 If we assume the story is true and leaves nothing of importance out, we’re likely to have two kinds of response to it: we have a negative feeling of some sort towards the neighbour, and we think that the neighbour acted wrongly towards poor J. Roughly speaking, sentimentalists think that these two responses are intimately related, with the feeling in the driving seat. Since different theories in the sentimentalist family make use of different responses, this entry will adopt a liberal definition of a ‘sentiment’ that includes non-cognitive attitudes and states of all kinds – emotions, feelings, affects, desires, plans, and dispositions to have them.