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March 2001

What is the Nature of Emotions - Part Two

This seems an odd description of our own emotions, but Bedford argues that there is no special introspective quality of emotions; we discover our own emotions in the same way as we discover others’ emotions. Bedford also argues that we should not consider feelings to be in any way necessary to emotions; feelings are sometimes incidentally found alongside emotions, but the two are entirely different. I have already mentioned some reasons given for this in objections to the feelings theory of emotion. Bedford also insists that while we can be mistaken about our emotions ( e.g. a person gazing around at their possessions, asking ‘Am I really happy?’, which is something they have just told their friends.), we can not be mistaken about our feelings; we are never mistaken about feeling pain. Crucially, Bedford also argues that you can be in an emotion state without actually feeling it; a man could be angry, but at that point in time not feel angry.
More recently, Solomon has also argued that emotions should be seen as judgments. Each emotion does not just comprise one judgment, but a whole system of judgments, which means that it becomes more difficult to object that one could make that judgment, yet not have an emotion. Also it is not just the propositional content of the judgments which constitutes the emotion, it is the way judgments are made, e.g. Solomon gives the example that a tautness of voice and a clenched fist, accompanied by the judgment that a matter (in his example in the world of microbiology) is of great importance indicates anger.

Evaluating the theory of Emotions as Judgements
There are good reasons to include judgment into our conception of what an emotion consists of, as Bedford argued when rejecting the feelings theory. The exclusion of feelings as being any part whatsoever associated with emotion does cause some problems however. When you ask a person how they know they are in a particular emotion state, the first thing they will refer to are feelings. Bedford may argue that emotions are not introspectively discovered, but most people would disagree with this. I disagree that it should be taken as a fact that people are mistaken about the nature of their own emotions in such a spectacular manner. A correct theory of emotions should be intelligible to all people, but emotions without feelings seem unintelligible. Representing emotions as merely judgments does not seem plausible to me.

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