Evaluative Phenomenology

3Evaluative Phenomenology

Michelle Montague

1. IntroductionOur normal waking life involves a seemingly continuous stream of conscious-ness. What is given in this stream? Almost everyone agrees that a world of physi-cal objects and states of affairs involving those objects is given,1 and evaluations of objects and states of affairs are also given—we judge, think, and feel that things are good or bad. Even if evaluative properties are not in fact objective features of the world, David Hume and J. L. Mackie are surely right in holding that they seem to us to be objective features of the world, and in that sense at least they are given to us in experience.

This givenness of objects and states of affairs in consciousness (including evalua-tions of objects and states of affairs) essentially involves phenomenological givenness. It is only in or through phenomenological or experiential givenness that the world of objects and states of affairs (and evaluations of those objects and states of affairs) can be given to us in consciousness. All conscious episodes must essentially involve, and are conscious in virtue of having, a certain phenomenological–experiential–qualita-tive character—a character which is such that there is, in a familiar phrase, ‘something it is like’, experientially, for the subject of experience to experience it. As I will under-stand the term ‘consciousness’, there is no non-phenomenological consciousness. Notions such as Ned Block’s ‘access consciousness’ may pick out certain functional properties that certain mental episodes have (and some of the episodes they pick out may qualify as conscious mental episodes), but they do not pick out a special kind of consciousness—a kind of consciousness that can possibly exist without having any phenomenological character.2

The conscious stream involves a great deal of activity: sensing the ambient environ-ment through the five external sensory modalities, feeling worried, happy, and sad

1 There are other kinds of objects given to consciousness, such as mathematical objects, aesthetic objects, fictional objects, but these will not concern me here.

2 I argue that all consciousness must be phenomenological in ‘The Life of the Mind’, forthcoming.

Evaluative Phenomenology 33

about various situations in our lives, and having a great many thoughts, such as judg-ing that the economy is getting better, wondering what will happen in the Middle East, entertaining the possibility of vacation in Greece next year, and so on. This is not, of course, an exhaustive list of what constitutes the stream, and there are many questions about how we can best categorize these various conscious activities. One rough group-ing divides them into three categories: thought, perception (including propriocep-tion), and emotion/mood. These are not strictly mutually exclusive categories, because the conscious activities that constitute the stream are so overlapping and interdepend-ent, but I think that we can usefully talk about them separately, and the purpose of this chapter is to focus on the category of conscious emotion.

I will restrict my attention to emotions that are not only conscious experiences but are also intentional phenomena, leaving open the possibility that there may be con-scious emotions, such as free floating anxiety or depression, that are not intentional phenomena at all, and acknowledging the fact that we allow that attributions of emo-tional states or conditions may be true even if the person to whom they are attributed is not at that time consciously feeling any emotion at all, being, perhaps, in a dreamless sleep.

It is clear that conscious emotions are complex intentional phenomena. That is, they not only represent objects and states of affairs, but they essentially represent objects and states of affairs in an evaluative way. I will argue that emotions represent objects and states of affairs as being sad, just, or joyful, and that these representations are essentially evaluative representations. That is, emotions essentially represent objects and states of affairs as having evaluative properties. (Sometimes I will put this point by saying that emotions represent evaluative properties. I will also use the shorter expres-sion ‘their objects’ and ‘its object’ as short for an emotion’s representing an ‘object or a state of affairs’.) Many philosophers claim that emotions are somehow connected to evaluations of objects and states of affairs,3 but I am claiming something stronger. Emotions, according to the present view, are essentially evaluative representations.4

It follows from my definition of consciousness that conscious emotions are essen-tially phenomenological episodes, and of course most philosophers accept this. But most views that accept that emotions essentially involve phenomenology assimilate that phenomenology to some type of sensory or bodily phenomenology.5 According to the current proposal, by contrast, emotions have their own distinctive sui generis kind of phenomenology, which I call ‘evaluative phenomenology’. In section 2 I will provide a

3 See e.g. de Sousa (1987), Greenspan (1988), Roberts (2003), and Solomon (1976).4 Note that in saying that emotions represent objects and states of affairs as having evaluative properties,

I am not committing myself to any form of moral realism. Just as an error theorist about colour may claim that we can represent colour properties without there being colour properties (as we experience them) in the world, I am claiming that we can represent evaluative properties without there being any such properties in the world. It may be that this position is inconsistent with certain contemporary forms of ‘externalism’ about content. So be it.

5 See e.g. Prinz (2004).

34 Michelle Montague

rough taxonomy of kinds of phenomenology, distinguishing evaluative phenomenol-ogy from other kinds, most notably from sensory phenomenology and what is now often called ‘cognitive phenomenology’.6

What further distinguishes this view of emotions from other views is that it ties an emotion’s evaluative phenomenology inextricably to its intentionality, and in par-ticular to how it represents the evaluative properties of its object. Solomon (1976) and Nussbaum (1990, 1994) both argue that emotions are evaluative judgements, but according to their views, whatever phenomenology is involved in having such evalu-ative judgements, that phenomenology is not part of how that judgement represents evaluative properties. In contrast, I will argue that an emotion represents its object’s evaluative properties in virtue of its own distinctive sui generis kind of phenomenol-ogy. It is because emotions have evaluative phenomenology that I say that they are experiences of value rather than just representations of value.

Much of this chapter will be dedicated to explicating how evaluative phenome-nology represents evaluative properties. A central aspect of giving this account will involve describing in some detail what I take the general structure of phenomenology (or consciousness) to be. In describing this structure, it will often be helpful to com-pare conscious perception and conscious emotion.

The final issue I will consider is the question of how ‘fine-grained’ evaluative phe-nomenology is. It is clear that sensory phenomenology is very fine-grained. That is, sensory phenomenology is rich and varied along different dimensions. For instance, we have colour phenomenology, shape phenomenology, and sound phenomenology, and each one of these categories is distinguishable into further detailed phenomenol-ogy. I will suggest that evaluative phenomenology is also fine-grained along various dimensions.

