Abstract
I am very sympathetic to Dan Hutto’s view that in our experience of the emotions
of others “we do not neutrally observe the outward behaviour of another and infer
coldly, but on less than certain grounds, that they are in such and such an inner
state, as justifi ed by analogy with our own case. Rather we react and feel as we do
because it is natural for us to see and be moved by specifi c expressions of emotion
in others” (Hutto section 4). Th is seems to me to be a good starting point for any
account of the ascription and epistemology of emotions, an excellent description
of data that any theory of the emotions has to take into account.
What I fi nd puzzling is that Hutto seems to believe that this view is in opposition
to certain widely accepted metaphysical assumptions about mental phenomena,
and that these assumptions must be dispensed with if we are to give a proper
account of emotion and avoid the problems which philosophy has traditionally
had with the emotions.
This collection of assumptions about the mental is what
Hutto calls the ‘object-based schema.’ Th e details of these assumptions will be discussed
below; but the points I want to make in this note are (a) that Hutto is wrong
in thinking that the plausible claims he makes about emotion (quoted above) require
us to deny the object-based schema; and (b) that he is wrong in his claim that
the object-based schema is entirely mistaken. Having established this, I will then
make some remarks about Hutto’s attack on my view of intentionality.