1. The ‘Evaluative Affect’ View (EA)

First let me explain how my view of emotion is supposed to slip between the horns of the two main alternatives contrasted and criticized in contemporary philosophy of emotion: the ‘evaluative judgements’ view and the perceptual view referenced just above. When I began working on emotions, the evaluative judgements view was dominant, so my own view emerged by critiquing its understanding of emotions as judgements, presumably in the sense of beliefs.Footnote ⁶ Thus understood, fear would imply a belief that the object of fear is dangerous, but I used an example of phobic fear, where the subject does not believe that the object is dangerous but nonetheless fears it, to contest that account.Footnote ⁷

By contrast, the perceptual view takes fear as a perception of danger. But the intended analogy to sensory perception is widely regarded as strained, at best. For one thing, while perceptions can be veridical or illusory, they cannot be said to be justified or unjustified by reasons in the way that emotions can. Also, a misleading feature of the perceptual view, or of its treatment of values as objects of emotion, is the suggestion that values generally are ‘out there’ to be perceived. This may or may not be true, but I would hesitate to build it into an understanding of emotion.

My own account, though it emerged by weakening the evaluative judgements view, really comes closer to the perceptual view insofar as it takes the affective or ‘feeling’ element of emotion – the discomfort of fear, say – as what does the evaluating. I hereby dub it the ‘evaluative affect’ view (EA).

EA both denies that emotions have to involve evaluative beliefs and discards the problematic analogy to sensory perception. Instead, it understands the affective element of emotion as itself embodying a positive or negative evaluation. My focus has been on negative cases, because of their central role in motivation: normally. one can escape a state of emotional discomfort by falsifying the evaluative element of the emotion in question – moving out of range of a feared object, for instance.

According to EA, the evaluative content of emotion can be pulled out in the form of a proposition for purposes of considering logical and justificatory issues about emotion, which were my initial focus in working on this subject.Footnote ⁸ However, this does not mean that the subject of an emotion mentally utters or apprehends such a proposition as a separate matter from feeling the feeling involved in the emotion. The subject need not even be able to spell out the content of emotion in propositional form. Earlier I spoke of ‘entertaining an evaluative thought’ to convey the contrast to belief, and of ‘holding an evaluative thought in mind’ to convey what emotional affect accomplishes. But that apparently confused some readers.

Let me pause briefly to clear up some related confusions. For a neat contrast to discomfort, I used the term ‘comfort’, while acknowledging that this was not a natural term for many of the varied affective states involved in positive emotion.Footnote ⁹ But talk of comfort or discomfort for the affective ‘component’ of emotion suggested to some that I had in mind a causally related experience of something like pleasure or pain, on the model of Aristotle's definition of anger in the Rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁰ Instead, however, I understand emotional affect as having an evaluation as its content, whether or not a prior evaluation is its cause. In slogan form, as I put it at one point: ‘Affect evaluates.’Footnote ¹¹

In my first pass at this subject I also used the language of objects to convey an emotion's content. In place of Kenny's term ‘formal object’, I spoke of an evaluative ‘component’ of emotion as its ‘internal’ object insofar as emotional affect is directed toward it. But some apparently took this as meaning that the emotion as a whole had to be about an evaluative proposition – that fear of a cat, say, was fear that the cat was dangerous, rather than discomfort about that (presumed) fact. This would be particularly implausible for emotions with more complex analyses than fear – for love, say, understood as sometimes involving, besides positive feelings about the loved object, discomfort at the need to close a distance from the object. That negative evaluation of distance is a source of motivation, though it is clearly not what one loves. Indeed, even the positive evaluation of the loved object itself need not always be something one loves, or loves having.

What I now would say is just that the evaluation in question spells out the content of the emotion, which I would distinguish from the emotion's object by analogy to Frege's distinction between sense and reference.Footnote ¹² On the Fregean account, language or a mental state that is about something refers to it, whereas its sense or meaning depends on how it does so – its ‘mode of presentation’ in Frege's terms. Frege's example was ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’, both referring to the planet Venus, though the two phrases have different meanings. Similarly, I might refer to a declawed cat I once had who turned violent toward guests (and eventually toward me) both as ‘my beloved pet’ and as ‘my attack-cat’. By the same token, love and fear of the cat refer to the same object – the cat – but have different evaluative contents, conveying what the feelings in question signify about the object.

