Feelings as evaluative indicators : a reply to Iuliia Pliushch

Abstract

These responses aim at clarifying various aspects and implications of my proposal that feelings are affordance sensings. Affective quality, in the present proposal, extends beyond the domain of primary and secondary emotions to all feelings, because it results from specific features in the dynamics of valence. Feelings do not convey an explicit causal information about the world. Causal relations are, rather, implicitly represented in a felt affordance through the dynamic relations between the associated, embodied cues for location, valence and intensity and type of the affordance. Affordances are neither perceived nor inferred; they are ßensed", which is an ability distinct from belief, whose informational input is derived from features of a perceived or interpreted situation or cognitive task. The input for an affordance sensing can well be conceptual; it is claimed, however, that even when a task is represented through concepts, the affordance-sensings elicited during the task are nonconceptual and evaluative. The relevant properties in affordance-sensings being dynamic, an interpretation of the view under discussion as being serial is resisted. Finally, Pliushch's proposal for extending this theory to an interpretation of the feelings involved in self-deception is discussed.