Psychological and philosophical theories that take emotions to be based on cognitive appraisal
have had little to say about the brain mechanisms needed to evaluate the relevance of a situation to a
person's many goals. Evaluation of a simple sensory stimulus (a man with a gun aimed at you) may be
relatively simple, but reflection on a complex situation (a job offer in a far-off city) may require an
assessment with respect to many goals. In chapter 4, I described theory evaluation as involving a kind
of parallel evaluation of multiple constraints, and cognitive appraisal is also naturally conceived as
parallel constraint satisfaction. Hence the brain can accomplish cognitive appraisal of a situation
with respect to multiple goals using the same kind of mechanism described in chapter 4 for inference
to the best explanation.