Brian Ballard

In this essay, I want to advocate for explaining the content of emotional experience as an instance of phenomenal intentionality—intentionality based on phenomenal properties. Much recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature of emotion argues that emotional experiences represent their objects as having certain value-laden properties. For instance, in fearing a serpent as it rears back, our emotional experience represents the serpent as menacing or fearsome. In being moved by an act of kindness, our emotional experience represents the act as good or noble or somehow beneficial. While this representational account of emotional experience remains controversial, many have thought it enjoys support as the best explanation for the normativity of emotions, for the way in which emotions can be fitting or unfitting. However, if emotional experiences represent value-laden properties, that leaves us with a question as to how they come to have this content. Plausibly, if a mental state has some representational content, something explains why. There's some further factor in virtue of which it has that content. I want to explore the thought that we can profitably seek to ground the content of emotional experience in its phenomenal character, in what it is like to undergo that experience. In doing so, I'm advocating for a modest version of phenomenal intentionality. Now, the two great puzzles of the mind are consciousness and intentionality. Philosophers have long sought to explain one of these in terms of the other, thereby eliminating one of the puzzles. For decades, the favored approach was to explain consciousness in terms of intentionality. Thus, Philosophers such as Michael Tye and Alex Byrne sought to account for what it is like to undergo an experience in terms of what the experience represents. However, in recent years, the reverse approach has emerged as a serious contender, that of explaining intentionality in terms of consciousness. This approach is known as the Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program. Under this umbrella, however, a more modest idea would be that at least some representational content for at least some mental states can be grounded in the phenomenal character of those states. All that my project here requires is this more modest thesis. If emotional experiences have value-laden content in virtue of their phenomenal properties, what phenomenal properties exactly might those be? That is the question I seek to answer. I want to explore three ideas that seem to me especially promising. The first appeals to the valence and arousal dimensions of emotional experience. The second appeals to the felt motivational character of emotional experience. The third appeals to a new idea I wish to develop, what I call an ego signature, a way in which the self is experienced in an emotion as bearing some relation to the emotion object. While advocate for all three of these ideas, my aim is primarily to explore the third approach. This requires us to develop the concept of an ego signature, and consider how it might serve as the phenomenal basis of emotional content.

Brian Ballard is assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, where he gave the inaugural PRECIS Lecture in Philosophy and Religion. The winner of the 2025 Plantinga Prize, he specializes in the philosophy of mind, ethics, and the philosophy of religion.