The Experience of Emotion : an Intentionalist Theory

The experience of emotion is a fundamental part of human conscious ness. Think, for example, of how different our conscious lives would be without such experiences as joy, anger, fear, disgust, pity, anxiety, and embarrassment. It is uncontroversial that these experiences typically have an intentional content. Anger, for example, is normally directed at someone or something. One may feel angry at one's stock broker for providing bad advice or angry with the cleaning lady for dropping the vase. But it is not uncontroversial that emotional experiences are always intentional. John Searle, for example, remarks, "Many conscious states are not Intentional, e.g., a sudden sense of elation ..." (1983, p. 2). Moreover, many animals experience emotions and it is natural to suppose that such emotions lack the sophistication of beliefs or thoughts. When a dog experiences delight in seeing its master after an absence of several days, the suggestion that at least part of the dog's experience of delight is a belief (or thought) that its master has returned home seems to import into the experience something that at best is associated with it and perhaps is not really a state to which the dog is subject at all. And even in the case of human beings, emotional experience often does not seem to involve thought. Consider the experience of disgust, to take one obvious example.' Nor is a salient belief required. One may have a strong fear of spiders and yet not believe that spiders typically pose any risk to humans. But if emotional experiences need not involve beliefs or thoughts, then just how are they intentional?2 Recent theories of consciousness have not devoted as much attention to the