Abstract

Many philosophers talk about evaluative experience, and claim that we experience value as being objective. However 'experience' is usually used in a loose sense, in which talk of the experience of value is equivalent to a claim about the conceptual commitments of ordinary evaluative thought. To the extent that theorists talk of evaluative perception, they are employing a loose metaphor. I begin this dissertation by developing a different understanding of what it means to talk of evaluative experience. I claim that evaluative experience begins in perceptual experience, and that evaluative talk develops out of an attempt to capture aspects of the phenomenology of that experience. Described from the point of view of an agent, one can say that the world is not presented as neutral, but rather the world grabs our attention, and presents itself to us in positive and negative ways. I claim that many supposedly puzzling aspects of evaluative thought can be traced all the way down to the most basic levels of awareness. Without being able to point to anything simpler, we find that certain responses to the world come to make sense. Such moments are the beginning of our experience of value, an experience that leads in complicated ways to the development of evaluative thought. ;I then argue that adopting this picture of evaluative experience can help us to make sense of many problems within philosophical psychology. I argue that desire, which has been seen by many philosophers as a problematic concept, can be best understood in terms of its relation to evaluative experience. Desire is a fundamentally evaluative notion, an evaluation of a recognized possibility. To desire X is to be in a state in which it seems to one that X is good. I further argue that desires on this conception can provide us with apparent reasons for action, and that this is a good result, one that fits with much of common sense thought about reasons for action. I argue that we can develop a better understanding of practical reasons in general by thinking of reason as emerging from our evaluative experience