The view of emotions offered here requires a lot of preparation whose point may not be apparent at first; I hope it will become so. Part of the difficulty is that the issues with which I am concerned within the theory of emotions can only be adequately discussed by looking at wider issues in the philosophy of mind. I began this introduction with the idea that everything that is given in consciousness requires phenomenological given-ness—a very general claim in the philosophy of mind. This chapter is concerned with an application of this general claim to the particular case of the emotions: in the having of an emotion, the (either really or seemingly objectively possessed) evaluative proper-ties of the object and states of affairs in question are given to the subject of experience in a distinctive way. That is, the way in which evaluative properties are given in emo-tions is very different from the way they are given in evaluative judgements, which may lack any emotional feeling.

In setting out an account of what is given in the having of an emotion, it will be help-ful to consider what it is for something to be given to consciousness at all. I explicate

6 This may not be an exhaustive taxonomy. For example, some have argued that there is ‘agentive phe-nomenology’, which may be irreducible to sensory or cognitive phenomenology. See e.g. Bayne (2011).


this idea of givenness in section 2 in terms of a general theory of content which takes proper account of the phenomenological aspect of experience, and in particular offers a taxonomy of phenomenology, as mentioned previously. A central feature of the the-ory is the idea that in having a conscious experience the subject is always and neces-sarily aware of the having of that very experience. I explicate this feature in section 3, because it is essential for giving an account of the property attributions made in experience. One of the preparatory detours made in section 4 is to give an account of how property attributions are made in perception, and in particular how colour attri-butions are made in visual experience. This will help clarify how evaluative property attributions are made in the having of emotional experience. Finally, in section 5 I dis-cuss the fine-grainedness of evaluative phenomenology.

2. Theory of ContentI call the totality of what is given to one experientially in a conscious episode ‘the con-tent’ of that episode. The content, the total mental content, of a conscious episode is (absolutely) everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of the experi-ence. It is everything one is aware of, experientially, in the having of the experience. So I have a very inclusive notion of content—one that extends beyond the use of ‘content’ to simply mean ‘representational content’'—that is, truth conditions or accuracy condi-tions—that is currently common in analytic philosophy.

So, what is given to a subject in having a conscious emotion? The total mental content of a conscious emotion (or any conscious episode) is a genus under which several spe-cies of content fall, and those species can be categorized under three headings:

(i) Phenomenological content, or experiential-qualitative character;

Since I take it that all consciousness is a phenomenological phenomenon, it follows that all conscious emotion is a phenomenological phenomenon. And according to the inclusive conception of content, given a particular emotion, the subject will be aware of the total phenomenological character of the emotion; the total phenomenological character of the emotion is given to the subject, and thus the total phenomenological character of the emotion will be part of the content of the experience. I take it that if it is part of phenomenological character, it is necessarily—by definition—given to the subject.

(ii) Representational (or intentional) content,7 the phenomenon of something’s being about something or of something; a representation of things being a cer-tain way (essentially for emotions, and sometimes for thoughts, this will include evaluative representations, representations of objects, and states of affairs as having evaluative properties).

7 I will use ‘representational’ and ‘intentional’ interchangeably.


And:

(iii) External content, typically physical objects and their properties.8 (The question of what the external content of emotion is will partly depend on whether evalu-ative properties are objective properties of objects and states of affairs.)

In discussing the notion of content many philosophers have taken it that it is true by definition that ‘all content is intentional content’. According to the present view, we can speak of ‘sensory content’, or more widely of ‘phenomenological content’, with-out commitment to the claim that all content is intentional content. In the end, I will argue that all phenomenological content is intentional content, but that is a substan-tive claim, and should not be made true by definition.

Once these three kinds of content are introduced, important issues arise about the relationship between them. I will argue that all phenomenological content is represen-tational or intentional content, as already remarked. That is, all phenomenology, has, essentially, intentional ‘structure’. (My reasons for asserting this are radically differ-ent from the standard representationalist’s reasons; a point I will return to shortly.)9 It is a further question whether all representational content is phenomenological con-tent. Many have thought that the answer to this question is ‘no’, given the evidence for unconscious representational content. However, I will not address this issue in this chapter.

Before considering the relation between phenomenological content and repre-sentational content, I want to introduce three sui generis kinds of phenomenology or phenomenological content, which I will call ‘sensory phenomenology’, ‘cognitive phe-nomenology’, and ‘evaluative phenomenology’. The most familiar is sensory phenom-enology, the ‘what it is likeness’ associated with the familiar five sensory modalities; for example, what it is like to see colours, hear sounds, smell odours. Sensory phenomenol-ogy also includes the phenomenology typically associated with proprioception. What is now typically called ‘cognitive phenomenology’ is a non-sensory kind of phenom-enology paradigmatically associated with conscious occurrent thought, but also with perception and emotion.10 Advocates of cognitive phenomenology point out that there is something it is like to consciously think that 2 + 2 = 4, or to think that temperance is a virtue, that is irreducible to any sensory phenomenology that may be associated with

8 In using ‘external content’ to mean, for example, physical objects our perceptions are of, I am deviating from the standard usage of this term in contemporary philosophy of mind.

9 In the case of conscious perception, ‘representationalists’ such as Dretske (1995), Harman (1990), and Tye (1995, 2000, 2002, 2009) argue that all phenomenological content either supervenes or is identical to intentional content, and intentional content is further reduced to some kind of causal-cum-functional rela-tions between states of the brain and states of the environment.

