Jérôme Dokic

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness.

A popular idea at present is that emotions are perceptions of values. Most defenders of this idea have interpreted it as the perceptual thesis that emotions present (rather than merely represent) evaluative states of affairs in the way sensory experiences present us with sensible aspects of the world. We argue against the perceptual thesis. We show that the phenomenology of emotions is compatible with the fact that the evaluative aspect of apparent emotional contents has been incorporated from outside. We then deal with the only two views that can make sense of the perceptual thesis. On the response–dependence view, emotional experiences present evaluative responsedependent properties (being fearsome, being disgusting, etc.) in the way visual experiences present response-dependent properties such as colors. On the response–independence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-independent properties (being dangerous, being indigestible, etc.), conceived as ‘Gestalten’ independent of emotional feelings themselves. We show that neither view can make plausible the idea that emotions present values as such, i.e., in an open and transparent way. If emotions have apparent evaluative contents, this is in fact due to evaluative enrichments of the non-evaluative presentational contents of emotions.

In this paper, we put forward a position we call “situationalism” (or “situated minimalism”), which is a middle-ground view between minimalism and contextualism in recent philosophy of language. We focus on the notion of free enrichment, which first arose within contextualism as underlying the claim that what is said is typically enriched relative to the logical form of the uttered sentence. However, minimalism also acknowledges some process of pragmatic intrusion in its claim that what is thought and communicated is typically enriched relative to what is said. We show that situationalism dispenses with free enrichment both at the level of what is said (proposition expressed) and of what is thought (mental level). According to situationalism, an alleged underdetermined utterance can, pace minimalism, be true in one situation while false in another, and two people using the same alleged underdetermined sentence can be characterized, pace contextualism, as having said the same thing.

An account of the evaluation of fictional discourse in terms of counterfactuals is sketched which accommodates the insights of D. Lewis and G. Evans but is not committed to the existence of possibilia on the one hand and to taking counterfactuals as barely true on the other hand. By adopting a two-step theory of evaluation which does not evaluate expressions (sentences) across possible worlds modal realism is avoided. And the use of a modified incorporation principle saying that every singular reference made in the scope of a pretence is anaphoric and linked to a quantifier outside the scope allows to incorporate actual individuals within a game of make-believe.

Cognitive penetrability (CP) is the general hypothesis that cognitive states (e.g. beliefs, desires, and preferences) can directly influence perceptual content. This chapter criticizes what is seen as a dubious premise implicitly or explicitly endorsed in many discussions about CP, either pro or contra. This premise validates the transition from relevant differences at the level of perceptual phenomenology—those that are supposed to result from different cognitive states—to differences pertaining to perceptual content. The chapter shows that the phenomenology of perception is not determined exclusively by perceptual content but possesses another, affective dimension, constituted by various kinds of conscious feelings (e.g. feelings of reality, familiarity, and confidence with respect to what is perceived). It claims that, at least in central cases, the phenomenological changes that the partisans of CP construe as being caused by penetrating cognitive states concern not the content of perception proper but its affective dimension.

The naïve conception of visual experience depicts such experience as a direct, primitive relation between the seeing subject and the object seen. It hinges on an opposition between the visual relation and the mental representation of the object seen in visual imagination or in the vision of images. The aim of this article is to suggest that the naïve opposition between relation and representation is still philosophically and scientifically relevant. Two philosophical theories of perception are presented: Relationalism takes up the spirit of the naïve conception by analysing visual experience as a non-representational relation to the object seen, whereas intentionalism rejects the naïve conception as inadequate and considers visual experience to be representational through and through. After introducing a general notion of representation acceptable to both sides, we examine a body of works from cognitive science that can mediate the debate between relationalism and intentionalism. The main argument propounded is that relationalism is compatible with the scientific data at our disposal on the cognitive processes related to vision. Relationalism has an additional philosophical advantage since it allows us to understand how mental representations, including visual ones, can be based on a more direct cognitive relation – in other words, an intrinsically relational one – to the visible world.

