Emotions and the Subject’s Point of View

In my dissertation, I argue that an emotional experience is the conscious operation of a certain processing mode–a processive mechanism that more or less holistically organizes the mind around a certain practical goal. Emotions do this, I argue, by orchestrating patterns of change in attention, reasoning, and motivation among many of a subject’s non-emotional mental states. In this sense, emotions occupy a very different place in the architecture of the mind than the perceptions, attitudes, and other mental states that traditional views identify with emotions. I develop the idea of a holistic organization of the mind around a practical goal by drawing analogies with other structured systems of representations that arise in vision (e.g. ‘seeing-as’), use of language (e.g. metaphor), and scientific inquiry (e.g. ‘frames’). Then, I use this idea to introduce a novel conception of the metaphysics of conscious emotional experiences and to address a longstanding puzzle about how to explain rational conflict between an agent’s emotions and her considered judgments.

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