Some readers of my earlier work apparently thought of the ‘content’ of a mental state as something ‘contained’ in it, so that experiencing an emotion would involve being aware of its content. However, on the notion derived from Fregean ‘sense’, the content of an emotion amounts instead to a kind of meaning – something the subject of emotion in certain cases may be unable to identify correctly, or at all. By contrast, the content of a sense perception – what is now sometimes thought of as ‘nonconceptual’ content, since it does not involve deploying concepts – would seem to amount to what one is aware of in experiencing it. Perhaps the analogy to perception might incline some to identify content and object – though one should note that, on the perceptual view of emotion, what is said to be perceived is not the particular object of an emotion but rather the value ascribed to that object.

Since my own initial interest was in the ‘logic’ of emotions, I focused on emotions with conceptual content. But I grant that these emerge from something simpler, which often persist in isolated form, as well as integrated with thought, even in adult human life.Footnote ¹³ Emotions are sometimes inarticulate, in the sense of having a content that the subject cannot specify, at any rate without further thought – though non-intentional emotion-like states such as depression or anxiety are nowadays typically treated in a separate category of moods. One can be depressed or anxious about something, however – or, for that matter, angry about something – without immediately being able to say what, or even to identify the emotion as such, which entails knowing what the feeling signifies about its object. In some cases, too, one can be aware of an emotion's object but not its content and hence be unable to identify the emotion without further investigation.Footnote ¹⁴

In any case, another possibility for some emotions is nonconceptual content – which serves to answer a common objection to both the evaluative judgements view and my own: animals and infants clearly exhibit emotion, even supposing that they lack the conceptual equipment for forming evaluative judgements or entertaining the corresponding propositional thoughts. The declawed cat I mentioned would sit in front of guests looking perfectly angelic but then hiss and swipe at them if they reached out to pet her. In reacting as she did my cat apparently evaluated guests as a threat. Personally, I would be inclined to grant the higher animals at least a few concepts, but in any case my claim is not that they entertain propositions but just that the content of their emotions – what their emotions signify, not necessarily how they are experienced – can be represented in propositional form.

2. Discomfort as Evaluative

Now let me turn to a different application of nonconceptual content, to normal experiences of physical pain as unpleasant. In some relatively rare cases pain is not experienced as unpleasant, as a result of anterior cingulotomy (a treatment for chronic pain) or in response to certain drugs classed as ‘dissociatives’. One explanation is that in normal cases the discomfort of pain amounts to a nonconceptual evaluation of pain or its bodily correlates as bad. In general terms, I think this at least undercuts the oddity of taking emotional discomfort or other affect as evaluative.

The ‘evaluativist’ view of pain is of course not undisputed.Footnote ¹⁵ I might modify the usual version myself, on the basis of an experience I had with nitrous oxide during a dental procedure. The dentist had told me I would still feel pain – not just pressure, as I suggested – but would not be bothered by it. Since that sounded impossible, I made a point of confirming it. In retrospect, though, and for quite some time, I could not spell out what it was about the experience that made me decide it was indeed an experience of pain. Some current authors suggest that pain is itself an evaluation, of damage to the body, though that did not fit my conception of the dental work I was undergoing.Footnote ¹⁶ Other authors characterize pain by its sensory qualities – stabbing, throbbing, or the like – though I did not remember taking note of any such features, or confirming on that basis that the sensation amounted to pain.

Finally, while working on this paper, the experience came back to me as I woke up one morning: what made it pain was simply that it hurt. It just did not hurt me. I did evaluate it as discomfort, that is, but attributed it to the person in the dentist's chair that I realized was myself but was dissociated from. This is what ‘dissociation’ can mean, after all: a detachment of the self from experience. It is exhibited in more extreme form, with identity confusion, by cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder – the psychiatric category replacing Multiple Personality Disorder – where a traumatic experience is seen as pertaining to someone other than the subject, or sometimes (typically in male cases) to no one in particular.

