Irwin Goldstein

In this dissertation I analyse the concepts of pleasure and unpleasantness and outline an approach whereby the insights gained about pleasure and unpleasantness are applied to the analysis of a number of feeling and emotion concepts. In trying to understand what pleasure is and hew it is related to pain and unpleasantness, I tackle various basic questions about the role of pleasure, pain, and unpleasantness in motivation and about the intrinsic goodness of pleasure and the intrinsic badness of pain and unpleasantness. In pleasure's nature of being good, wanted, and sought and pairfs nature of being bad, unwanted, and avoided we locate the way in which pleasure and pain are opposites and the central defining properties of the 'pleasant' and the 'unpleasant'. Within my analysis of pleasure and unpleasantness I reach the conclusion that pleasure and unpleasantness are 'special experiences' : I explain what is involved in this claim and defend it against the objections which Ludwig Wittgenstein raised in his Private Language Argument. The view of the emotions which I outline and defend is the view which Aristotle, Spinoza, and many other philosophers have held. According to this view, emotions or 'feelings' such as con¬ fidence or fear, delight or misery, and pride or shame, are 'modes' of pleasure or unpleasantness. Given my views on pleasure and unpleasantness, it would follow that a number of emotions are, in part, the 'special experiences' of pleasure and unpleasantness.

Materialists say sensations and other kinds of mental states are physical events. Today, most materialists are neural materialists. They think mental states are neural events or material properties of neural events.Orthodox neural materialists think mental states are neural events or orthodox material properties of neutral events. Orthodox material properties are defining properties of the physical. A defining property of the physical is a type of property that provides a necessary condition for something's being correctly termed ‘physical’ Defining properties of the physical include spatial and temporal properties and causal propensities and sensitivities. A particle is an electron, for instance, by having a particular set of spatiotemporal properties and causal sensitivities and powers.

Ethical antirealists believe the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, do not signify properties that objects and actions have or might have. They believe that when a person calls pain or any other event ‘bad’ and adultery or any other action ‘wrong’, he does not report some fact about that object or action. J. L. Mackie defends ethical anti-realism in part by appealing to an ontological queerness he believes value properties would have if they existed. "If there were objective values," Mackie writes, "they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe." Goodness would have a queer magnetic power. "Something's being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it," Mackie says. If there were a property of the sort we conceive of good as being, it would be a queer property—one we cannot reasonably believe exists, Mackie argues.

Against Hume and Epicurus I argue that our selection of pleasure, pain and other objects as our ultimate ends is guided by reason. There are two parts to the explanation of our attraction to pleasure, our aversion to pain, and our consequent preference of pleasure to pain: 1. Pleasure presents us with reason to seek it, pain presents us reason to avoid it, and 2. Being intelligent, human beings (and to a degree, many animals) are disposed to be guided by reason, and hence by what there is reason to choose, seek, and prefer, when they act.

That all pleasure is good and all pain bad in itself is an eternally true ethical principle. The common claim that some pleasure is not good, or some pain not bad, is mistaken. Strict particularism (ethical decisions must be made case by case; there are no sound universal normative principles) and relativism (all good and bad are relative to society) are among the ethical theories we may refute through an appeal to pleasure and pain. Daniel Dennett, Philippa Foot, R M Hare, Gilbert Harman, Immanuel Kant, J. L. Mackie, and Jean-Paul Sartre are among the many philosophers addressed.

By what types of properties do we specify twinges, toothaches, and other kinds of mental states? Wittgenstein considers two methods. Procedure one, direct, private acquaintance: A person connects a word to the sensation it specifies through noticing what that sensation is like in his own experience. Procedure two, outward signs: A person pins his use of a word to outward, pre-verbal signs of the sensation. I identify and explain a third procedure and show we in fact specify many kinds of mental states in this way.

Orthodox neural materialists think mental states are neural events or orthodox material properties of neutral events. Orthodox material properties are defining properties of the “physical”. A “defining property” of the physical is a type of property that provides a necessary condition for something’s being correctly termed “physical”. In this paper I give an argument against orthodox neural materialism. If successful, the argument would show at least some properties of some mental states are not orthodox material properties of neural events. Opposing philosophical orthodoxy, I show there are no posteriori identities -- identities that cannot be known of a priori.

A person skeptical about other minds supposes it is possible in principle that there are no minds other than his. A person skeptical about an external world thinks it is possible there is no world external to him. Some philosophers think a person can refute the skeptic and prove that his world is not the solitary scenario the skeptic supposes might be realized. In this paper I examine one argument that some people think refutes solipsism. The argument, from Wittgenstein, is grounded in a thesis about language. Some people believe that in using language a person necessarily is linked to persons other than himself. Some people think a person can use the ‘communalist’ principle to refute forms of solipsism. I show that people do not refute solipsism with the Wittgensteinian, language-necessarily-is-shared principle.

People see five kinds of views in epistemology and ontology as hinging on there being words a person can learn only by private ostensive definitions, through direct acquaintance with his own sensations: skepticism about other minds, 2. skepticism about an external world, 3. foundationalism, 4. dualism, and 5. phenomenalism. People think Wittgenstein refuted these views by showing, they believe, no word is learnable only by private ostensive definition. I defend these five views from Wittgenstein’s attack.

People support ethical antirealism with various arguments. Gilbert Harman thinks if a property of goodness existed, it would have detectable effects on objects that have it. However, Harman reasons, the good has no such detectable effects. Internalists think if good objects had some goodness property, that property would bond to desire and action in a way inconsistent with ethical realism. I defend ethical realism from the two arguments. I explain how good can both name a property and how objects with that property might dispose people to seek them. This explanation of the good's magnetism provides a reply to Harman.

Many philosophers sharply distinguish emotions from feelings. Emotions are not feelings, and having an emotion does not necessitate having some feeling, they think. In this paper I reply to a set of arguments people use sharply to distinguish emotions from feelings. In response to these people, I endorse and defend a hedonic theory of emotion that avoids various anti-feeling objections. Proponents of this hedonic theory analyze an emotion by reference to forms of cognition (e.g., thought, belief, judgment) and a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling. Given this theory,emotions are feelings in some important sense of "feelings", and these feelings are identified as particular emotions by reference to their hedonic character and the cognitive state that causes the hedonic feelings.