This essay raises a challenge for the perceptual theory of emotion. According to the perceptual theory, emotions are perceptual states that represent values. But if emotions represent values, something should explain why. In virtue of what do emotions represent the values they do? A psychosemantics would answer this, and that’s what the perceptual theorist owes us. To date, however, the only perceptual theorist to attempt a psychosemantics for emotion is Jesse Prinz. And Prinz’s theory, I argue, faces an important difficulty: It makes the pairing of any given emotion with its respective value entirely arbitrary. But that’s a problem. It seems—and this is a major contention of this essay—that an emotion, in virtue of how it feels, bears a natural or non-arbitrary link to the value it represents. And this datum makes it all the more difficult to provide a viable psychosemantics for the evaluative content of emotion.

中文翻译：

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感觉与价值之间的非任意联系：情感知觉理论的心理语义挑战

本文对情感知觉理论提出了挑战。根据知觉理论，情绪是代表价值的知觉状态。但如果情感代表价值观，就应该有一些东西可以解释其原因。情感凭借什么代表了他们的价值观？心理语义学会回答这个问题，这就是知觉理论家欠我们的。然而，迄今为止，唯一尝试用心理语义学来研究情感的知觉理论家是杰西·普林茨 (Jesse Prinz)。我认为，普林茨的理论面临着一个重要的困难：它使得任何给定情感与其各自价值的配对完全是任意的。但这是个问题。似乎——这是本文的一个主要论点——一种情感，由于它的感觉，与其所代表的价值有着自然或非任意的联系。这一数据使得为情感的评价内容提供可行的心理语义学变得更加困难。