Emotions and Recalcitrance: Reevaluating the Perceptual Model

Abstract

One central argument in favor of perceptual accounts of emotions concerns recalcitrant emotions: emotions that persist in the face of repudiating judgments. For, it is argued, to understand how the conflict between recalcitrant emotions and judgment falls short of incoherence in judgment, we need to understand recalcitrant emotions to be something like perceptual illusions of value, so that in normal, non‐recalcitrant cases emotions are non‐illusory perceptions of value. I argue that these arguments fail and that a closer examination of recalcitrant emotions reveals important disanalogies with perception that undermine the perceptual model of emotions.

What's Wrong With Recalcitrant Emotions? From Irrationality to Challenge of Agential Identity

“…Helm seems to hold a similar view when he reformulates my ‘conflict without contradiction’ into ‘conflict without incoherence’ (Döring ; Helm ). According to Helm, conflicts between perceptions and judgements are conflicts without incoherence, whereas conflicts between emotions and judgements are conflicts with incoherence.…”

“…Sabine A. Döring therefore (and for further reasons elaborated by Broome) assuming that rationality instead consists in satisfying certain requirements of coherence between one's mental attitudessuch as the enkratic principle that, if you believe that you ought to ϕ, then you intend to ϕ, or the consistency principle that you not judge both that p and judge that not-p. Helm seems to hold a similar view when he reformulates my 'conflict without contradiction' into 'conflict without incoherence' (Döring 2009;Helm 2015). According to Helm, conflicts between perceptions and judgements are conflicts without incoherence, whereas conflicts between emotions and judgements are conflicts with incoherence.…”

“…Let me now show why I think it isn't. It will prove useful to begin with Christine Tappolet's () attempt to account for our intuitive sense that recalcitrant emotions are irrational which both of us have rejected (Döring ; Helm ).…”

“…In order to support this claim, Helm points to a distinction which we allegedly make between one's ‘perceiving’ the world to be some way and one's ‘seeming to perceive’ the world to be that way (). Helm here takes up an idea already present in his 2001 book Emotional Reason (41 ff.…”

“…The question, then, is why should this conflict in content be irrational in the one case, but not in the other? 4 Helm (2015) provides a good survey. 5 I am here skating over potential complications arising from the claim of some perceptualists that emotions can have nonconceptual content.…”