Emotions as value judgments

The discussions in the previous chapter have given us a better understanding of the nature of evaluative properties and their connections with the emotions. It is now time to consider how these connections can be put to use in order to analyze emotions. In prelude, let us step back for a moment to survey the dialectical situation we find ourselves in. In Chapter 3, we saw that conceiving of desires as constitutive parts of the emotions is the source of the problems facing the mixed theory. And relocating them as antecedents of the emotions in the way the desire satisfaction/frustration approach does did not improve matters. Now, remember that the difficulty that motivated us to consider desires in the first place was the fact that it proved impossible to individuate emotions bymeans of factual beliefs. Our discussion of conative theories of emotions knocked the pins out from under the notion that this difficulty could be removed by appealing to desires. This diagnosis is shared by the rival theory of emotions we shall consider in

this chapter. This classical theory, popular in antiquity (for instance, amongst the Stoics) and more recently brought back into fashion (e.g., Nussbaum 2004, Solomon 1993), holds that one can resolve this difficulty while retaining the idea that emotions are fully reducible to doxastic phenomena. It is only that the relevant doxastic phenomena are of a nature quite distinct from those involved in the theories we have considered up to now: they are evaluative or axiological beliefs. That is why it is called the evaluative judgment theory. In this chapter, we shall first present and discuss this theory of the emotions.

The fact that it faces a substantial difficulty will then lead us to discuss a common strategy to overcome it, a strategy that constitutes the so-called add-on theory of the emotions. We shall argue that this theory is no more convincing than the evaluative judgment theory, because it fails to do justice to the nature and role of phenomenology in emotions. Since this criticism relies on a substantial claim about the richness of emotional phenomenology, this will occasion a consideration of constructionism, an approach to the emotions rooted in a radical denial of this claim that amounts to a mirror-image version of the add-on theory.

To understand the distinctive claim of the evaluative judgment theory, let us return to the examples used at the beginning of Chapter 3. According to a