Aesthetics, both in its theoretical and empirical forms, has seen a renewed interest in the sublime, an aesthetic category dear to traditional philosophers, but quite neglected by contemporary philosophy. Our aim is to offer a novel perspective on the experience of the sublime. More precisely, our hypothesis is that the latter arises from ‘a radical limit-experience’, which is a metacognitve awareness of the limits of our cognitive capacities as we are confronted with something indefinitely greater or more powerful than us. This hypothesis better explains the negative feelings involved in the experience of the sublime and accounts for its demarcation from other experiences (for example, terrible beauty). Experiences of the sublime have an overall positive valence, though. We will explore different ways in which a subject can try to overcome the negative evaluation involved in radical limit-experiences, and suggest that only one of them is appropriate to experiences of the sublime.

Awe seems to be a complex emotion or emotional construct characterized by a mix of positive (contentment, happiness), and negative affective components (fear and a sense of being smaller, humbler or insignificant). It is striking that the elicitors of awe correspond closely to what philosophical aesthetics, and especially Burke and Kant, have called “the sublime.” As a matter of fact, awe is almost absent from the philosophical agenda, while there are very few studies on the experience of the sublime as such in the psychological literature. The aim of this paper is to throw light on the complex relationship between awe (as understood by psychologists) and the experience of the sublime (as discussed by philosophers). We distinguish seven ways of conceiving this relationship and highlight those that seem more promising to us. Once we have a clearer picture of how awe and the experience of the sublime are related, we can use it to enhance collaboration between these domains. We would be able to use empirical results about awe in a philosophical analysis of the experience of the sublime, which in turn can help us to design novel experimental hypotheses about the contexts in which we experience awe.

Si l’accointance est définie comme une relation mentale entre un sujet et un fragment de réalité, le sens de l’accointance est le sentiment pour le sujet d’être en rapport direct avec un fragment de réalité. Pour de nombreux philosophes, le sens de l’accointance fait partie de l’essence de la perception consciente : voir une montagne, par exemple, implique le sentiment d’être en rapport direct avec elle, de l’avoir « en chair et en os » sous les yeux, plutôt que de la viser à travers une représentation mentale indépendante. La thèse principale défendue dans cet essai est que le sens de l’accointance est indépendant et distinct de l’accointance elle-même. Plusieurs exemples présentés montrent que pour être véritablement accointé avec la réalité, il n’est ni nécessaire ni suffisant d’avoir le sentiment d’accointance. Le sens de l’accointance est mieux conçu comme une expérience métacognitive séparée de l’accointance. L’article examine enfin les conséquences de cette thèse pour la question de savoir si la perception implique ou repose sur une représentation mentale de ce qui est perçu.

On a cognitivist account of self-ascription, I can have direct, non-inferential knowledge about my own beliefs. This account makes traditionally appeal to the notion of introspection, conceived as an internal source of knowledge. At least since Wittgenstein, many philosophers have justly worried that such a notion makes it impossible to make sense of the ascription of a unified notion of belief, which can be shared with others. In this essay, I explore another method of self-ascription, which was also envisaged by Wittgenstein (and later by Gareth Evans), which I call “the method of deployment”. This method is such that I can gain knowledge about my own beliefs by attending not inwards but outwards, on the external world as I found it. Wittgenstein feared that the method of deployment would inevitably lead to solipsism. With reference to recent work in the theory of mental simulation, I try to show that Wittgenstein’s fear is ungrounded. I draw two general conclusions. First, the method of deployment does not concern self-ascription only ; it can also ground the ascription of beliefs to others. Second, what is special about self-ascription is the “ontological substrate” on which it is based. For instance, I am warranted in believing that I believe that it is raining because I am presented with thefactthat it is raining, in contrast to a mere possibility. The method of deployment does not lead to solipsism if it is based on a naïve ontological distinction between facts and mere possibilities.

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is part of what is remembered), or it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter.

This essay is about our perceptual ability to recognize familiar persons. The question is whether and to what extent our ordinary recognition judgments rely on perceptual experience as opposed to background beliefs. It argues that in order to give a proper answer to this question, we need to introduce a third character into the picture, namely the feeling of presence. Ordinary person recognition involves qualitative recognitional abilities, which (in the visual case) enable us to see that a particular person looks just like a familiar person, but also an independent causal mechanism which generates the feeling that the familiar person herself is present. When we recognize someone, we identify her (general) visual appearance, but we also feel her presence. Feelings of presence are essential contributions to the phenomenology of person recognition, but they do not supervene on perceptual content proper.