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Notes
See e.g. C. Tappolet, Émotions et valeurs (Paris: Presses Universitaires France 2000); S. Döring, Gründe und Gefühle: Zur Lösung „des“ Problems der Moral (Habilitation, Duisburg-Essen University 2004); R. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) and Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013); J. Slaby, Gefühl und Weltbezug: Die menschliche Affektivität im Kontext eine neo-existenzialistischen Konzeption von Personalität (Paderborn: Mentis 2008); J. Slaby & P. Wüschner, „Emotions and Agency,“ in Roeser, S. & Todd, C. eds., Emotion and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014), 212-228; J. Deonna & F. Teroni, “In What Sense Are Emotions Evaluations?”, in S. Roeser & C. Todd, eds., Emotion and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014), 15-31. For the origins of the view, see A. Meinong, On Emotional Presentation, tr. M.-L. Schubert Kalsi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1972), and E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, tr. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1989).
This intuition is clearly articulated by Husserl, op. cit, p. 196. See also B. Helm, “Felt Evaluations: A Theory of Pleasure and Pain,” American Philosophical Quarterly 39(1) (2002), p. 196 as well as Deonna & Teroni, op. cit., p. 16.
The perceptual analogy is not endorsed by all proponents of the Epistemic View. For exceptions, see Deonna & Teroni, op. cit., and Slaby & Wüschner, op. cit. Here, I focus on the more common understanding of the Epistemic View which is driven by this analogy.
See M. Heidegger, Being & Time, tr John Macquarie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row 1962), esp. §27. This reading is defended by D. Weberman, “Heidegger and the Disclosive Character of the Emotions”. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 34(3), (1996): 379–410. See also Slaby, op. cit., ch. 5.
See J. P. Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” tr. J. P. Fell, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1(2) (1970): 4-5. Some of what Sartre says in his subsequent work on emotion invokes a peculiar form of projectivism which is sometimes thought to conflict with this reading. See J. P. Sartre, Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions (London: Methuen 1962). For discussion, see D. Weberman, “Sartre, Emotions, and Wallowing”. American Philosophical Quarterly 33(4) (1996): 393-407.
See J. McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in T. Hondrich, ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge 1985), 110–129.
McDowell himself does not actually endorse this model, though he can be read as offering the basis of a possible argument for it. See, e.g., E. Düringer, Evaluating Emotions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2014), ch. 2. In some places, Wiggins comes close to the view, too. See D. Wiggins, “A Sensible Subjectivism,” in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell 1987), 185-214. The claim that emotions are perceptions or quasi-perceptual impressions of response-dependent properties also surfaces in J. D’Arms & D. Jacobson, “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotion,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(1) (2000): 65-90. D’ Arms and Jacobson take themselves to record a common view when writing that “[m]ost recent accounts of the structure of emotion, despite their differences, agree that emotions (somehow) present the world to us as having certain value-laden features.” (ibid., 66) As they suggest, these value-laden features are response-dependent properties. In this context, the idea of evaluative presentation can be read as alluding to the type of direct access afforded by sensory experiences. See also J. Dokic & S. Lemaire, “Are Emotions Perceptions of Value?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43(2) (2013): 227-247.
Dokic & Lemaire, op. cit., have attacked versions of the Response-Dependence View, on which emotions are closely assimilated to sensory impressions. They similarly focus on the normative character of affective properties, but their charge is substantially different. Some objections that have been raised against perceptual models of emotion can be read as targeting both versions on which emotions provide access to affective properties as well as other versions on which they detect response-independent values. See M. Salmela, “Can Emotion be Modelled on Perception?” Dialectica 65(1) (2011): 1-29; D. Whiting, “Are Emotions Perceptual Experiences of Value?”, Ratio 25(1) (2012): 93-107. See also K. Mulligan, “Intentionality, Knowledge and Formal Objects,” Disputatio 23(2) (2007): 205-228, and “Emotions and Values,” in P. Goldie, ed., Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 475-500, as well as J. M. Müller, “How (Not) to Think of Emotions as Evaluative Attitudes,” Dialectica 71(2) (2017): 281–301, and “Emotion as Position-Taking,” Philosophia 46(3) (2018): 525–540. Rather than concern myself with the extant literature in this area, in this paper I present a new set of considerations which specifically targets the Response-Dependence View.
