4 - Subjective Mental States

Summary

Whitman, of course, was the evangelist for first-person subjective experience. In Chapter 3, I argued that understanding should be seen as including a subjective feeling, an emotion, and an objective achievement. Feelings and emotions are characterized as having such properties as valence, strength, and “content.” That content is conferred by an appraisal of the current situation in the light of prior experience; thus, different appraisals evoke different feelings. I will refer to the content of a feeling state as an intuition with “identity conditions” that may be quite different from those for concepts and beliefs.