Constant Bonard
Biographic Data
| ID | 1166355 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Constant Bonard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Constant |
| FAMILY NAME | Bonard |
| SIGNATURE | BONARD C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bern |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4925-6042 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Are Emotions Key to Political Engagement? The Case of Environmental Mitigation
Emotions are widely taken to play an important role in motivating political engagement. Activists and scholars often emphasize emotional responses such as fear, indignation, hope, and compassion as central drivers of political views and actions. This paper examines how the relation between emotion, evaluation, and motivation should be understood by drawing on research in the affective sciences and focusing on the case of environmental mitigation.…
Identity-Based Irrationality and the Goal-Directed Theory of Emotions
This article introduces identity-based irrationality, a form of emotional irrationality that arises when the evaluations eliciting an emotion conflict with a person's deep, identity-constituting beliefs and desires. While the goal-directed theory (GDT) of emotions accounts for apparent (Type-1) and theoretical (Type-2) irrationality, it does not capture cases where emotions are structurally inconsistent with the agent's deep self. Drawing on theo…
The Belief–Desire Appraisal Theory of Emotion
I introduce the Belief–Desire Appraisal Theory of Emotion (BDA). BDA makes three main claims: (a) Emotions are psychological episodes whose paradigmatic instances are constituted by coordinated changes in appraisals, action tendencies, bodily responses, and subjective feelings; (b) appraisals—which are rapid, low‐level evaluations of situational relevance to one's concerns—drive and explain the changes in the other components; and (c) appraisals …
Emotions Represent Evaluative Properties Unconsciously
Drawing on affective sciences, I argue that normally elicited emotions involve a component—the appraisal process—that represents evaluative properties unconsciously. More specifically, I argue that, given a substantial agreement in affective sciences about what emotions are, given broadly shared definitions of representation, evaluative properties, and unconsciousness, given how appraisals are conceptualized by most (neuro)psychological theories …
Underdeterminacy without ostension
Together, the code and inferential models of communication are often thought to range over all cases of communication. However, their prevailing versions seem unable to fully explain what I call underdeterminacy without ostension . The latter is constituted by communication where stimuli that are not (nor appear to be) produced with communicative or informative intentions nevertheless communicate information underdetermined by the relevant codes.…
The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories
Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these…
The defectiveness of propaganda
We argue that political propaganda is a negative phenomenon, against a recent strain of philosophical theorizing that argues that political propaganda can sometimes be neutral or even positive. After an exploration of the sense and connotation of the word ‘propaganda’ in ordinary use and in the scholarly literature, we discuss Ross's initial account of propaganda as an epistemically defective form of political communication. We claim that, with s…
Natural meaning, probabilistic meaning, and the interpretation of emotional signs
When we see or hear a spontaneous emotional expression, we usually immediately, effortlessly, and often correctly interpret it to mean happiness, sadness, or some other emotion as well as what this emotion is about. How do we do that? In this article, I evaluate how useful the concepts of natural meaning and probabilistic meaning are when it comes to explaining how we and other animals interpret emotional signs displayed without communicative int…
Beyond ostension
Relevance and emotion
The ability to focus on relevant information is central to human cognition. It is therefore hardly unsurprising that the notion of relevance appears across a range of different disciplines. As well as its central role in relevance-theoretic pragmatics, for example, relevance is also a core concept in the affective sciences, where there is consensus that for a particular object or event to elicit an emotional state, that object or event needs to b…
Relevance and emotion
The ability to focus on relevant information is central to human cognition. It is therefore hardly unsurprising that the notion of relevance appears across a range of different disciplines. As well as its central role in relevance-theoretic pragmatics, for example, relevance is also a core concept in the affective sciences, where there is consensus that for a particular object or event to elicit an emotional state, that object or event needs to b…
Beyond ostension
The defectiveness of propaganda
We argue that political propaganda is a negative phenomenon, against a recent strain of philosophical theorizing that argues that political propaganda can sometimes be neutral or even positive. After an exploration of the sense and connotation of the word ‘propaganda’ in ordinary use and in the scholarly literature, we discuss Ross's initial account of propaganda as an epistemically defective form of political communication. We claim that, with s…
Relevance and emotion
The ability to focus on relevant information is central to human cognition. It is therefore hardly unsurprising that the notion of relevance appears across a range of different disciplines. As well as its central role in relevance-theoretic pragmatics, for example, relevance is also a core concept in the affective sciences, where there is consensus that for a particular object or event to elicit an emotional state, that object or event needs to b…
Beyond ostension
Natural meaning, probabilistic meaning, and the interpretation of emotional signs
When we see or hear a spontaneous emotional expression, we usually immediately, effortlessly, and often correctly interpret it to mean happiness, sadness, or some other emotion as well as what this emotion is about. How do we do that? In this article, I evaluate how useful the concepts of natural meaning and probabilistic meaning are when it comes to explaining how we and other animals interpret emotional signs displayed without communicative int…
Underdeterminacy without ostension
Together, the code and inferential models of communication are often thought to range over all cases of communication. However, their prevailing versions seem unable to fully explain what I call underdeterminacy without ostension . The latter is constituted by communication where stimuli that are not (nor appear to be) produced with communicative or informative intentions nevertheless communicate information underdetermined by the relevant codes.…
The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories
Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these…
The defectiveness of propaganda
We argue that political propaganda is a negative phenomenon, against a recent strain of philosophical theorizing that argues that political propaganda can sometimes be neutral or even positive. After an exploration of the sense and connotation of the word ‘propaganda’ in ordinary use and in the scholarly literature, we discuss Ross's initial account of propaganda as an epistemically defective form of political communication. We claim that, with s…
Emotions Represent Evaluative Properties Unconsciously
Drawing on affective sciences, I argue that normally elicited emotions involve a component—the appraisal process—that represents evaluative properties unconsciously. More specifically, I argue that, given a substantial agreement in affective sciences about what emotions are, given broadly shared definitions of representation, evaluative properties, and unconsciousness, given how appraisals are conceptualized by most (neuro)psychological theories …
Are Emotions Key to Political Engagement? The Case of Environmental Mitigation
Emotions are widely taken to play an important role in motivating political engagement. Activists and scholars often emphasize emotional responses such as fear, indignation, hope, and compassion as central drivers of political views and actions. This paper examines how the relation between emotion, evaluation, and motivation should be understood by drawing on research in the affective sciences and focusing on the case of environmental mitigation.…
Identity-Based Irrationality and the Goal-Directed Theory of Emotions
This article introduces identity-based irrationality, a form of emotional irrationality that arises when the evaluations eliciting an emotion conflict with a person's deep, identity-constituting beliefs and desires. While the goal-directed theory (GDT) of emotions accounts for apparent (Type-1) and theoretical (Type-2) irrationality, it does not capture cases where emotions are structurally inconsistent with the agent's deep self. Drawing on theo…
The Belief–Desire Appraisal Theory of Emotion
I introduce the Belief–Desire Appraisal Theory of Emotion (BDA). BDA makes three main claims: (a) Emotions are psychological episodes whose paradigmatic instances are constituted by coordinated changes in appraisals, action tendencies, bodily responses, and subjective feelings; (b) appraisals—which are rapid, low‐level evaluations of situational relevance to one's concerns—drive and explain the changes in the other components; and (c) appraisals …
Emotions and Moral Behavior (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Cognitive psychology (4 works) · Cognitive science (4 works) · Cognition (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Embodied and Extended Cognition (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (2 works)