A natural response for the dogmatist to make here is to tighten and finetune their account so as to exclude the over-generalisation cases presented above. One notable example of such a view is proposed by Chudnoff. On Chudnoff’s view, it’s not sufficient for a perceptual experience to make it seem to you that p in order for it to justify your belief that p. Rather, the experience must instantiate the property of having presentational phenomenology with respect to p. Chudnoff (2013) sets out the notion of presentational phenomenology as follows:
What it is for an experience of yours to have presentational phenomenology with respect to p is for it to both make it seem to you that p and make it seem to you as if this experience makes you aware of a truth-maker for p (p. 37).
Crucially, what distinguishes Chudnoff’s view from basic PD is the addition of the truth-maker condition. On this account, if my visual experience of the mug on the desk immediately and defeasibly justifies my belief that there is a mug on the desk, it does so in virtue of having presentational phenomenology with respect to that proposition, i.e. it both makes it seem to me that there is a mug on the desk and makes it seem as if I’m visually aware of an item in my perceptible surroundings that makes that proposition true. Thus, we get the following restricted phenomenal dogmatist view:
Presentationalism: S’s perceptual experience is capable of immediately and defeasibly justifying her belief that p if and only if the experience both makes it seem to S that p and makes it seem as if S is perceptually aware of a truth-maker for p.
There are good reasons to endorse presentationalism. One of the central motivations for the view is that the notion of presentational phenomenology chimes well with various characterisations of the epistemically significant phenomenal character of visual experience offered by phenomenal dogmatists in the literature, while providing a more robust diagnosis of this character.Footnote 7 Moreover, the presence of the truth-maker condition makes Chudnoff’s account better able to deflect over-generalisation cases, e.g. if presentationalism is true, then Markie’s wishful prospector cannot be justified in their seeming-based belief that the pebble is gold because what makes that proposition true, i.e. the chemical composition of the pebble, is not something that can figure into visual seeming awareness. Therefore, because the visual experience does not make it seem as if the prospector is perceptually aware of a truth-maker for the relevant proposition, it cannot lend justification to the relevant belief.
Now, in light of this development, let’s return to the emotions. We can transpose the theoretical machinery of presentational phenomenology over to the case of emotional experience in order to construct the following restricted account of emotional dogmatism:
Restricted Emotional Dogmatism (RED): S’s emotional experience is capable of immediately and defeasibly justifying her evaluative belief e if and only if the experience both makes it seem to her that e, and makes it seem as if she is emotionally aware of a truth-maker for e.
One interesting thing to note here is that RED, insofar as it places epistemic significance on the emotional experience making it seem to you as if you’re aware of a truth-maker for an evaluative proposition, fits nicely with the comments provided by Goldie, Tappolet, and Johnston in §1. Recall that in their respective descriptions of the epistemic power of emotions, Goldie described emotional feelings as capable of “revealing things about the world”, while Tappolet suggested that emotional experiences “allow us to be aware of certain features of the world”. The suggestion here that emotional experiences provide us with some sort of unique awareness about things out there in the world seems to closely match RED’s requirement of emotional experiences making it seem as if we’re aware of truth-makers for evaluative propositions, i.e. things out there that make evaluative propositions true. Indeed, Johnston explicitly uses the language of truth-makers insofar as he claims that “affect discloses evaluative truth-makers” (2001, p. 206), and that this (at least partially) explains what he terms the “epistemic authority” (p. 205) of affective experiences. By including the truth-maker condition, then, RED coheres with views about the epistemic import of emotional phenomenology in the surrounding literature, inherits the general advantages of the basic ED account and receives support from a more theoretically robust epistemological framework which avoids the pitfalls of basic dogmatism.
However, RED also faces significant challenges. Before presenting my own critique, let us first address a challenge levelled against RED by Brogaard and Chudnoff (2016). In their analysis, RED is rejected on the grounds that it builds phenomenologically unrealistic contents into the scope of emotional seeming awareness. For Brogaard and Chudnoff, emotional experience cannot bring seeming awareness of truth-makers for evaluative propositions because evaluative properties are not suitable objects of emotional awareness. Crucially, this is because evaluative properties bear a normative dimension; they merit certain emotional responses. For an emotional experience to make it seem as if I’m aware of an evaluative property instantiated by an object, that emotional experience would have to reflexively present itself as being epistemically merited by the object. This, for Brogaard and Chudnoff, cannot be true. Whether an object merits that particular emotional response is not something I can be aware of via my own emotional phenomenology.
