Who is Afraid of Contrary Emotions?

Are there genuinely contrary emotions and is it irrational to feel them simul- taneously? It certainly is irrational to believe that Real Madrid won the 2016 UEFA Champions League Final and simultaneously disbelieve it—i.e., believe that Real Madrid did not win the 2016 UEFA Champions League Final. On the other hand, it can happen to everyone to feel pleased to some extent that Real Madrid won the 2016 UEFA Champions League Final and simul- taneously displeased with it to some extent. Nothing irrational appears to be involved here.1 Some philosophers have concluded that such emotions cannot be genu- inely contrary. If they were, so it is argued, it would be hard to understand why they do not constitute an irrational pair. Maybe the objects of these emotions are not one and the same. For instance, one can be pleased with some aspect of the outcome of the UEFA Champions League Final and displeased with some other aspect of it. Thus, emotional attitudes, such as being pleased and displeased, do not fully parallel cognitive attitudes, such as belief, in so far as their objects are not, or fundamentally not, the propositions referred to by the ‘that’-clauses following the attitude verb. In this paper we take the opposite stance: we argue that emotional attitudes are fundamentally propositional and entirely parallel belief, knowledge and other cognitive attitudes. Moreover, the notion of contrariety is not to be understood differently for emotions than for judgments. Thus, some emotions that have the same object are genuinely contrary. We provide an account of why this involves no irrationality. Greenspan (1976) suggested that the logic of emotions differs from that of belief. We agree and identify where exactly they diverge.