My half-awake recollection hardly counts as scientific evidence, though I wonder whether experimental subjects of pain without discomfort are asked similar questions about their experience. In any case, my own experience suggests that there may already be a negative evaluation of painful sensations involved in classifying them as pain. The normal experience of ‘unpleasant pain’ adds to this a negative evaluation of oneself as in a bad state of feeling because of it. Something like this is also involved in emotional evaluation, which several authors in the evaluative judgements tradition make a point of describing as ‘self-involved’ or the like.Footnote ¹⁷ In my nitrous oxide case the pain felt by the woman in the dentist's chair did not bother me at all, even remotely, since I trusted the dentist not to be doing her harm. By contrast, my declawed ‘attack-cat’ sometimes bit people, so I had reason to evaluate her as a danger to my guests, but as long as I thought she posed no threat to me, I might be worried about harm she might do to others, but what I would thereby be feeling would not amount to fear of the cat – unless I empathized with my guests to the point of feeling fear on their behalf.

Further complications arise for emotions, however, since unlike pain on the usual conception, they have intentional objects. The emotional analogue of pain sensations would be the particular felt symptoms of the emotion – a pang of fear, say, or feelings indicative of bodily readiness to flee, such as sped-up heartbeat, shortness of breath, and so on. But if the experience of emotion symptoms as discomfort amounts to an evaluation of the symptoms, how can the discomfort also be said to evaluate the object of emotion?

What I would suggest is that the evaluation of emotion symptoms as discomfort depends on seeing them as responses to features of the object that would support a negative evaluation.Footnote ¹⁸ For guests’ fear of my cat, the relevant features would include the cat's sharp teeth and (what guests would initially assume to be) claws, along with its behavior. Sped-up heartbeat and similar fear symptoms need not be unpleasant in themselves, after all, but only when they are interpreted as signs of something bad, in this case danger. So the symptoms of fear of a cat, say, are normally evaluated as unpleasant just insofar as the subject takes them as danger responses, involving an urge to flee or the like.Footnote ¹⁹

This is to say that the symptoms and object of an emotion are evaluated simultaneously, not that a prior evaluation of the object causes a certain evaluation of the symptoms. The evaluation of emotion symptoms as discomfort involves negatively evaluating the emotion's object on the basis of its perceived (or imagined) features. As I have noted, this need not mean having a separate evaluative thought; animals and infants should be capable of it too. I also would not make out emotional discomfort as something separate from the symptoms evaluated as feeling bad. Rather, the symptoms amount to a state of discomfort as thus evaluated. These elements of emotion can come apart in special cases, just as pain can be felt without discomfort in dissociative cases, but normally they constitute a single integrated response.

In short, EA, the ‘evaluative affect’ view of emotion, is not intended as a causal account, connecting distinct feelings and evaluative thoughts. In fact, the earliest philosophical source of my work in this area was dissatisfaction with Hume's account of the passions in terms of causally connected impressions and ideas.Footnote ²⁰ Though in earlier work I used the term ‘components’ for the different aspects of emotion, I now call them ‘elements’ – we might think of them as ‘bonded’ elements – to avoid the suggestion of a separate parts.

What is the point, though, one might ask, of distinguishing elements of emotion that turn out not to be distinct? My original purpose in writing about this subject, as noted, was to see what could be said about the ‘logic’ of emotion, particularly in contrast to judgement, and to show how emotion might supplement judgement in practical reasoning. For that purpose it was helpful to be able to consider in its own right a propositional content of emotions, of the sort that might count as a reason or play a role in an argument. Though an excess or defect of affect can make an emotion disproportionate and hence inappropriate, I did not expect to be able to say anything substantive about such quantitative matters. In any case, the distinction between affect and evaluation was meant to be logical or conceptual, not to support an analysis into causally connected parts.