I will not pursue this criticism against RED. Instead, I will propose a different challenge which focuses not on RED’s putative commitment to controversial phenomenological assertions, but on its commitment to controversial epistemological results. My reason for this is twofold. First, note that whether one finds Brogaard and Chudnoff’s challenge compelling relies on their having the intuition that emotional experience cannot bear a very specific kind of self-reflexive phenomenology. This doesn’t strike me as a commonly held intuition. There are those in the literature who, at the very least, are amenable to the suggestion that emotions can be experienced as being epistemically merited with respect to their objects, and some even propose accounts of emotional phenomenology in which this is explicitly the case.Footnote 8 Second, and relatedly, it seems at least prima facie plausible that our intuitions have significantly more reliability and argumentative traction within the domain of epistemological theorising, given the frequency with which counterexamples are cited as compelling objections to epistemological views. Our intuitions when it comes to specific introspective phenomenological claims, on the other hand, are plausibly less widely-shared, less reliable, and less dialectically compelling. For these reasons, §3.1 will solely pursue the forthcoming epistemological challenge against RED.
Objection: the dilemma of evaluative truth-makers
Here, I argue that RED’s inclusion of the truth-maker condition spells serious trouble for the view. Specifically, RED faces a dilemma in what seeming awareness of truth-makers for evaluative propositions consists in. Take an experience of fear towards an approaching snake. In order for that experience of fear to justify the evaluative belief that the snake is fearsome, the experience must both make it seem to you that the snake is fearsome and make it seem as if you’re emotionally aware of a truth-maker for that evaluative proposition. But what is the truth-maker for this proposition? RED, as expressed thus far, is silent as to whether the truth-maker consists in the evaluative property of fearsomeness itself, or whether it consists in the non-evaluative properties instantiated by the snake that give rise to the evaluative property of fearsomeness, i.e. the sharp fangs, the aggressive movements, and so forth. Call these ‘the evaluative property reading’ and ‘the non-evaluative property reading’ of the truth-maker condition respectively. The problem is that neither of these options looks promising for RED.
Let’s begin with the evaluative property reading, which can be spelled out as follows:
REDEP: S’s emotional experience is capable of immediately and defeasibly justifying her evaluative belief e if and only if the experience both makes it seem to her that e and makes it seem as if she’s emotionally aware of the evaluative property putatively instantiated by the object.
Immediately, a problem arises here. Namely, while the inclusion of the truth-maker condition seems to suitably restrict dogmatism in the perceptual case, it’s not at all clear that this reading of the truth-maker condition restricts RED at all. Reconsider Brady’s suspicious interviewer. The worry is that REDEP can’t exclude the interviewer’s emotional experience of suspicion because their experience satisfies both the seeming condition and the truth-maker condition. That is, insofar as the emotional experience already makes it seem to the interviewer that the candidate is duplicitous (and they’re not aware of any reason to distrust this seeming), then plausibly their experience of suspicion also makes it seem to them that the candidate instantiates the property of ‘duplicitousness’. The evaluative property reading of the truth-maker condition doesn’t seem to be adding any further requirement to emotional dogmatism, given that any emotional experience which satisfies the seeming condition will also satisfy the truth-maker condition. What else could it mean for an emotional experience to make it seem to you that the candidate is duplicitous, other than making it seem as if you’re aware of the evaluative property of ‘duplicitousness’ putatively instantiated by the candidate? Naturally, then, REDEP will continue to over-generalise to problematic cases precisely because, in practice, it’s no different to ED.
