Constitutivism, belief, and emotion

Dialectica 62 (4):455-482 (2008)
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Abstract

Constitutivists about one's cognitive access to one's mental states often hold that for any rational subject S and mental state M falling into some specified range of types, necessarily, if S believes that she has M, then S has M. Some argue that such a principle applies to beliefs about all types of mental state. Others are more cautious, but offer no criterion by which the principle's range could be determined. In this paper I begin to develop such a criterion, arguing that although the principle applies when M is a belief, it does not apply when M is an emotion. I account for this asymmetry by focusing on differences in the commitments that belief and emotion conceptually involve, and briefly sketch out a psychological explanation of those differences. I conclude that one can reasonably split one's epistemological loyalties between constitutivism regarding meta-beliefs and non- constitutivism regarding beliefs about one's emotions

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Larry A. Herzberg
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

Citations of this work

SINGULARISM about Episodic Memory.Nikola Andonovski - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (2):335-365.
Doubting Love.Larry A. Herzberg - 2021 - In Simon Cushing, New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 125-149.

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References found in this work

The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind.John R. Searle - 1983 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The Concept of Mind.Gilbert Ryle & Daniel C. Dennett - 1949 - New York: University of Chicago Press.

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