ABSTRACT
Christine Tappolet defends the view that emotions have non-conceptual content, even if this content is representational in the sense that emotions imply good or bad assessments of their intentional objects. Emotions, she makes clear, cannot be identified with judgments. To make her view plausible, she engages the question of how concepts relate to perceptions and judgments. Even if a perception and a judgment should present (or represent) the same state of affairs, only the judgment and not the perception presupposes conceptual capacities on the side of the subject. Concepts, in this context, are understood as the inferentially relevant building blocks of content. Tappolet distinguishes the question of conceptual contents (for example of a judgment) from the question of concept possession. While the latter refers to the psychological capacity of an individual, the first is of a semantic nature. Tappolet nonetheless considers the distinction between a state- and content-variant of the conceptualist thesis to overlap and supports the view that emotions as well as perceptions are non-conceptual phenomena from the outset, working her way through various supporting arguments.
