What's really disgusting

Abstract

Abstract Finding something disgusting involves a particular sensuous experience and an evaluation that the thing is of little or no value. Sensuous properties such as digustingness are constituted by these two aspects, the sensuous and the evaluative. In “The Authority of Affect” (2001a), Mark Johnston argues for a detectivist account where our affective states detect mind-independent properties of sensuous value, like disgustingness. He argues that the other two standard positions, projectivism and dispositionalism, do not account for the authority of affect or are incoherent. In this paper, I argue that he is wrong to rule out dispositionalism for being incoherent and that it does account for the authority of affect. In addition, I argue that it is best able to capture the nature of sensuous properties and that it should be the default account of the relation between sensuous properties and affect.