| Excerpt / Summary "Emotional attitudes, just like other propositional attitudes, have intentional objects. The intentional object of my relief is the fact that my pain is past. But intentional objects, as MacBeath remarks ‘connect not with what is the case, but with what is believed . . . to be the case,’ (1983, p. 86). The object of my relief is the same as the object of the irreducibly tensed belief that I hold: the belief that my pain is past. So, I believe that my pain is past, and the object of my relief is the content of this belief. It is important to note that MacBeath is not claiming that what I am relieved about is the fact that I believe that my pain is past; it is not that my belief is the object of my relief. Rather, the content of my belief (i.e. that my pain is past) is also the intentional object of my relief. The B-theory, recall, does not try to eliminate tensed beliefs and sentences from our systems of language and thought. Indeed, it recognises that most of our language and thought is irreducibly tensed. What it does claim, however, is that the truthmaker for any tensed judgement is a tenseless fact. My belief that my pain is past, if true, is made true by the tenseless fact that the cessation of my pain is earlier than my belief about it.
Belief reports generate non-extensional contexts. I can believe that George Orwell wrote 1984 and not believe that Eric Blair wrote 1984 even though George Orwell is Eric Blair. Reports of emotional responses are just like belief reports in this respect. The operator ‘Thank goodness for the fact that. . .’ generates a nonextensional context (Garrett 1988, pp. 203-04). I can thank goodness for the fact that my pain is past, and not thank goodness for the fact that the cessation of my pain is earlier than my judgement that my pain is past. As it turns out, the fact that makes true my belief that my pain is past is the fact that the cessation of my pain is earlier than my judgement about it. But this is an important distinction, because we can sometimes have emotional responses to states of affairs that we believe to be the case, but which in fact aren’t. MacBeath gives the example of a man who feels relief at the fact that he will never sit another examination. The object of his relief is the content of his belief that he will never sit another examination. If the belief is true, it
is made true by the tenseless fact that he sits no examinations after the time at which he holds the belief. But his belief may be false. If so, we would not say that his relief is inappropriate. What is crucial to our tensed emotions is the tensed beliefs we have about what was, is, or will be the case, not whether those beliefs are true. This, then, is how the new B-theory of time responds to the first problem generated by Prior’s challenge." |