Seminário de Filosofia Analítica

Sessão 3: 9 de Maio de 2007, 17:00, Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa, Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) - Entrada livre. Teresa Marques (Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa): Embedding Emotions
Abstract: This paper discusses the behaviour of expressives, speech acts performed in expressing emotions, in connection with logically complex sentences. A position on the content of emotions contends that emotional content is nonconceptual. Nonconceptual content is, arguably, non-inferential. That emotional content is nonconceptual translates into two claims. First, expressives do not convey logically complex contents, say, conditional content. Secondly, emotional content is not embeddable in logically complex sentences, say as a consequent of a conditional. A related but distinct problem is whether expressives themselves can be embedded in logically complex sentences like conditionals. This paper argues that, against strong views on the nonconceptual content of emotions (as that advocated by Gunther 2003 and 2004, for instance) expressives can have conceptual content, in particular, conditional or disjunctive content. That is, as far as available evidence indicates, expressives, and the emotions thereby expressed, can have the same content as other speech acts and other psychological attitudes. This paper then discusses a possibly illuminating hypothesis concerning the embeddability of expressives themselves. This related question is connected to a more general problem concerning Frege’s point and the embeddability of speech-acts in general. The hypothesis is whether there are conditional expressives, in the same way as there are conditional promises or orders, and how that possibility relates to the status of the emotion, if any, thereby expressed.
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