Emotion and Sentiment

Experiences may be divided into those which do not and those which do have an 'epistemological object.' The former may be called Pure Feelings. The natural question to ask with regard to a feeling is: 'How are you feeling?' And the natural answer is to utter some adjective (or, more properly, adverb), such as 'Hot,' or 'Tired,' or 'Cross.' To feel tired is to be feeling in a certain way; it is not to be aware of a certain object, real or fictitious. On the other hand, there are many experiences about which it is natural to ask: 'What is the object of your experience?' or 'What is it about?' If a person says that he is seeing or hearing or thinking, it is natural to ask: What are you seeing?' or 'What are you hearing?' or 'What are you thinking about?' And the answer that one expects is the utterance of some substantive or phrase equivalent to a substantive, e.g., 'A red flash,' 'A squeaky noise,' 'The square-root of minus 1.' I shall say that experiences of the latter kind 'have an epistemological object' or are 'epistemologically intentional.' All such experiences may be called Cognitions. It is important to notice that an experience may be epistemologically intentional, even if it be a delusive quasi-perception or a thought of something which does not and perhaps could not exist. A person who in a dream ostensibly sees a man pointing a revolver at him is having an epistemologically intentional experience, although there is no ontological object (i.e., no actual man, pointing an actual revolver at him at the time) corresponding to it. Similarly, a person who is thinking of a phoenix is having an epistemologically intentional experience. He is certainly thinking of something and he could describe what he is thinking of. If he were thinking of a dragon, instead of a phoenix, he would be thinking of something different and would give a different description. And that, in spite of the fact that there never have been, and perhaps could not be, in nature either phoenixes or dragons. So we begin by dividing experiences into Pure Feelings and Cognitions. The former are those which have only psychical qualities and do not have epistemological objects. The latter are those which have epistemological objects. Cognitions may have psychical qualities as well as epistemological objects; some of them certainly do, and perhaps all of them do. A pure feeling cannot significantly be described either as veridical or as delusive. These alternatives can be significantly predicated only of cognitions. A cognition is veridical if there is an ontological object answering to the description which the experient would naturally give of its epistemological object, i.e., the description which he would offer in answer to the question: 'What are you cognising?' It is totally delusive, if there is no