Cognitive, Feelings, and the Background Structures of Emotion
A traditional understanding of a cognitivist theory of emotion suggests that emotions are reducible to cognitive states, such as judgments. In this context, emotions have evaluative and intentional content. There has been a tendency within the cognitivist theories of emotion to assume as irreducible the intentional structures through which these theories operate. A consequence of this tendency often sees feeling as a residual component of the intentional structures of emotional experience and compartmentalized through internal and external distinctions, such as bodily feelings and world-directed feelings. The aim of this thesis is to call attention to some of the shortcomings of a cognitivist theory's incorporation of feeling into a philosophy of emotion. I focus specifically on one category of feeling, a background sense of belonging to a world. What often appears to be ignored is the notion that prior to all emotional experience we have already found ourselves belonging to a world, and attempts at a phenomenological understanding of feeling as a pre-intentional background sense of belonging to a world prior to an emotional experience become obscured or dismissed.
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