Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to argue for a version of what I call “emotional experientialism”. Emotional experientialism is the claim that emotional experience has an essential role to play in understanding evaluative concepts. I distinguish between a specific and a general version of emotional experientialism. Specific emotional experientialism claims that specific emotional experiences, such as shame, play an essential role in our understanding of specific evaluative concepts, such as SHAMEFUL. I argue that specific emotional experientialism is unwarranted and that we should instead endorse general emotional experientialism. General emotional experientialism claims that having some form of emotional experience has an essential role to play in understanding evaluative concepts in general. Specifically, I argue that having some form of emotional experience is essential to understanding what it is like to value something and, in turn, understanding what it is like to value something plays an essential role in rendering intelligible why a given emotional experience is appropriate in the given circumstances. I argue for this claim by committing to the neo-sentimentalist biconditional and interpreting it as a claim about evaluative concepts: a given evaluative concept applies if and only if a given emotional response is appropriate. In addition, I argue that we can have some understanding of evaluative concepts without emotional experience, but I claim that for this appropriateness to be intelligible, we need to understand what it is like to value things in the relevant way. We can do this, I claim, either through actual emotional experience, or by means of dramatic imagination of what emotional experience might be like.