Content area
Abstract
Emotions, it is now widely agreed, are not mere sensations; they are conceptually contentful and hence norm-governed mental states. Acknowledgement of this insight, however, has left us with several deep puzzles about emotions. First, once we accept that emotions are cognitive, how do we account for the intuition that emotions involve an essential connection to feelings, even if not every token occasion of emotion is felt? Second, how can we capture the apparent distinctiveness of the norms governing emotions? Third, can we solve these two puzzles in a way that does justice to the variety of emotional phenomena while also explaining our intuition that they make up a unified class?
One source of current accounts' failures to solve these puzzles is the tacit, misguided assumption that emotions can be genuinely normative only if they can be reduced to other mental states whose normative credentials are firmly established. In this dissertation, I show that we have untapped philosophical resources for understanding emotions in their own terms. First, taking from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind the insight that a single state can be both phenomenal and conceptual without being a mere aggregation of two discrete mental states, I show that the felt dimensions of emotions come within the purview of their norms; this provides the beginnings of a solution to the problem of their normative distinctness. Second, I use a neopragmatist theory of explanation according to which connections can be essential without being present on every token occasion to explain how emotions could essentially involve feelings without always being felt. Combining these tools with a methodological shift to thinking about emotions in terms of the work they do allows us to solve the remaining puzzles about emotions. Emotions, I argue, function to creatively engage us with, and sustain, objective and personal values. Attention to emotions' work reveals our folk-psychological category "emotions" to be both distinct and well formed. It is, in the end, emotions' seeming "unruliness" and incredible variety---just those aspects that seem most troubling on current accounts---that allow them to play the meaningful roles in our lives that they do.
