18:00 Uhr; Raum S06 S00 B41 Universität Duisburg-Essen
Some experiences have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. Many philosophers take valence to pose a particularly insidious challenge to intentionalism about phenomenal character. According to intentionalism, the phenomenal character of an experience (i.e., the experience’s what-it-is-likeness) is nothing over and above the experience’s intentional content. But what’s the content of valenced experiences, if any? In recent years, two answers to this challenge have emerged: imperativism (Barlassina & Hayward, 2019; Martínez and Barlassina, forthcoming), according to which valenced experiences have imperative content, and evaluativism (Carruthers, 2024), according to which valenced experiences instead have evaluative content. In this talk, I argue that we should favour imperativism over evaluativism because it offers the best explanation of the role of valence in our cognitive economy: it is only by positing that valenced experiences are imperatival that we can explain their effects on action-production, decision-making, and reward-learning.