Being Afraid Of A Bear

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Recommended: Essays on emotions

The “judgment” theory of emotions is a favored theory among philosophers. According to this theory, at the heart of emotion is a cognitive state: an emotion either is or essentially includes a judgment or belief. If I am in love with a person, this means not just that I get warm and fuzzy feelings inside when the person approaches, but that I have certain beliefs about them – that they are worthy, lovable kind of person. Similarly, if I am afraid of a bear, I don’t just experience a twinge or a pang; I believe or judge the bear to be dangerous or threatening to me. At the heart of love, it would seem, is the judgment that the beloved is a wonderful person; at the heart of fear is the judgment that I am being threatened. Being afraid of the bear does seem to entail that I believe it is threatening me. Likewise it seems contradictory to say that I love a person, but there’s nothing about them that I believe to be appealing. Furthermore, a change in the relevant evaluative judgment may produce a change in one’s emotional state. I cannot be angry that you have insulted me if I …show more content…

This suggests that we are arguing about evaluative judgments: you are trying to convince me that I am right or wrong to make a particular evaluative judgment. If emotions were nothing but feelings, argument would be beside the point and normally you would not try to argue somebody out of pain. Overall, philosophers generally agree that emotions have intentionality. “Thus we can understand the “formal object” of an emotion as its essential intentionality – the kind of object to which it must be directed fi it is to be that emotion.”(pg.12) The judgments and objects that constitute our emotions are those which are especially important to us, meaningful to us, concerning matters in which we have invested

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