10 There is some debate about the best way to define ‘cognitive phenomenology’. Some (e.g. Smithies 2013) define it as whatever the phenomenology is that is associated with conscious thought even if it turns out that that phenomenology is purely sensory. I think this obscures the central question of the cognitive phe-nomenology debate and robs the term ‘cognitive phenomenology’ of its best terminological usage; that is, to designate a type of phenomenology that is irreducible to any sensory phenomenology.


these thoughts. Finally, ‘evaluative phenomenology’ is—so I propose—a further sui generis (non-sensory) kind of phenomenology that is associated with conscious emo-tions. As mentioned previously, I choose the term ‘evaluative phenomenology’ because I believe, and am going to argue, that emotional experiences are essentially experiences of value or as of value.

I do not have the space here to give a full account of these different kinds of phenom-enology and the ways in which they can be present in conscious thought, conscious perception, and conscious emotion. (There is currently a lively debate about whether there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology at all.)11 I will just briefly mention a few relevant theses to make explicit the differences between these three kinds of phenomenology.

First, consider conscious thought. According to the view of consciousness proposed here, all consciousness is essentially a phenomenological phenomenon. It follows that conscious thought is an essentially phenomenological phenomenon. What kind of phenomenology is associated with conscious thought? My view is that although cog-nitive phenomenology and sensory phenomenology may be present in every case of conscious thought, the presence of cognitive phenomenology is necessary to make a conscious thought specifically a conscious thought, rather than some other kind of conscious state, and is in this way essential to conscious thought.12

Secondly, consider conscious perception (where perception is opposed to, is some-thing essentially more than, sensation). In this case I believe that both cognitive phe-nomenology and sensory phenomenology are fundamentally present—even if the kind of cognitive phenomenology present is sometimes very primitive.13

Thirdly, emotion. I take it that typical emotions involve all three kinds of phenome-nology, although once again the cognitive phenomenology present may be very prim-itive. I should also emphasize that although bodily sensations may often be present when we experience emotions, evaluative phenomenology is not reducible to bodily sensations. My emotional experience of sadness may, for example, include certain ‘fatigue’-like bodily sensations, but the psychic deflation associated with sadness is not reducible to such bodily fatigue nor any other combination of bodily sensations. I will argue that evaluative phenomenology is intentional in a way that bodily sen-sations like pain, fatigue, and the feeling of a rapid heartbeat are not. Briefly, evalu-ative phenomenology can be and in most cases is intentionally directed beyond the body, whereas bodily sensations, if they are intentional at all, are only directed at the

11 For a recent collection of essays on this issue see Bayne and Montague (2011). See also Horgan and Tienson (2002).

12 I argue for this claim in ‘The Life of the Mind’, forthcoming.13 In Montague (2011) I argue that our perceiving and thinking is structured in such a way that it is fun-

damentally ‘object-positing’. Object-positing is best categorized as an instance of cognitive phenomenology and delivers the this object of our perceptual experiences, although it is less conceptually specific, for exam-ple, than seeing a dog as a dog.


body.14 It may also be true that one may make evaluative conscious judgements with-out any emotional feeling, and because all conscious episodes are phenomenological and experiential, an evaluative conscious judgement may be said to be an experiential representation of value. However, conscious emotion, with its evaluative phenomenol-ogy, is a distinctive kind of experience of value, fundamentally experientially different from the kind of cognitive experience involved in an evaluative conscious judgement. This difference should be evident when we reflect on the phenomenological difference between judging (without feeling) that a friend’s death is sad and feeling down about the sadness of a friend’s death. I will argue that this phenomenological difference entails that the way evaluative phenomenology represents evaluative properties is very differ-ent from the way a conscious thought or judgement represents evaluative properties.

3. Awareness-of-AwarenessThere is one more essential element to the overall content of conscious episodes—an element which ties together the intentional and phenomenological aspects of conscious episodes in a number of ways. The basic idea is simple and ancient—and Aristotelian. It is that in having a visual experience of a tree in leaf (for example), the subject, in addi-tion to being aware of the tree and any other relevant external content, is also aware of the awareness of the tree. In having a particular conscious perceptual experience the subject is always and necessarily also aware of that very experience itself. There is always some sort of awareness of the experience or experiencing: conscious awareness always involves—constitutively involves—some sort of awareness of that very awareness.15

The relationship between the awareness-of-awareness feature of experience and the phenomenological features of experience makes explicit how the phenomenological features of experience are intentionally structured. The phenomenological features of an experience are that in virtue of which an experience is what it is, experientially, to the subject who has it, with the particular qualitative character that it has. The instantiation of a phenomenological property immediately reveals to one that one is having an experi-ence, and so in having an experience one is immediately aware of having an experience.

Two important facts follow from this picture. First, the awareness-of-awareness fea-ture is an essential (constitutive) feature of phenomenology; given which it follows immediately that phenomenology is fundamentally intentionally structured. Second, according to the awareness-of-awareness thesis, phenomenological properties them-selves present, phenomenologically, as what they are—properties of experience. This

14 Evaluative phenomenology can be directed at the body, as is the case when one fears the cancer in their body.

15 This view is well expounded in the Phenomenological tradition. See e.g. Brentano (1995), Husserl (2001), Gurwitsch (1966 [1941]), and so on. See also Kriegel (2009), Rosenthal (2005), Smith (1989), and Zahavi (2006). Locke puts it strongly by saying that ‘thinking consists in being conscious that one thinks’ (Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689]: II.i.19); he uses ‘think’ in the wide Cartesian sense to cover all conscious mental goings-on).


second fact shows that the oft-cited ‘transparency thesis’ in the philosophy of percep-tion, that introspection of our perceptual experiences never reveals properties of expe-rience themselves, is simply false. Experiences immediately reveal themselves to us as what they are, experiences, but we are often not thinking of them as such.16

To illustrate these points in more detail, let us begin again with visual experience. Most agree that my visual experience of a tree in leaf is about or of the tree and its shape and colour (that it has all these things as part of its content), but many deny that it is also about or of its own visual phenomenological character. According to the view under discus-sion, however, there is a fundamental sense in which the visual (as opposed to say tactile) quality of one’s seeing the tree is part of what one is aware of in having the experience.17

The greenness and shape of the tree is visually presented to me. And its being pre-sented to me visually is part of the intentional content of the experience, on this view, because its being a visual experience is part of what I am aware of just in having it, and necessarily so—otherwise it would not be a visual experience at all. In other terms: in having a visual experience, I have an experience of the experience. Most simply, I expe-rience the experience. This may seem trivial, but it is not!

