Avraham Max Kenan

I feel fear of the Great Dane in front of me. I am envious of my colleague’s publication list. I feel admiration for activists at a human-rights demonstration. My fear, envy and admiration are unique experiences in themselves and unique ways in which I experience the Great Dane, the publication list, and the activists, as fearsome, enviable and admirable (respectively). This raises two questions: how are emotions related to our ability to conceive of emotions themselves and of evaluative properties? In this paper, I present my attempts to answer both questions. I argue that feeling an emotion is necessary for one to be able to conceive of the emotion and to acquire emotion concepts. I also argue that emotions are the basic way we conceive of evaluative properties. This novel metasemantic and epistemic account has implications for our view of concepts of evaluative properties and the way we can acquire them. Most importantly, it brings forth a necessary explanatory role that emotions play in fixing our reference to evaluative properties, acquiring concepts of these properties and forming beliefs about them. The account provides crucial groundwork for establishing emotions’ epistemic role.

This paper connects the debate regarding perceptual representation of high-level properties and the debate regarding non-conceptual perceptual representation. I present and defend a distinction between representationally-complex properties and properties that are simpler to represent and offer ways of assessing whether a property is representationally complex. I address conditions under which such a property might be non-conceptually represented and conclude that most representationally-complex properties are simply too complex to be non-conceptually represented. Thus, most mental states that represent representationally-complex properties must be conceptual. This conclusion is relevant for a variety of philosophical theories (perception, ethics, emotions, pain) and is especially dramatic with respect to accounts according to which a mental state can non-conceptually represent such properties. As a test case for applying my argument I consider a group of such accounts: non-conceptual perceptual views of emotions, which my argument entails are false. I end by considering the implications my argument has for different theories.