At this point, the defender of REDEP may argue that the case is under-described. In response to this over-generalisation worry, they might attempt to re-describe the case in order to motivate the plausibility of conceding justification to the interviewer. They may suggest, for instance, that the interviewer’s emotional experience of suspicion makes it seem as if they’re emotionally aware of the duplicitousness instantiated by the candidate because the interviewer is picking up on subtle duplicitous-making features of the candidate, i.e. that their emotional seeming awareness of duplicitousness is caused by their perception of certain mannerisms and micro-behaviours indicative of duplicitousness, such as avoiding the gaze of the interview panel, excessive talking, smirking, etc. Thus, the defender of REDEP might argue that the emotional experience makes it seem as if they’re emotionally aware of the property ‘duplicitousness’ instantiated by the candidate because they’re aware of the relevant pattern of non-evaluative properties. If this is the case, then conceding justification on the basis of these emotional seemings doesn’t seem problematic.
The problem with this response is that REDEP lacks the ability to distinguish between a case like this, i.e. a case in which the emotional seeming awareness of duplicitousness is caused by a seeming awareness of a pattern of duplicitous-making features of the candidate, and a case in which the emotional seeming awareness of ‘duplicitousness’ is caused by epistemically dubious cognitive biases (e.g. suppose that the candidate is a woman and the interviewer is unknowingly biased against women). The worry is that, insofar as the epistemically relevant emotional seemings—i.e. the seeming that the candidate is duplicitous and the seeming awareness of the evaluative property ‘duplicitousness’ instantiated by the candidate – can be grounded in either of these causal explanations, REDEP doesn’t have the tools to differentiate the good and bad cases; both types of emotional seemings (i.e. those produced by epistemically legitimate means and those produced by epistemically illegitimate means) have the same justificatory power. This is a bad result.
So, if the source of RED’s continued vulnerability to the over-generalisation problem is conceiving of truth-makers for evaluative propositions as evaluative properties themselves, why not abandon this claim and insist instead that the truth-maker for an evaluative proposition is the relevant set of non-evaluative properties instantiated by the object which would make the proposition true? This is the non-evaluative property reading, and can be spelled out as follows:
REDNEP: S’s emotional experience is capable of immediately and defeasibly justifying her evaluative belief e if and only if the experience both makes it seem to her that e and makes it seem as if she’s emotionally aware of the set of non-evaluative properties that, if instantiated, would give rise to the relevant evaluative property, and so make e true.
The attraction of this reading is that, unlike REDEP, it avoids obvious over-generalisation cases like the biased interviewer. Recall that, in this case, the interviewer’s emotional seeming awareness of the candidate’s duplicitousness is caused by their bias against women. This case would not meet the requirements of REDNEP precisely because the interviewer’s emotional experience is not making it seem as if they’re aware of the set of non-evaluative properties that would make the proposition ‘the candidate is duplicitous’ true. Rather, their experience is being triggered by the combination of their sexist bias and their perception of the candidate’s gender. Clearly, mere seeming awareness of the candidate’s gender does not amount to seeming awareness of the candidate instantiating particular non-evaluative properties which would make the proposition ‘the candidate is duplicitous’ true. Thus, REDNEP avoids the charge of over-generalisation because it can epistemically differentiate between the good case (i.e. the case in which the interviewer’s emotional seemings of duplicitousness are caused by their perception of duplicitous-making non-evaluative features of the candidate), and the bad case (i.e. the case in which the interviewer’s emotional seemings of duplicitousness are caused by their perception of the candidate’s gender and their bias against women).
The problem, however, is that REDNEP is now too restrictive. If we identify these conjunctions of non-evaluative properties as truth-makers, then very few of our emotional experiences would be capable of bearing justificatory power. It seems that only very basic emotional experiences, like fear of a snake or disgust towards spoiled milk, for example, are reliably capable of bringing the required wide-ranging emotional seeming awareness of the relevant non-evaluative properties that would make the relevant proposition (e.g. ‘the snake is fearsome’, or ‘the spoiled milk is disgusting’) true. Emotional experiences which do not figure into this very basic category often don’t bring awareness of the relevant non-evaluative properties.Footnote 9 Take an emotional experience of awe towards a piece of artwork which does not bring full seeming awareness of the non-evaluative properties which would make the proposition ‘that artwork is beautiful’ true, or an experience of amusement towards a particular state of affairs which does not bring seeming awareness of the particular amusement-making non-evaluative properties. Despite the absence of such fine-grained seeming awareness, it seems entirely possible that emotional experiences of this sort are capable of providing a positive epistemic contribution to the status of the corresponding evaluative beliefs. Thus, robbing these emotions of immediate justificatory power on the basis of their not fulfilling the strict phenomenological requirements for REDNEP strikes me as bad news for the view.