This awareness does not require the possession of the concept visual experience, or being visual, or any colour or shape concepts. Rather, it follows immediately, from the fact that one’s awareness of the world, in the case in question, consists partly in one’s being visually aware of the world, that one is, in having that experience, aware of the visual character of one’s experience. And the content of this awareness of one’s experience’s being visual18 can be specified only in terms of (by reference to) the sen-sory phenomenology associated with visual experiences; that is, what it is like to see colours, shapes, and so on. So the phenomenological content essential to having an experience is part of an experience’s intentional content, whatever else may be part of its intentional content.

We can summarize these claims as follows:

(a) In general, in having an experience, one is aware of the experience, one experi-ences the experience, not (as it were) just the tree (as many philosophers seem to hold these days).19

16 There is a lot of debate about the ‘transparency thesis’, and some have argued (e.g. Kriegel 2009) that the awareness-of-awareness thesis is compatible with it. I think there are reasons the transparency thesis seems plausible. The sense in which phenomenological properties reveal themselves to be properties of experience in the having of the experience is already quite elusive, but it becomes even more so when we introspect on our experiences. When I introspect on a visual experience, for example, I am no longer having that visual experience and so the experiential properties of that visual experience become very difficult to access. My best access to experiential properties is when I am actually having experiences.

17 Aristotle puts the point by saying that ‘we perceive that we perceive’, but the former kind of perceiving is obviously different from the latter: the claim is not that we see that we see. It is controversial what the first occurrence of perception amounts to, and the present claim is simply that it will involve appeal to phenom-enological properties, whatever its full account. See Caston (2002) for an excellent discussion.

18 Arguably there is more to an experience’s being visual than sensory phenomenology, such as cognitive phenomenology. However, I will leave this issue aside for the purposes of this chapter.

19 The sense in which one is aware of an experience as an experience should not be understood as involving the concept experience. I mean the phrase ‘as an experience’ in the same sense as Tye means experiencing a


So:

(b) In having a visual experience, one experiences it as a visual experience—one is aware of it as a visual experience, one experiences the distinctively visual char-acter, the visuality, of the experience, which is quite unlike aural character, the aurality, of hearing, or the olfactory character of smelling and so on.

So:

(c) Experiencing the visuality of the visual experience necessarily involves expe-riencing the phenomenology that is proprietary to visual experience, such as colour phenomenology, visual-shape phenomenology, and so on.

We can now say that each sensory modality is a ‘way’ of experiencing the world (leaving aside questions of cross-modal effects). We visually experience the world, we auditorily experience the world, we experience the world in an olfactory way, we expe-rience the world in a gustatory way and so on.

And now we can add that the emotions, too, have their own unique way of present-ing the world. In emotional experience, the world is presented in an evaluative way; that is, in having emotions one is evaluatively aware of the world. Emotions phenom-enologically present the world as possessing evaluative properties, and this evaluative phenomenological presentation is distinctive in that the ‘evaluative phenomenology’ associated with evaluative presentations is irreducible to any sensory or cognitive phenomenology that may be associated with emotion. So far, then, I am claiming that emotions form a general class, like the sensory modalities, and they have in common, as a general class, the property of presenting the world in an experiential evaluative way. In section 5 I will consider how just as the sensory divides into more specific ‘sen-sory ways’ of experiencing the world, to hear, see, taste, and so on, emotion divides into more specific ‘evaluative ways’ of experiencing the world, to be sad, happy, angry, and so on.

We can also now make the awareness-of-awareness thesis explicit for emotional experience by providing the counterpart claims to (b) and (c) for a particular emo-tional experience as follows:

(b) * In having an experience of sadness, a negative evaluative experience, for exam-ple, one is aware of, one experiences, the sui generis negative evaluative emo-tional phenomenological character of the experience of sadness.

So:

(c) * One is accordingly aware of the evaluative phenomenology proprietary to the experience of sadness, such as psychic deflation or heaviness.

property as a property of an object in the following passage: ‘I found myself transfixed by the intense blue of the Pacific Ocean . . . what I was focusing on, as it were, were a certain shade and intensity of the colour blue. I experienced blue as a property of the ocean not as a property of my experience’ (Tye 2002: 448).


Again, I should stress that in saying that a subject is aware of an experience of sad-ness as an experience of sadness I do not mean to imply that the subject must possess the concept sadness.

Up until this point, I have focused on presenting a general theory of content, which captures the different kinds of content that may be present in conscious experience, and I have begun to elucidate some of the ways in which these different kinds of content are related. In particular, I have tried to bring out one of the ways in which the intentional-ity and the phenomenology of a conscious experience are related by arguing that all conscious awareness constitutively involves an awareness of that very awareness, and is therefore correctly said to be intentional with respect to itself (this being a condition of its very possibility). In having an experience the subject of experience is necessarily aware of the experience itself, and the subject immediately becomes aware of the expe-rience itself, and this ‘awareness of ’ is to be understood as an intentional phenomenon.

