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from the declarative evaluations and their arguments, and vice versa, one can explicitly express
(as beliefs) some priority of attractiveness, urgency, activation, or whatever.
However, being able to deliberate , that is, to choose an alternative on the grounds of explicit
evaluations concerning the 'goodness' of the various options, and being capable of reasoning
aimed at supporting such judgments will add further advantages to the mere fact of making
choices. In these cases, in fact, the system can justify its choices, as well as modify the 'values'
at stake through reasoning. Moreover, it is liable to persuasion, that is, it can modify its
preferences on the grounds of the evaluations conveyed by others (argumentation).
We interact with people on the basis of the image and trust we have of them, i.e. on the
basis of our evaluations of them: this defines their 'value' and reputation. And also, social
hierarchies are just the resultant of the evaluations that the individuals and the groups receive
from others.
5.3.1 Evaluations and Emotions
Given this 'cold' view of evaluation ('cold' if compared with others', e.g., (Mandler, 1975)),
what is the relationship between evaluation and emotion? As we claim in (Castelfranchi,
2009):
Evaluations do not necessarily imply emotions
No doubt many evaluations show some emotional feature. For instance, if I believe a certain
food, book, person, and so on, to be 'good', I will be likely to feel attracted to it (or him or her).
But evaluations and emotions are not necessarily associated with each other, because not any
belief about the goodness or badness of something necessarily implies or induces an emotion
or an attraction/rejection with regard to that 'something'. There also exist 'cold' evaluations:
if, for instance, I believe that John is a good typist, I will not necessarily feel attracted to him.
This is especially true because X (for example a neutral consultant or expert) can formulate
evaluations relative to Y 's goals: what would be good or bad for Y .
Evaluations luckily have emotional consequences if they simultaneously:
i) are about our own goals (the evaluator is the goal owner);
ii) these goals are currently active;
iii) they are important goals.
Emotions do not necessarily imply evaluations
One may view attraction or rejection for some m as a (possible) consequence of an evaluation;
so, in this case the emotion 'implies' an evaluation in the sense we have just considered. On
the other hand, however, one may view attraction or rejection per se as forms of evaluation
of the 'attractive' or 'repulsive' object. In the latter case, we are dealing with a supposed
identification: to say that an emotion implies an evaluation means to claim that the two
actually coincide, which is still to be proved.
In fact, we view attraction and rejection as pre-cognitive implicit evaluation , that we call
'appraisal'. In a sense, any emotion implies and signals an 'appraisal' of its object.
 
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