Emotion, Cognition, and the Virtue of Flexibility

Conclusion

I started out in Chapter 1 with the proposal that there is a kind of mental state that has not been considered so far in the literature: a kind of emotion that is not cognitive but nevertheless object-directed. I call this kind of emotion a basic emotion, or an emotional response. A basic emotion is directed at something, but it is “basic” in the sense that it does not have the complexity and sophistication of emotions that are plausibly construed in cognitivist terms. If there is such a mental state, I argued, it can play an independent role in normative guidance. This proposal is novel insofar as emotions, if they are taken to figure in normative guidance at all, tend to be theorized as linked to or penetrated by cognition. This ...