So far, I have mainly described how awareness-of-awareness features in experience, and now one might ask what reasons we have for accepting the awareness-of-aware-ness thesis. Part of my argumentative strategy is already employed in the phenom-enological description of our conscious experience. The idea is that this description itself would make the awareness-of-awareness thesis seem intuitively plausible. The hope is that this description captures something essential about perceptual and emo-tional experience, and in so doing provides a reason for accepting the awareness-of-awareness claim. In the next section, a more theoretical reason for accepting the awareness-of-awareness thesis is given. I will argue that the thesis plays an essential role in accounting for how property attributions are made in typical perceptual and emotional experiences.20

4. Evaluative Phenomenology and Evaluative Property Attributions

The first point to make is that phenomenological properties do double duty: in occur-ring (being instantiated), they not only reveal themselves to the subject as what they are, experiential properties; they also purport to reveal features of the world. In this section I focus on the latter feature of phenomenological properties. Insofar as the phenomenological properties of emotional experiences purport to reveal features of the world, I am concerned mainly with two questions: in typical emotional experi-ences, what kinds of properties are attributed to objects and states of affairs, and how are those properties attributed?

In standard cases of sensory perception, physical objects are presented to a subject as being coloured, shaped, soft, sweet, loud, and so on. In emotion, objects and states

20 For this second argument for the awareness-of-awareness thesis to be complete, I would have to argue against other views, which I cannot do here.


of affairs are presented to a subject as being joyful, sad, horrifying, uplifting, annoying, and so on.21

In what way are states of affairs given as sad, horrifying, uplifting, annoying, tragic? I will argue for three claims. First, sadness, the joyful, the horrifying, and so on are at least sometimes properties we attribute to objects and states of affairs, and these property attributions are experienced as attributions of objective properties of states of affairs. Second, these property attributions are essentially evaluative property attri-butions. Third, it is partly in virtue of the evaluative phenomenology associated with emotions that evaluative properties are attributed to objects and states of affairs.22

To begin to defend these three claims let us return to the example of being sad about a friend’s death. It seems totally natural for a subject to attribute the property of sad-ness to the state of affairs of her friend’s death: ‘my friend’s death is sad’. This kind of attribution of ‘emotion properties’ is fairly common in our language: we feel the behav-iour of irresponsible stockbrokers contemptible; we find our boss annoying; we feel that the conflict in Syria is tragic; we feel the war in Bosnia was disgusting, and so on. These various property attributions, such as sadness, the tragic, the joyful, are experi-enced as the attribution of objective properties of states of affairs. They are properties these states of affairs seem to have, independently of us. It may be that a certain state of affairs has the power to cause me to be sad, but it seems that it is something intrinsic to the state of affairs itself, its being sad, which has this causal power. That is, when I claim that the death of my friend is sad, I am saying something specifically about that state of affairs itself—that the state of affairs is itself objectively sad.

One may feel some discomfort about attributing the property of sadness to a state of affairs. One may feel that being sad cannot be a property of something that is not a subject of experience. But I have not yet claimed that sadness actually is a genuine property of states of affairs, only that it is experienced as one.

Can one go further, and attribute sadness—the property of being sad as a matter of purported objective fact—to a state of affairs? Well, what are the paradigm cases of attribution of properties to things that have no experience, things like physical objects and states of affairs? Shape and weight are paradigm cases of properties of physical objects. When we attribute shape and weight to an object, for example, we take these to be genuine, wholly mind-independent properties of that object. Colour, too, is expe-rienced as a wholly mind-independent property of an object. It seems to us that col-our—colour-as-we-subjectively-experience-it—is spread out over the object. Nor do we need to limit ourselves to physical objects and states of affairs, for the same is true

21 We also sometimes attribute these properties to ourselves: I am sad, happy, horrified, and so on. There is a sense in which attributing sadness to a state of affairs and to myself is inextricably tied together. I am sad because my friend’s death is sad.

22 My claim here is that evaluative phenomenology is sufficient for making evaluative property attribu-tions. So I am leaving open the possibility that a subject may be in a depersonalized state and judge that something is beautiful but have no feeling.


of numbers. We take the natural numbers to have wholly objective, mind-independent properties—perhaps those defined by the Peano axioms.

The attributions of properties to purported objective phenomena that we make when we feel emotions are more like the number case than the physical object case, inasmuch as the former two are not made directly on the basis of the sensory phenom-enology, as I have defined it, and although the number case and the emotion case may be different in many other respects.

The attributions of sadness, the tragic, the joyful, the uplifting, and so on all essen-tially involve evaluative property attributions. At the most basic level, we can divide these into attributions of negative value and attributions of positive value. Emotions such as sadness, horror, fear, and rage all represent disvalue, and emotions such as love, joy, and courage all represent positive value. But things are not always so simple. One can have a mix of emotions; and there is more to representing the sadness of a friend’s death than a representation of its disvalue. All I want to claim at the moment, how-ever, is that a representation of disvalue is actually essential to a representation of sad-ness, and also, quite generally, that all emotions essentially involve evaluative property attributions.

So far I have been focusing on the property attributions of ‘sadness’, ‘the tragic’, ‘the joyful’ that we make in having emotional reactions to states of affairs, but of course there is also the phenomenology of feeling sad, feeling joyful, and so on. I have already discussed one of the ways in which the intentionality and the phenomenology of an emotion are essentially related (in virtue of the awareness-of-awareness feature of experience). I now want to turn to another, which also, as it turns out, depends on the awareness-of-awareness feature of experience.

The question I am concerned with is this: what is the relationship between the evalu-ative phenomenology that is (an essential) part of—and distinctive of—the emotion of sadness (for example), and the property attribution of sadness to a state of affairs?

To make the answer to this question as clear as possible, it will be helpful to first discuss perception, and in particular, the case of a visual experience involving colour experience. Consider the case of having a visual experience of a red ball, and let us focus on the redness aspect of this experience. We can ask, what is the relationship between the ‘reddish’ phenomenology, what we might call ‘phenomenal redness’, that is (an essential) part of—and distinctive of—the visual experience of the red round ball, and the property attribution of redness, what we might call ‘redness-as-seen’, to the ball?

