Having an emotion involves having an evaluative point of view on one’s circumstances. For example, there is a sense in which being angry involves taking oneself to have been wronged, and fear seems to paint the scene as one of danger. A significant debate in contemporary philosophy of mind concerns the nature of this point of view. The central theme of the account I defend in this dissertation is that an emotional point of view is a holistic goal-oriented property of the mind, rather than a property of an individual representational state such as a judgment or a perception. I argue that emotions are processing modes–processive mechanisms that more or less holistically organize the mind around certain relational goals, such as securing safety or regaining control. Emotions do this, I argue, by orchestrating widespread patterns of change in attention, inquiry, prediction, and motivation that promote the pursuit of those goals. This account does better than prominent contemporary alternatives in that it is supported by empirical work in psychology on emotion, it avoids a range of problems about how to individuate conscious emotional experiences, and it provides resources to address a longstanding puzzle about the nature of conflicts between a subject’s emotions and their evaluative judgments.

Creator

• Thomson, Mark

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-z8v8-fx36

Subject

• Philosophy

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15485
• etdadmin_upload_797662

Keyword

• Intentionality
• Consciousness
• Emotions
• Representation
• Perceptualism
• Phenomenology

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright