Abstract

In this lecture, I critically examine two approaches to defending the thesis that it is of the nature of emotion to have evaluative propositional content. The first argumentative strategy crucially relies on the observation that emotions are appraised as appropriately, or inappropriately, directed at an object on the grounds that the object in question does, or does not, have some specific evaluative property. The second argumentative strategy relies on the observation that emotional responses are, at times, taken to be supportive or corrective of evaluative judgments. An examination of how these two argumentative strategies fail serves to illuminate the relation between evaluative judgments and emotions. Indeed, what motivates me to undertake this project is not so much an interest in the nature of emotion per se as an interest in the relation between evaluative judgments and emotions, assuming cognitivism about the former.