I will begin with the following two claims:

(1) Generally, a visual experience’s sensory phenomenology is intimately and meta-physically linked to the kinds of property attributions made in the having of the experience. In particular, the phenomenology of ‘what it is like’ to experience reddishness, phenomenal redness, suffices for the attribution of what we take to be the colour redness of the ball, such as redness as seen.

And:


(2) It is in virtue of the subject’s awareness of the sensory phenomenology of the visual experience that the phenomenology suffices for being about or focally directed towards the redness-as-we-see it of the ball. It is partly because of one’s awareness of experiencing ‘phenomenal redness’ that one attributes the prop-erty redness to the ball, which is essentially and phenomenologically linked to ‘phenomenal redness’.23

(1) and (2) provide a two-step account of this particular aspect of the relation between the phenomenology of a visual experience and the intentionality of visual experience, which concerns the fact that certain sorts of property attributions (attribu-tions of properties to physical objects in the world) are made in visual experience.

There is a sense in which the general idea behind (1) is fairly uncontroversial in the philosophy of perception.24 Taken generally, it simply asserts that a perceptual experi-ence’s phenomenology is intimately and metaphysically linked to the kinds of property attributions made in having the experience. For example, most representationalists (in the philosophy of perception) accept the claims that if two perceptual experiences have the same phenomenological content, then necessarily they share (a kind of) intentional content, and if two perceptual experiences share (a kind of) intentional content, then necessarily they have the same phenomenological content.25

(2) is more controversial because it asserts that this link between the phenomenol-ogy and the intentionality of the experience is made in virtue of the subject’s aware-ness of the experience itself, and in particular in virtue of the subject’s awareness of the phenomenology of the experience. Therefore, (2) is appealing to the awareness-of-awareness thesis to account for the metaphysical link between the phenomenology and the intentionality of experience.

Let us consider the relationship between (1) and (2) in more detail. In having the visual experience as of a red round ball we are aware of the ‘reddish’ phenomenology or the ‘phenomenal redness’. In being aware of the phenomenal redness we are aware of a property of experience. (This follows from my characterization of the awareness-of-awareness thesis introduced in section 3.) But we also attribute a colour property to the ball, what I have described as ‘redness as seen’; this property seems to be spread out over the ball. According to (1), the property attributed to the object is internally and essentially linked to the phenomenological property we are aware of. That is, the ‘red-dish’ phenomenology itself suffices for the attribution of redness to the ball. In attrib-uting redness to the ball, I attribute the property whose essential intrinsic character I take to be fully revealed in the phenomenological-qualitative character of experience.

23 I do not think the ‘rednesss’ property we attribute to the ball in virtue of our phenomenal red experi-ence can be identified with any particular surface reflectance property, because of the possibility of inverted spectra. I do not have the space to argue for this here.

24 Of course there are well-known philosophers who reject (1). See e.g. Block (1990, 2010).25 The qualification ‘kind of ’ on ‘intentional content’ is meant to leave open the possibility that a visual

experience can have different kinds of intentional content, only some of which metaphysically co-vary with phenomenology.


Finally, according to (2), it is only because we are aware of phenomenal redness that we attribute redness to the ball. (If we were not aware of the phenomenal redness in the way that we are, we would not then attribute it to the ball.)

But more needs to be said about the internal link between the awareness of ‘phe-nomenal redness’ and the redness we attribute to the ball. When the subject is aware of ‘phenomenal redness’, she is aware of a purely phenomenological property of experi-ence, a property that is not in fact a property of non-phenomenological things in the world. But there is also a straightforward (and fundamental) sense in which the subject attributes phenomenal redness to the ball. And the redness-as-seen that is attributed to the ball is experienced as an objective (or mind-independent) property of the ball, not as a property of experience; it seems to be spread out over the surface of the ball. Nonetheless, there is clearly a relationship between ‘phenomenal redness’, the property of experience one is aware of, and the property attributed to the ball. This relationship cannot be strict identity, because as I have already mentioned, phenomenal redness is experienced as a property of experience, whereas the redness attributed to the ball is experienced as an objective property. I propose that the relationship is one of resem-blance. An aspect of the phenomenal redness resembles an aspect of the redness attrib-uted to the ball. We feel the experience of phenomenal redness gets it exactly right about, completely conveys the intrinsic qualitative character of, the objective property. This is what our belief in the resemblance consists in.

To summarize so far. The awareness-of-awareness thesis is a way of saying what experience is; it is constitutive of experience that the subject is aware of having experi-ence. The awareness-of-awareness thesis also accounts for two of the ways in which the phenomenology and intentionality of experience are related. First, phenomenol-ogy itself is intentionally structured, because in having an experience the subject is aware of, hence, trivially, intentionally aware of, having that experience. Second, it is essentially in virtue of the subject’s awareness of the phenomenological properties of the experience, in having the experience, that the subject attributes certain properties to objects. But a further link between the phenomenological properties the subject is aware of having in having an experience, which are properties of experience, and prop-erties attributed to objects must be made because the properties attributed to objects are experienced as objective, mind-independent properties. Resemblance is part of explaining how the phenomenological property experienced as a property of experi-ence gets linked to the property attributed to the object—a property experienced as an objective, mind-independent property.26

I now hope the perceptual case will help make clear how the evaluative phenomenol-ogy that is (an essential) part of—and distinctive of—the emotion of sadness (for exam-ple) and the property attribution of sadness to a state of affairs are related. Consider the following two claims about emotion, which are analogous to the perception case.

26 I am not here attempting to give an account of why we experience certain properties as objective prop-erties. Perhaps such a discussion will involve appeal to spatial properties. I am taking as a datum that we do


(3) The evaluative phenomenology that is integral to an emotional experience suf-fices for the evaluative property attributions made in that experience. Thus (for example) the evaluative phenomenology that is an integral part of feeling sad about a friend’s death suffices for the experience’s attributing the negative evalu-ative attribution (and thus the attribution of sadness) to that friend’s death.27

And:

(4) It is in virtue of the subject’s awareness of experiencing the evaluative phenome-nology that the experience makes the evaluative property attributions it does. It is in virtue of the subject’s awareness of the evaluative phenomenology essential to sadness that the experience attributes the negative value involved in sadness (and thus attributes sadness) to the friend’s death.

I will now explain in more detail why the term ‘evaluative phenomenology’ is par-ticularly apt for the kind of phenomenology involved in emotional experience. All emotional experiences have positive affect or negative affect, and these affects are asso-ciated with (what we take to be) the negative or positive value of objects and states of affairs. This association is the reason I use the term ‘evaluative phenomenology’ to refer to a kind of phenomenology distinctive and essential to emotion experience, which is irreducible to sensory or cognitive phenomenology.

The positive or negative evaluative phenomenology (the positive or negative affect) of an emotion represents the positive or negative quality of the object or state of affairs represented. Very roughly, the phenomenology of feeling sad about something, which involves negative affect, experientially represents that that something is of disvalue. So feeling sad about a friend’s death experientially represents the disvalue of that death.28 Of course, there is more to representing the sadness of a friend’s death than an expe-riential representation of its disvalue, but what I am claiming is that in this experi-ence of sadness, the negative evaluative phenomenology is essential to representing its disvalue and thus its sadness.29 It is also important to note that negative evaluative phenomenology, for example, differs from emotion to emotion. The negative evalua-tive phenomenology associated with sadness is different from the negative evaluative

experience ‘redness as seen’ as an objective property of physical objects, and because of this, something more than appeal to our experience of phenomenal redness characterized as a property of experience is needed.

27 If one thinks that only subjects of experience attribute properties to things, strictly speaking, and that experiences never do, one can say that the fact that one attributes sadness to one’s friend’s death, in reacting emotionally as one does, depends essentially on the fact that one’s emotional experience has the evaluative-phenomenological component it does.

28 As I mentioned in Section 2, a person who is thoroughly depersonalized can make a conscious judge-ment that something is of disvalue without having any feeling, and this would still be an experiential rep-resentation of disvalue, because all consciousness is a phenomenological-experiential phenomenon. I am arguing, however, that these two kinds of experiential representations of disvalue are very different. Emotions have their own distinctive way of experientially representing evaluative properties. Perhaps one can put the point by saying that in emotions, one seems to feel the very nature of value and disvalue.

29 One, for example, has to deploy the concepts of friendship and death.


phenomenology associated with horror, and both of these are different from the nega-tive evaluative phenomenology associated with rage and so on. I will come back to this point in Section 5. For now, all I want to claim is that negative and positive evaluative phenomenology represents disvalue and value.

In a visual experience one visually experiences the redness of the ball; in an emo-tional experience one emotionally experiences the disvalue of a friend’s death. Visual experience involves experiences of different colours, such as red and not-red, and emotional experience involves experience of value and disvalue.

The evaluative phenomenology of experiencing sadness about a friend’s death, the negative affect one experiences, in the specific mode of sadness, accounts for one’s attribution of the property of disvalue (and so sadness) to the friend’s death. So, although one may be able to know intellectually (in some sense) that the death of a friend is of disvalue, and indeed that such a death is sad without feeling an emotion, one can experience the disvalue of the friend’s death in this distinctive way only if one has an emotional experience. Data in Star Trek, who does not have any emotions, may be capable of saying what is of value and disvalue, and in turn saying what is sad and what is happy, but he cannot experience sadness or happiness and thus he cannot expe-rience value or disvalue (in the special way I am indicating). A stronger claim about Data, which I do not have the space to pursue in this chapter, is that although he can say what is of value and disvalue, and know what is of value and disvalue, he cannot really know value and disvalue. It may be similar to someone who is blind from birth who can say this is red, when told that it is a ripe tomato, and indeed know that it is red, but not know what red is.

A problem that arose for the case of perceptual experience now also arises for the case of emotional experience. Recall that according to the awareness-of-awareness thesis, phenomenological properties are experienced as properties of experi-ence. But it is also true that sadness, for example, is experienced as an objective, mind-independent property of states of affairs. So, how can evaluative phenomenol-ogy, experienced as a property of experience, partly account for the attribution of dis-value to the friend’s death, experienced as an objective, mind-independent property of that state of affairs?

Although the solution to this problem in the emotion case is not obviously an appeal to ‘resemblance’, I think a defence can be made for it here as well. The basic idea is that in experiencing the negative affect (the negative evaluative phenomenology) that is part of experiencing sadness, the negative affect is itself experienced as something of disvalue.30 This disvalue experienced in the experience of negative affect resembles the disvalue that is attributed to the state of affairs of the friend’s death. It is then partly in virtue of this resemblance relation that the negative affect experienced as a property of experience represents the disvalue attributed to the friend’s death. More strongly put,

30 This claim will be slightly modified in section 5, because we will always experience determinates of disvalue rather than the determinable disvalue.


similar to the case of the experience of redness, we feel the experience of feeling the dis-value of negative affect gets it exactly right about, completely conveys the character of, the purported objective property of disvalue.

Of course, there are well-known problems with explicating representation in terms of resemblance. The first thing to note is that I am certainly not claiming that all rep-resentation is a matter of resemblance. I am only concerned with a certain class of properties that are experienced as part of conscious experience. In light of this, many of the problems with the resemblance theory of representation will not apply here. For example, I am not claiming that in order for the concept of a number to represent a number there must be some resemblance relation in place.

One problem that might be raised against my account is that resemblance is a symmetrical relation. So, for example, if a picture of Napoleon resembles Napoleon and so represents Napoleon in virtue of this resemblance, then because Napoleon resembles the picture does the man Napoleon also represent the picture of Napoleon? Clearly not. Representation can be non-symmetrical, even if resem-blance is not. My general answer to this worry is that only mental states and experi-ences can be truly said to represent. So the reason we get representation in virtue of the resemblance relation for ‘phenomenal redness’, for example, and the apparent property of the object that resembles ‘phenomenal redness’ is because ‘phenomenal redness’ is part of a conscious experience. The same reasoning applies to emotional experiences.

I am also not claiming that resemblance is sufficient for representation, even if we restrict our attention to conscious experiences. For example, two conscious experi-ences that have phenomenal redness as a part do not represent one another, despite resembling one another. In order for a conscious perceptual experience to represent something, it is necessary that the appropriate causal conditions hold.

5. Fine-grained Evaluative PhenomenologyOur sensory experiences are fine-grained in the sense that they are rich and varied along various dimensions. Each of our sensory modalities has associated with it a par-ticular type of phenomenology (putting aside cross-modal effects); for example, vision has colour-shape phenomenology, audition has sound (timbre [e.g. oboe sound] pitch [e.g. middle C] loudness [e.g. 52 decibels]) phenomenology, and so on. Furthermore, within each of these types of phenomenology associated with the sensory modalities there are further fine-grained variations. For example, within the category of colour phenomenology, many different colour experiences are possible, such as blue experi-ences, red experiences. And within each of these particular types of colour experiences, there are more fine-grained variations, maroon experiences, brick-red experiences, and so on.

My question now is, how fine-grained is evaluative phenomenology? I have so far only referred to the very general categories of negative evaluative phenomenology and


positive evaluative phenomenology. But are negative evaluative phenomenology and positive evaluative phenomenology rich and varied in any way analogous to sensory phenomenology?

I propose to answer these questions first by considering how fine-grained value and disvalue are. It seems plausible that value and disvalue are genera, the good and the bad, under which there are different species of goodness and badness. For instance, dishonesty, injustice, and murder are different kinds of disvalue, and temperance, kindness, and fairness are different kinds of value.

In a like manner, it seems plausible that negative evaluative phenomenology and positive evaluative phenomenology are genera, under which there are several different species. For example, although sadness, fear, and anger all possess negative evaluative phenomenology, they also feel different; and although joy and love possess positive evaluative phenomenology, they feel different. One explanation for these differences in evaluative phenomenology or these different ways of feeling is that different kinds of emotion involve the representation of different kinds of evaluative properties. Very generally speaking, for example, although fear and anger both possess negative evaluative phenomenology, fear is associated with the disvalue of threat, and anger is associated with the disvalue of injustice, and so correspondingly the evaluative phe-nomenology associated with each emotion is different.

So far, then, we have one kind of analogy between sensory phenomenology and evaluative phenomenology. The different sensory modalities and the properties they represent have different types of phenomenology associated with them, and the dif-ferent types of value and disvalue have different types of evaluative phenomenology associated with them. There may, however, be a further way in which sensory phenom-enology and evaluative phenomenology are alike. Consider again the broad category of colour. It is a determinable under which several determinates fall: red, blue, purple, and so on. However, each of these colours is itself a determinable under which several determinates fall. For example, there are many shades of red. And up to a certain point, associated with these different shades of red are different ‘reddish’ phenomenological experiences.

Now consider the emotion of anger. Is there a kind of fine-grainedness of evalua-tive phenomenology within the emotion of anger analogous to the fine-grainedness that exists within our experiences of different shades of red? That is, are there different kinds of evaluative-phenomenological experiences associated with different instances of anger? Clearly, there are different degrees of intensity of feeling associated with anger, ranging from mild annoyance to rage. But can the evaluative phenomenology associated with anger differ along another dimension besides degree of intensity?

Consider the following two instances of anger: feeling angry about being threat-ened by a hostile neighbour, and feeling angry about terrorism. Try to imagine that the degree of intensity of feeling is exactly the same in these two cases. Do these instances of anger feel different qua anger? My inclination is to say that they do. If they do feel different, what explains this difference?


One possibility already canvassed previously is that just as the difference between the negative evaluative phenomenology associated with anger and fear can be traced to the different kinds of evaluative properties typically represented by these emotions, perhaps different kinds of evaluative properties represented by different instances of anger can result in different evaluative-phenomenological experiences. However, in the examples of anger given previously, both cases involve representing the property of injustice, but that property may be being combined with other evaluative properties in such a way that explains the difference in feeling. For example, being threatened by a neighbour may involve representing the possibility of bodily harm to oneself, whereas terrorism may involve representing further harms such as coercion and intimidation.

Another way in which these instances of anger differ is that in the first case the emo-tion is directed at a particular person, and in the second case the emotion is directed at a general state of affairs, or at least no particular person, or no one one knows. So, there may be a difference between the way we evaluate particular persons versus the way we evaluate general states of affairs that manifests itself in differences of feeling.

So far, what I have said about the sense in which evaluative phenomenology may be fine-grained is very speculative, and I do not have the space to adequately deal with the complexity of these issues here. I will end by saying that for my own part I do think evaluative phenomenology is fine-grained along various dimensions and that this can be traced to the very complex ways in which we experience value and disvalue.

In conclusion, I have argued that emotions essentially have a kind of phenomenol-ogy, evaluative phenomenology, which is irreducible to sensory phenomenology or cognitive phenomenology. I have tried to show how evaluative phenomenology is essential to the property attributions we make to objects and states of affairs—for example, that our friend’s death is sad, or that the situation is the Middle East is dis-turbing, and so on.31

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Evaluative Phenomenology

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