity as a mere accompanying, non-intentional feeling to emotion
and argues that the affective content itself is world-directed, namely in virtue of being an