Abstract

My concern in this paper is to examine certain thesis proposed by cognitivist theories about the relationship between emotion and belief. Due to the great variety of states we call emotions and to the fact that they do not constitute a unitary class, it is not only difficult but also unhelpful to formulate a general theory about their connection with belief. It is important to examine particular emotions and special cases to avoid undue simplification. When we go into particular cases we observe that with certain emotions a perception of ‘seeing something as’ is more relevant to the emotion than a specific belief. Although in general we believe things are as we see them, there are cases when our rational beliefs conflict with our perceptions - i.e. seeing something as dangerous but not believing it is. ‘Seeing as’ does not have here the same direction of it as belief and cannot be considered a cognitive state. On the other hand, there are emotions like love and hate, which hardly ever take sentential complements and of which we cannot say that they are determined or generated by specific beliefs or by seeing their object in some specific way.