3. Emotional Valence and Motivation

My suggested treatment of emotional discomfort as doubly evaluative can be summed up as saying that the symptoms of emotion are constituted as discomfort by what the discomfort is about – signs of danger, in the case of fear. Emotional discomfort embodies an evaluation insofar as it is based on taking the emotion symptoms in question as signifying something – the parallel of ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ in Frege's distinction – about the object of emotion. This double evaluation – of both the subject's state of feeling and the object of emotion – serves to explain what psychologists call the ‘valence’ of emotions, their positive or negative aspect, in a way that supports their role in motivation. That is, the disvalue of discomfort for the agent can reinforce a negative evaluation – either of the object of emotion, as in simple cases, such as fear, or of some relation to the object, such as distance from an object of love, or failure (so far) to get back at an object of anger. Given that one naturally wants to avoid or escape discomfort, the negative evaluation of one's own feelings explains how emotions add motivational force to a ‘cool’ judgement – of danger, distance, a failure to retaliate, or what have you.

However, another implication of the research on pain is that my earlier attempt to pick out discomfort in motivational terms – as a state one would naturally want to get out of – would extend too broadly.Footnote ²¹ The reference to what one would ‘naturally’ want was intended to allow for subjects who have some special motive for remaining in a state of discomfort – the sense that they deserve it, perhaps – but it also would seem to apply to dissociative cases of pain without discomfort, given that the subject in such cases would naturally want to escape the sensations of pain in question. That is, if the subject were in his natural state, and not dissociated from his experience of pain, he would want to escape it. So at most the motivational criterion gives a necessary condition of discomfort. I would take a negative evaluation of one's sensations as another necessary condition, though this too seems not to be sufficient on its own, unless we add a requirement that what is evaluated is specifically one's state of feeling.Footnote ²² For pain sensations might sometimes be evaluated negatively in other ways – as worrisome for one's health, say, or as meaning that one bought the wrong pair of shoes – in a state of moderate dissociation from feeling that many of us can manage without drugs or surgery.

The evaluation of emotion symptoms and of the object of emotion can conceivably come apart, then, but in normal cases they go together, just as pain is normally unpleasant. EA, the evaluative affect view, thus connects feeling bad with evaluating something as bad, so that emotions with some element of negative content have a corresponding motivational force. But the evaluative content itself normally supplies the basis for motivation, and in some cases – I think particularly of serious moral cases, such as guilt feelings at the need to make up for badly wronging someone – the element of emotional discomfort on its own seems comparatively trivial. As directed toward a negative evaluation of something one can act to change, though, emotional discomfort at least serves to reinforce that reason for action with a threat of continuing discomfort until one acts.Footnote ²³ At the same time, EA is meant to leave room for cases where emotional discomfort is part of an experience that feels good on the whole, such as fear at a horror film, romantic yearning, and some energizing instances of anger. In contrast to dissociative cases, where the subject feels no discomfort, here he feels an element of discomfort that is an integral part of an overall positive experience.

What about simple positive emotions, without any element of discomfort, such as joy? Whereas fear and other negative emotions might be thought of as goads to action, given the role of discomfort as a motive for escape, joy can function as a goal: one naturally wants to attain a positive feeling – or to sustain it, though one's current experience of joy does not seem to be what motivates action on the desire to sustain it, except where the experience results in a negative evaluation of alternatives.Footnote ²⁴ Here, too, the feeling may simply serve to reinforce an evaluation that would motivate even in the absence of emotion – for instance, where one acts primarily to continue the activity that gives rise to joy, such as listening to a certain piece of music. Positive emotions can also be said to motivate expressive behavior (‘jumping for joy’, say), but where such behavior amounts to intentional action, I take the real motivator to be some negative element or accompaniment of the emotion, such as anticipatory discomfort at the thought of ‘containing’ joy.

So my emphasis has been on negative emotions, or aspects of emotions, as the primary emotional motivators. To sum up in compact form the upshot of my further argument in this paper: applying evaluativism in the pain literature to negative emotion reveals the need to take emotional discomfort as evaluating both the symptoms of emotion and its object. Intuitively, the evaluation of symptoms might seem more basic, but I have suggested that it actually depends on the evaluation of the object. This connection supports the link assumed in my work between negative affect and an emotion's negative evaluative content - with ‘content’ interpreted in Fregean terms, as what the discomfort means or signifies about the object of emotion (or the subject's relation to its object, to handle cases like love). The evaluative content of emotion thus may be more than the subject of an emotion has in mind while feeling it.