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

EVALUATIVE AND AFFECTIVE INTENTIONALITY OF EMOTIONS 285
which evidently are cognitive efforts. Furthermore, affective phenomenology has a
motivational pull to it, i.e. part of the feelings experienced in emotion are motivational
feelings, e.g. to run away in fear, attack your offender or jump for joy (Helm 2009, 249).
These motivational feelings are not felt in addition to the emotion but rather are essential to
how the emotion feels, i.e. to her affective content. Relatedly, Goldie (2000) who convincingly
argues that actions performed out of emotion cannot be explained by reference to the agent’s
beliefs and desires alone and the fact that these actions just happens to be accompanied by
certain feelings. Rather, an action performed out of emotion (e.g. fearfully running away or
passionately making love) is fundamentally different from that same action when not
performed out of emotion, in that it is driven and motivated by the agent’s feelings (Goldie
2000, 40). Montague not only fails to address any of these roles of the affective content, but,
given her characterization of affective content as the experiential representation of a
previously established cognitive content, makes them difficult to square with her remaining
account.
5. Conclusions
The discussion of Montague’s account was meant to illustrate just how difficult it is to
adequately describe how the evaluative character of emotions’ intentionality comes about and
how the evaluative and affective contents are intricately intertwined with one another and
also with the cognitive contents of emotion. Summarizing, the conclusions to be drawn here
are (from the first point) that the way a state of affairs is represented is determined by the
value it has for a subject and (from the second point) that the affective content’s contribution
to the cognitive and evaluative aspects of the intentionality of emotions must be recognized.
Although Montague’s notion of thick content was meant to explain the richness of emotions’
intentionality by including cognitive, evaluative and affective contents, the above
considerations hopefully show that it is not enough to include these as intentional objects, but
that the truly demanding task lies in describing the relation of these to one another. However
tempting it may be to succumb to the idea of deconstructing emotions’ intentionality into
single components in order to gain a deeper understanding of the intentional structure
underlying emotions, without an adequate description of how these components come
together to produce the complex phenomenon that is the intentionality emotions, more
insight might be lost than actually gained.
Wendy Wilutzky
Universität Osnabrück
wewilutz@uni-osnabrueck.de
References
de Sousa, R. 1987: The Rationality of Emotions, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Goldie, P. 2000: The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Goldie, P. 2002: ‘Emotions, Feelings and Intentionality’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences 1, 235–254.
Helm, B. W. 2009: ‘Emotions as Evaluative Feelings’, Emotion Review 1(3), 248–55.
Lewis, M. D. 2005: ‘Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems
modelling’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, 169–245.