Emotional Experience and Propositional Content

Those arguing for the existence of non-propositional content appeal to emotions for support, although there has been little engagement in those debates with developments in contemporary theory of emotion, specifically in connection with the kind of mental states that emotional experiences are. Relatedly, within emotion theory, one finds claims that emotional experiences per se have nonpropositional content without detailed argument. This paper argues that the content of emotional experience is propositional in a weak sense, associated with aspectual experience and correctness conditions. Furthermore, it provides an interpretation of purely-objectual emotional experiences which satisfies this weak view of propositional content. Introduction Propositionalism is often characterized as the view that all intentional attitudes, like belief, hope, and desire, are relations to propositions. As such, the class of intentional attitudes would be exhausted by the class of propositional attitudes. Whatever the status of that view, given its ostensible commitment to a relational view of intentionality and the metaphysical reality of the propositions to which a subject is related, there is a view in the vicinity we can call propositionalism about content. According to this less demanding view, the intentional content characteristic of the relevant intentional states has a propositional structure and therefore intentional states should be characterized as having propositional content. For propositionalism about content to be true, all intentional content should be propositional content. Non-propositionalism about content can be framed as a denial of the aforementioned view: some intentional states have a content which does not have a propositional structure – intentional content is not ipso facto propositional content. There is a further requirement to specify what non-propositional content amounts to (i.e. what its structure is, if not propositional). Perhaps the relevant intentional states have purely 1 See Perry 1994 387-8; Stoljar 1996: 191. 2 See Searle 1983; 2018: 259-71; Sinhababu 2015: 1-16.