Christine Tappolet

Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality

Introduction 1. Rational Capacities, or: How to Distinguish Recklessness, Weakness, and Compulsion 2. How is Strength of Will Possible? 3. Akrasia, Collective and Individual 4. Emotions and the Intelligibility of Akratic Action 5. Weakness of Will and Practical Judgement 6. Accidie, Evaluation, and Motivation 7. The Work of the Will 8. Choosing Rationally and Choosing Correctly 9. Prudence and the Temporal Structure of Practical Reasons 10. Practical Irrationality and the Structure of Decision Theory 11. Paradoxical Emotion: On sui generis Emotional Irrationality

Truth Pluralism and Many‐Valued Logics: A Reply to Beall

Mixed inferences are a problem for truth pluralism, a doctrine which aims at combining truth assessability and anti-realism with respect to allegedly non-descriptive sentences, such as moral sentences. It seems that truth pluralists have to give up the classical account of validity. Against this,JC Beall suggests that truth pluralists can adopt the account of validity usedin many-valued logics: validity can be defined as the conservation of designatedvalues. The problem, I argue, is that there is ground to believe that on this account sentences which are true in one or other way also fall under a generic truth predicate. I also argue that mixed conjunctions make for a further problem for truth pluralism, and more particularly for Bealls version of it. Finally, I consider the deeper worry that the distinction between truth which does and truth which does not entail realism is inferentially irrelevant.

Emotions, perceptions, and emotional illusions

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we realize that they are fearsome. Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful.

Emotion, philosophical issues about.

We start this overview by discussing the place of emotions within the broader affective domain-how different are emotions from moods, sensations, and affective dispositions? Next, we examine the way emotions relate to their objects, emphasizing in the process their intimate relations to values. We move from this inquiry into the nature of emotion to an inquiry into their epistemology. Do they provide reasons for evaluative judgments and, more generally, do they contribute to our knowledge of values? We then address the question of the social dimension of emotions, explaining how the traditional nature versus nurture contrast applies to them. We finish by exploring the relations between emotions, motivation and action, concluding this overview with a more specific focus on how these relations bear on some central ethical issues.

Rethinking Cognitive Mediation: Cognitive–Behavioral Therapy and the Perceptual Theory of Emotion

Empirical assessments and theoretical considerations raise questions about cognitive behavioral therapy’s fundamental theoretical tenet that psychological disturbances are mediated by consciously accessible cognitive structures. This paper considers this situation in light of emotion theory in philosophy. We argue that the “perceptual theory” of emotions, which underlines the parallels between emotions and sensory perceptions, suggests a conception of cognitive mediation that can accommodate the observed empirical anomalies and one that is consistent with the dual processing models dominant in cognitive psychology.

Introduction: Modularity and the Nature of Emotions

Are our experiences of fear, disgust, anger, joy, pride or compassion, for instance, more akin to states such as feelings or sensations, which are often thought to lack cognitive content, or are they more like perceptions or else like judgements? If emotions are informational or cognitive states, should we take emotions to be perceptions of a certain kind or else propositional states with a fully conceptual content? Are emotions passive states or are they at least to a certain extent subject to the will? Are some or all emotions basic, in the sense of being universally shared and innate or are they cultural constructions? Do some, or all, emotions threaten theoretical or practical rationality or are they, to the contrary, essential preconditions of rational thought and action? These are some of the many questions which emotion theorists have tried to answer. Since the publication of Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind (1983), a new set of questions, answers to which provide at least partial replies to the questions just mentioned, has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. Are emotions, or at least some of them, modular? This would mean, minimally, that emotions are cognitive capacities that can be explained in terms of mental components that are at functionally dissociable from other parts of the mind. This is what is suggested by the often noticed conflicts between emotions and thought. For instance, Hume asks us to consider “the case of a man, who being hung out from a high tower in a cage of iron cannot forbear trembling, when he surveys the precipice below him, tho’ he knows himself to be perfectly secure from falling, by his experience of the solidity of the iron, which supports him [...]”. The emotion of fear this man experiences is characterised by recalcitrance with respect to thought. Since this is taken to be one of the hallmarks of modularity, one might be tempted to conclude that emotions, or at least some types of emotions, are modular

The Normativity of Evaluative Concepts

It is generally accepted that there are two kinds of normative concepts: evaluative concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. The question that is raised by this distinction is how it is possible to claim that evaluative concepts are normative. Given that deontic concepts appear to be at the heart of normativity, the bigger the gap between evaluative and deontic concepts, the lesser it appears plausible to say that evaluative concepts are normative. After having presented the main differences between evaluative and deontic concepts, and shown that there is more than a superficial difference between the two kinds, the chapter turns to the question of the normativity of evaluative concepts. It will become clear that, even if these concepts have different functions, there are a great many ties between evaluative concepts, on one hand, and the concepts of ought and of reason, on the other.

Reply to Kurth, Crosby, and Basse’s review of emotions, values, and agency

Abstract In this reply, I argue that the worries raised by Kurth and this coauthors are not fatal for the perceptual theory of emotions. A first point to keep in mind in discussing the analogy argument in favor of that account is that what counts is the overall balance of similarities and differences, given their respective weight. In any case, I argue that none of the alleged differences between sensory perceptual experiences and emotions are such as to rule out that emotions are a kind of perceptual experience which can confer epistemic justification of our evaluative beliefs. Finally, I suggest that the perceptual theory is in a position to nicely capture what happens when we disagree about evaluative issues.

What kind of evaluative states are emotions? The attitudinal theory vs. the perceptual theory of emotions

ABSTRACT This paper argues that Deonna and Teronis attitudinal theory of emotions faces two serious problems. The first is that their master argument fails to establish the central tenet of the theory, namely, that the formal objects of emotions do not feature in the content of emotions. The second is that the attitudinal theory itself is vulnerable to a dilemma. By pointing out these problems, our paper provides indirect support to the main competitor of the attitudinal theory, namely, the perceptual theory of emotions.

À la rescousse du platonisme moral

Moral platonism, the claim that moral entities are both objective and prescriptive, is generally thought to be a dead end. In an attempt to defend a moderate form of moral platonism or more precisely platonism about values, I first argue that several of the many versions of this doctrine are not committed to ontological extravagances. I then discuss an important objection due to John McDowell and developed by Michael Smith, according to which moral platonism is incoherent. I argue that objectivism is compatible with the claim that certain ways of being aware of values, namely those involving emotions, are motivating.