Dominique Kuenzle

Philosophical thinking about pleasure today, especially in the context of normative ethics, is deeply influenced by the concept’s function within Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism, according to which the moral quality of any action depends on its tendency to “maximize pleasure” and “minimize pain.” According to Mill’s own philosophy of science and language, the content and function of “pleasure” is determined by its role in scientific induction, specifically within the associationist psychological theory Mill shares with his father, James Mill. Pleasures, it turns out, are qualities of sensations with inductive links to other mental states, the power to explain actions, and the potential for being physiologically explained. The semantic content of “pleasure” as a general name, and thus the content of the moral precepts set up by Mill’s principle of utility, must be thought of as responsive to inductive progress in associationist psychology, ethology, and neuroscience.

Die zweite Hälfte der 1830er Jahre – Mill war gerade 30 Jahre alt geworden – waren geprägt von seinen Versuchen, als Redaktor der London and Westminster Review den politischen Kampf der progressiven Radikalen zu unterstützen. Wie in anderen Phasen seines Lebens war auch dieses intensive politische Engagement gefolgt von einem temporär desillusionierten Rückzug in die Theorie; Mill hielt es für angemessen, sich nun vorerst für klare Ideen statt für politische Reformen einzusetzen. „Die geistige Erneuerung Europas“, meinte er zu Robert Barclay FoxFox, Robert Barclay, „muss der sozialen vorangehen“. Und so machte sich Mill daran, ein Projekt zu beenden, an dem er laut seiner Autobiographie schon seit den frühen 1830er Jahren gearbeitet hatte: die systematische Darstellung der logischen, erkenntnis- und wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlagen seiner philosophischen und politischen Positionen.

Philosophical thinking about pleasure today, especially in the context of normative ethics, is deeply influenced by the concept’s function within Bentham’s and Mill’s Utilitarianism, according to which the moral quality of any action depends on its tendency to “maximize pleasure” and “minimize pain”. According to Mill’s own philosophy of science and language, the content and function of “pleasure” is determined by its role in scientific induction, specifically within the associationist psychological theory Mill shares with his father, James Mill. Pleasures, it turns out, are a quality of sensations with inductive links to other mental states, the power to explain actions, and the potential for being physiologically explained. The semantic content of “pleasure” as a general name, and thus the content of the moral precepts set up by Mill’s Principle of Utility, must be thought of as responsive to inductive progress in associationist psychology, ethology and the neurosciences.

Undoubtedly, emotions sometimes thwart our epistemic endeavours. But do they also contribute to epistemic success? The thesis that emotions 'skew the epistemic landscape', as Peter Goldie puts it in this volume, has long been discussed in epistemology. Recently, however, philosophers have called for a systematic reassessment of the epistemic relevance of emotions. The resulting debate at the interface between epistemology, theory of emotions and cognitive science examines emotions in a wide range offunctions. These include motivating inquiry, establishing relevance, as well as providing access to facts, beliefs and non-propositional aspects ofknowledge. This volume is the first collection focusing on the claim that we cannot but account for emotions if we are to understand the processes and evaluations related to empirical knowledge. All essays are specifically written for this collection by leading researchers in this relatively new and developing field, bringing together work from backgrounds such as pragmatism and scepticism, cognitive theories of emotions and cognitive science, Caitesian epistemology and virtue epistemology.

This chapter provides an overview of the issues involved in recent debates about the epistemological relevance of emotions. We first survey some key issues in epistemology and the theory of emotions that inform various assessments of emotions’ potential significance in epistemology. We then distinguish five epistemic functions that have been claimed for emotions: motivational force, salience and relevance, access to facts and beliefs, non-propositional contributions to knowledge and understanding, and epistemic efficiency. We identify two core issues in the discussions about such epistemic functions of emotions: First, even though it is plausible that emotions are involved in epistemic processes, it may be doubted whether they really matter for the normative question of what counts as knowledge or justified belief. Second, some of the epistemic functions claimed for emotions in general may only be attributed to some specifically epistemic emotions, which have been present all along in traditional epistemology, albeit under different labels such as ‘intuitions’.