What an Emotion is: A Sketch

Abstract

1. In the paradigm cases; emotions are felt. Furthermore, there is a strong inclination to identify the feeling with the emotion (analogously with: The feeling of a pain is the pain). But unlike pains, emotions are not always felt, being sometimes subceived and sometimes wholly beneath consciousness. 2. Emotions are intentional states, and have propositional objects in the sense that what the emotion is about, of, for, at, or to can in principle be specified prepositionally. 3. Some emotions have typical physiological concomitants, some of which are to some degree felt; and people are sometimes inclined to identify the feeling of the emotion with the feeling of these changes. 4. Typically an emotion depends on the subject believing some state of affairs to obtain (for example, A would not fear this spider if he didn't believe it likely that the spider is harmful); but this is not always so: Sometimes we experience an emotion despite not believing its propositional content. 5. Some emotions beget dispositions to kinds of actions; so references to such emotions are often a powerful way of explaining actions.