Date: Tuesday 10 February, 2026
Time: 12-13:30
Location: Room 52.701 (Poblenou Campus), 138 Carrer de Roc Boronat, Barcelona

Abstract: 
Philosophers tend to give to emotions a homogenous theoretical treatment when it comes to the assessment of their epistemic role: all emotions play (or fail to play) the same epistemic role in the same way. However, there is a huge number of empirical results that show that negative emotions (e.g., fear) make us more prone to assess evidence concerning the instantiation of their formal object (e.g., Danger) in their particular object (e.g., O1), and evaluative judgments about them(e.g., <O1 is dangerous>), more carefully and in a more epistemically cautious way than positive emotions. In this talk, I want to motivate the idea that valence makes an epistemic difference and to give a philosophical explanation of why this is so. I will argue that negative valence tends to raise the epistemic stakes for evaluative judgements, whereas positive valence tends to lower them. 

Speaker profile: https://philpeople.org/profiles/aaron-alvarez-gonzalez

Event details: http://eventum.upf.edu/go/valenceseminar

Funded by the European Union GA Nº 101142133- Valence Asymmetries