I take this the line of thought to be congenial to McDowell’s considerations on the experience of secondary qualities, though it is not explicitly put forward by him in this way. To be fair, there seems to be no explicit comparison between emotion and the perception of colour in Heidegger, op. cit., or Sartre, ops. cit. That said, Weberman compares them in order to defend the objectivity of affective properties in reconstructing Heidegger’s view of emotion. See Weberman, “Heidegger and the Disclosive Character of the Emotions”, p. 399.
It is controversial whether presentation is a form of representation. See, e.g., B. Brewer, “Perception and Content,” European Journal of Philosophy 14(2) (2006): 165-181; Brewer, Perception and Its Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001). In contrast, it is uncontroversial that representation need not be presentational. Judgments and beliefs have representational content, but they do not present what they represent. On this issue, see also Dokic & Lemaire, op. cit.
It seems to me that Sartre’s view of emotion may be a plausible candidate for this reading. See Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”. Dokic & Lemaire, op. cit., argue that versions of the view on which emotions represent, but do not present, affective properties fail to support a substantive epistemic analogy with perception. As they suppose, this analogy is undermined by the fact that such views will have to assume that the normative aspect of their representational content is supplied independently of emotion. There are several issues here, including how to precisely conceive of this normative enrichment. I am not sure that the proposal is incompatible with a substantive analogy in terms of primary access to response-dependent properties (see below), but I will here have to set this question aside. The objection I will develop puts pressure on the idea of a primary emotional access to affective properties from a different angle.
See, e.g., McDowell, op. cit.; Wiggins, op. cit.; J. D’Arms & D. Jacobson, “Sentiment and Value,” Ethics 110 (2000): 722-748; D’Arms & Jacobson, op. cit.; W. Rabinowicz & T. Rønnow-Rasmussen, „The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value,“ Ethics 114 (2004): 391-423. Not all versions of neo-sentimentalsm invoke a deontic understanding of affective qualities. However, this is clearly true of the standard version.
For the view that they are deontic as opposed to axiological, see D. von Hildebrand, Christian Ethics (New York: McKay 1953), ch. 18 and Mulligan, “Emotions and Values”, p. 480. For the view that they are deontic over and above being axiological, see J. Hartland-Swann, An Analysis of Morals (London: Allen & Unwin 1960).
On an alternative, but less common, view, affective properties have permissive rather than prescriptive force. See, e.g., Mulligan, “Emotions and Values”, p. 480. In keeping with mainstream meta-ethics, I will here assume the common, prescriptivist conception of their deontic force. However, my main charge against the Response-Dependence View applies also on a permissivist conception.
There is a certain parallel here with the ‘no guidance’ argument against doxastic normativism. See K. Glüer & A. Wikforss, “Against Content Normativity,” Mind 118 (2009): 31-70; Glüer & Wikforss, “The Truth Norm and Guidance: A Reply to Steglich-Petersen,” Mind 119 (2010): 757-761.
This response is inspired by a reply to Glüer & Wikforss’ ‘no guidance’-argument against doxastic normativism. See P. Steglich-Petersen, “The Truth Norm and Guidance: A Reply to Glüer and Wikforss,” Mind 119 (2010): 749-755. My rejoinder parallels Glüer & Wikforss’ rejoinder. See Glüer & Wikforss, “The Truth Norm and Guidance: A Reply to Steglich-Petersen.”
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Peter Königs, Tobias Wilsch, Hichem Naar and an anonymous referee for this journal for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank audiences at the workshop “Observational Properties” (University of Fribourg, September 2017) as well at the philosophy of mind-workshop of the philosophy of neuroscience-group (University of Tübingen, January 2017) and at Sabine Döring's research seminar (University of Tübingen, May 2017) for their helpful comments. This research was partly funded by a postdoc scholarship from the University of Fribourg (July-September 2017).
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Müller, J.M. Response-Dependent Normative Properties and the Epistemic Account of Emotion. J Value Inquiry 54, 355–364 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-019-09700-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-019-09700-w