Ambivalent emotions and the perceptual account of emotions
Recently, there has been more and more support for a perceptual account of emotions, according to which emotions can be taken to be perceptions of values (Johnston 2001, Wedgwood 2001, de Sousa 2002, Prinz 2004). On this account, an emotion like fear has correctness conditions that are similar to the correctness conditions of perceptual states. Fear is correct or appropriate in so far as its object is really dangerous, in that this is what makes fear correct or appropriate. Danger, then, is the formal object of fear.1'2 My aim here is to reply to a simple and apparently quite