Emotional Insight

Michael Brady attacks the popular idea that emotions are, or are quite like, perceptions: perceptions of evaluative properties, or, more elegantly, the evaluative world. While the perceptual model of emotions has been criticized before, this is the first book-length work devoted to the task. Emotional Insight's argument is therefore timely, in addition to being original and plausible. As a piece of writing, it has a pleasingly straightforward arc, illustrating the attractions of the perceptual model, setting up the most promising theory of that kind, dismantling it, and addressing some problems that arise along the way. The end result is a contribution to the philosophy of emotions that deserves the interest of any advocate of the perceptual model, as well as philosophers working on the relationship between emotions, attention, and evaluation. The book's starting point is the observation that emotions seem to inform us about value. For example, feeling suspicious might lead me to believe that someone is untrustworthy; feeling afraid might lead me to judge that they are dangerous. It is uncontroversial that emotions have this sort of evaluative content; and if they also reliably (if not infallibly) co-occur with the actual presence of untrustworthiness or danger, we might think that having emotional experiences provides us with some evidence that the evaluative world is really thus and so. Emotions could then be thought of as mirroring the way in which perceptions justify our empirical beliefs. As Brady sees it, this epistemological view is the core tenet of the perceptual model of emotions. Just as my perception as of a tree normally generates and immediately justifies the judgement that there is a tree in front of me, so ‘emotional experiences can both generate and immediately justify evaluative beliefs’ (p. 78).

Argument (complex analysis) · Cognitive psychology · Epistemology · Feeling · Mirroring · Perception · Value (mathematics) · Computer Science · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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