A (quasi) belief-desire theory of emotion: the etiological cognition–conation account

Commentateur : Jérôme Dokic

Belief-desire theories of emotion were popular in the 1980s but have since suffered repeated attacks. In the recent philosophical literature on emotions, they seemingly have been left for dead. In this paper, I argue that these objections have not been fatal. The new (quasi) belief-desire theory that I propose here – which I call the etiological cognition-conation account (ECCA) – can avoid them. In a nutshell, the ECCA states that a normally elicited emotional episode involves a mental process (the appraisal process) that is constituted of a kind of inferential process on (quasi) belief-desire pairs. The mental states in question are cognitive and conative states that can be low-level, unconscious, and fragmented. Only some theories of beliefs and desires consider them as such, hence the prefix ‘(quasi)’. These cognition-conation pairs cause changes in the other components of the emotional episode – the action tendencies, physiological responses, and emotional feelings. If the ECCA is a viable theory, it should come as good news for emotion theory because (quasi) belief-desire theories allow building important bridges with other fields both within and outside philosophy that are otherwise unavailable.

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