Here, there are two possible responses available to the defender of REDNEP. The first of which is to concede that, understood this way, the view ends up being restrictive but deny that this is problematic. Indeed, the defender of REDNEP might stress that the lesson to be learned from the over-generalisation problem is that we should be casting a narrow net around the emotional experiences capable of bearing justificatory power. We want to rule out cases in which emotional seemings look like they’re not grounded in epistemically legitimate observations of the relevant non-evaluative properties, and the best way of doing this is to impose strict constraints on what counts as emotional seeming awareness of truth-makers. If a consequence of this is that relatively complex emotional experiences which do not bring seeming awareness of the relevant non-evaluative properties end up getting ruled out of the account (insofar as they do not make it seem as if one is emotionally aware of a truth-maker for the relevant evaluative proposition), then so be it. The worry with conceding epistemic austerity here, however, is that one desideratum for a plausible version of a justificatory thesis of emotion is that it can account for how a broad catalogue of our evaluative beliefs can be justified by emotional experiences. If endorsing REDNEP means that we can only consider very basic emotional experiences as capable of bearing justificatory ability, then our dogmatist approach to emotional justification is failing to provide a satisfactory picture of the immediate justificatory capacity of emotional experience.
Secondly, the objector might argue that in these scenarios—take the amusement case, for example – my emotional experience is, in fact, making it seem as if I’m aware of the relevant collection of non-evaluative properties which would make the event amusing, I just can’t articulate exactly what those properties are. One suggestion in support of this might be something like the following. When prompted, i.e. when asked ‘what’s so funny?’, I can gesture vaguely towards the features of the situation that make it amusing, such as the particular comment made, the context in which it was made, and so forth, even if I can’t express the amusing-making minutia. In other words, I’m not at a complete loss as to what it is about the situation that makes it amusing, and this is all that’s needed for evidence of emotional seeming awareness of the relevant conjunction of non-evaluative properties. Therefore, we can tell some story about having emotional seeming awareness of the relevant truth-maker in these cases, and REDNEP doesn’t end up being objectionably restrictive with respect to the kinds of emotional experiences is bestows with justificatory power.
The problem with this response is that further ambiguity in what emotional seeming awareness of truth-makers consists in raises difficult questions for REDNEP. If all that matters for emotional seeming awareness of truth-makers is that the experience makes the subject capable of gesturing towards the non-evaluative features of the object which would make the relevant evaluative proposition true, then it becomes less clear that REDNEP is able to rule out problematic cases. Take the suspicious interviewer whose emotional seemings that the candidate is duplicitous are caused by sexist bias. Plausibly, their emotional experience of suspicion will make them capable of saying something about what seems to make the candidate duplicitous (e.g. “there’s just something about them”), but this still seems insufficient for the interviewer to be justified in their belief that the candidate is duplicitous. Substantively relaxing the notion of awareness in order to let in cases where the emotional experience doesn’t make it seem as if one is aware of (i.e. able to identify) all of the relevant non-evaluative properties runs the risk of letting the epistemically illegitimate cases like biased suspicious interviewer in through the back door.
In summary, RED is confronted with a troubling dilemma. Either we identify evaluative properties themselves as the truth-makers for evaluative propositions (REDEP), in which case the view continues to over-generalise, or we identify the relevant aggregate of non-evaluative properties as truth-makers for evaluative propositions (REDNEP), in which case the view rules out emotional experiences which, plausibly, are capable of immediately justifying the relevant evaluative beliefs. If endorsing RED means that we must commit to either an objectionably profligate account of emotional justification or instead one which is objectionably austere, then RED does not provide a suitable framework for thinking about the immediate justificatory power of emotional experiences.