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284 WILUTZKY
experiential representation of the framed situation. However, Montague also explicitly states
that “the sadness of the cat’s death, experienced as something objective” (ibid 183) is distinct
from the affective phenomenology of the experience, i.e. the feeling of sadness, and even
maintains that they appear as distinct objects in the experience of emotion. This simultaneous
endowment of affectivity with intentionality and segregation of the affective content from the
cognitive content is problematic.
On the one hand, as Peter Goldie (2000) has pointed out, it is phenomenologically
implausible to assume two such independent objects in emotion: one does not first judge a
situation to be e.g. dangerous and in addition feel fear; rather, one “thinks of the danger with
feeling” from the very start (Goldie 2000, 40). While emotion can be made intelligible by
reference to beliefs, desires and feelings, when actually experiencing an emotion or acting out
of emotion, beliefs and desires do not usually figure in the experience’s content (cf. ibid 147).
Furthermore, Goldie has shown that both cognitive and feeling elements may be present in
consciousness without them being experienced as distinct objects: There is an ambiguity in
saying that A feels an emotion E. It can either simply mean that A has feelings which are E-
related, or it can mean that A is aware of feelings which A recognizes as being E-related. In
the latter case A is reflectively conscious of her feelings and thus the feelings are indeed an
individual object in the experience of emotion as A directs her attention towards them. On the
former interpretation A is “unreflectively emotionally engaged with the world” so that she is
not aware of her feelings in an object-like manner, but nonetheless A’s thoughts and actions
are structured by these feelings so that it would be wrong to claim that A is unconscious of her
feelings (ibid 64-66). As it stands, Montague’s proposal cannot accommodate the familiar
phenomenon of unreflective feeling described by Goldie. What is needed is an explanation of
how the affective content structures the cognitive content, so that both come together as one
object in experience.
On the other hand, the separation of the affective from the cognitive content, and in
particular Montague’s description of the affective content as the result of the interactions
between evaluative and cognitive contents, neglects the ways in which affectivity itself can
contribute to both the cognitive and the evaluative aspects of emotion. The rendition of the
affective phenomenology of emotions as an experiential representation of the evaluative
content, which in turn is arrived at via the cognitive framing, implies that the affective
content is merely a reiteration of a content that has already been previously established in a
non-affective way (i.e. what was formerly “a representation of her joyful win” now is “an
experience of her joyful win”, ibid 190). Although Montague concedes that affective content
may have a reinforcing effect on the cognitive content, so that the feeling of sadness may
strengthen the framing of one’s cat’s death as sad (cf. ibid 184), no further way in which the
affective content may help establish the intentionality of emotions is discussed. Indeed, any
such endeavors would most likely stand at odds with Montague’s previously outlined account,
since the affective content is effectively the result of (or something triggered by) previously
established cognitive and evaluative contents. That the affective contents of emotions is more
than a byproduct of an otherwise non-affective, cognitive process becomes evident in Helm’s
portrayal of the interconnectedness of evaluative and affective contents: the loss of an object
of affection is felt as painful, and it is in virtue of this feeling that the loss is evaluated as bad.
Conversely, it is because of the value that the lost object has that its loss pains you in the first
place (Helm 2009, 250). Affect and evaluation are thus interdependent and affective content
therefore can certainly not be regarded as the end of a causal chain of events. Instead,
affective content can contribute to cognitive and other functions in several respects. For one
thing, the affective contents “reverberate through [a subject’s] entire mental economy,
affecting not only her desires, her expressive behaviour and the way in which she acts [...] also
her imaginations and memories” (Goldie 2002, 245). The way in which we think of those
objects towards which we feel emotion changes drastically due to the affective content that is
experienced, and these new ways of thinking can lead us to generate new goals and desires -