Emotion (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Emotion (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Emotion
First published Tue Sep 25, 2018
No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and
meaning of our existence than the emotions. They are what make life
worth living and sometimes worth ending. So it is not surprising that
most of the great classical philosophers had recognizable theories of
emotions. These theories typically conceived of emotions as a
subject’s phenomenologically salient responses to significant
events and as capable of triggering distinctive bodily changes and
behaviors. But it
is
surprising that throughout much of the
twentieth-century, scientists and philosophers of mind tended to
neglect the emotions—in part because of behaviorism’s
allergy to inner mental states and in part because the variety of
phenomena covered by the word “emotion” discourages tidy
theorizing. In recent decades, however, emotions have once again
become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy and affective
science. Our objective in this entry is to account for these
developments, focusing primarily on the descriptive question of what
the emotions are, but tackling also the normative question of whether
emotions are rational. In view of the proliferation of exchanges
between researchers of different stripes, it is no longer useful to
speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of
other disciplines, particularly psychology, neuroscience, and
evolutionary biology. This is why we have made an effort to pay
significant attention to scientific developments, as we are convinced
that cross-disciplinary fertilization is our best chance for making
progress in emotion theory.
After some brief methodological remarks intended to clarify what
differentiates a philosophical approach from a more general cognitive
science perspective on the emotions, we begin by outlining some of the
ways researchers have conceived of the place of emotions in the
topography of the mind. We will note that emotions have historically
been conceptualized in one of three main ways: as experiences, as
evaluations, and as motivations. Each of these research traditions
captures something true and significant about the emotions, but no
theory within any tradition appears immune from counterexamples and
problem cases. Concerning the rationality of emotions, we will
distinguish two main varieties of it—cognitive rationality and
strategic rationality—and explore a number of ways in which the
emotions can succeed or fail with respect to different standards of
rationality.
1. Defining the Emotions: What are the Desiderata?
2. Three Traditions in the Study of Emotions: Emotions as Feelings, Evaluations, and Motivations
3. The Early Feeling Tradition: Emotions as Feelings
4. Emotions and Intentional Objects
5. The Early Evaluative Tradition in Philosophy: Emotions as Judgments
6. The Evaluative Tradition in Affective Science: Appraisal Theories
7. The Hybrid Evaluative-Feeling Tradition in Recent Philosophy
7.1 Emotions as Evaluative Perceptions
7.2 Emotions as Evaluative Feelings
7.3 Emotions as Patterns of Salience
8. The Motivational Tradition in Affective Science and Its Opponents
8.1 Basic Emotion Theory: Emotions as Evolved Affect Programs
8.2 The Behavioral Ecology View, Psychological Constructionism and Social Constructionism: Emotions as Constructions
9. The Motivational Tradition in Recent Philosophy
9.1 Attitudinal and Motivational Theories: Emotions as Attitudes and Motive States
9.2 Enactivist Theories of Emotions: Emotions as Enactions
10. Rationality and Emotions
10.1 Cognitive Rationality as Fittingness, Warrant and Coherence
10.2 Instrumental and Substantive Strategic Rationality
11. Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Cited Works
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
1. Defining the Emotions: What are the Desiderata?
Two broad desiderata have governed the project of defining emotions in
both philosophy and affective science: (a) Achieving compatibility
with ordinary linguistic usage, and (b) Achieving theoretical
fruitfulness. A definition that aims exclusively at (a) is a
descriptive
definition. A definition that aims at (b) at the
cost of possibly violating some ordinary intuitions is
prescriptive
. To secure ordinary language compatibility,
traditional philosophers have relied on introspection, thought
experiments, casual observation, gleaning of insights from literary
texts and other artistic sources, and more recently, experimental
tests of ordinary intuitions and of the psychological processes
underlying them performed within “experimental
philosophy”.
Scientists have also been interested in the study of folk emotion
concepts, and they have applied to them experimental techniques common
in the psychology of concepts. These techniques have revealed that
emotion concepts, like most ordinary concepts, are prototypically
organized (Fehr & Russell 1984). There are better and worse
examples of emotions as ordinarily understood (e.g., fear is a better
example of emotion than awe) and there are borderline cases, such as
boredom: on those, ordinary language users are split as to whether
they qualify as emotions. A variety of psychological structures have
been proposed by concept theorists to account for membership in folk
emotion categories, including similarity to prototypes, exemplars,
perceptual symbols and others (Fehr & Russell 1984; Wilson-Mendenhall et al.
2011).
What philosophers and affective scientists aim to offer are
prescriptive definitions of emotions that preserve as much ordinary
language compatibility as it is compatible with serving
interest-dependent theoretical objectives. One reason why
theoreticians are not merely interested in outlining the contours of
folk emotion concepts through descriptive definitions is that they
suspect that such concepts may include widely diverse items that are
not amenable to any robust theoretical generalizations.
At first blush, the things we ordinarily call emotions differ from one
another along several dimensions. For example, some emotions are
occurrences (e.g., panic), and others are dispositions (e.g.,
hostility); some are short-lived (e.g., anger) and others are
long-lived (e.g., grief); some involve primitive cognitive processing
(e.g., fear of a suddenly looming object), and others involve
sophisticated cognitive processing (e.g., fear of losing a chess
match); some are conscious (e.g., disgust about an insect in the
mouth) and others are unconscious (e.g., unconscious fear of failing
in life); some have prototypical facial expressions (e.g., surprise)
and others lack them (e.g., regret). Some involve strong motivations
to act (e.g., rage) and others do not (e.g., sadness). Some are
present across species (e.g., fear) and others are exclusively human
(e.g., schadenfreude). And so on.
This multi-dimensional heterogeneity has led some to conclude that
folk emotion categories do not designate natural kinds, either with
respect to the generic category of emotion (Rorty 1980b, 2003; Griffiths 1997;
Russell 2003; Zachar 2006; Kagan 2007, 2010) or with respect to
specific emotion categories such as anger, fear, happiness, disgust,
and so on (Scarantino 2012; Barrett 2006, 2017). Others have
argued that there is, nevertheless, enough homogeneity among instances
of folk emotion categories to allow them to qualify as natural kinds
(e.g., Charland 2002; Prinz 2004; Zinck & Newen 2008).
The concept of a
natural kind
is itself contentious and
probably more suitable for discussing the categories affective
scientists are interested in, so we will speak of
theoretical
kinds
instead, understood as groupings of entities that
participate in a body of philosophically or scientifically interesting
generalizations due to some set of properties they have in common.
Whether folk emotion categories are homogeneous enough to qualify as
theoretical kinds has important methodological implications. To the
extent that they are, the prescriptive definitions of emotions the
theorist offers can achieve both theoretical fruitfulness and maximal
compatibility with ordinary linguistic usage (in such case,
prescriptive definitions will also be descriptively adequate). To the
extent that they are not homogeneous enough, prescriptive definitions
will have to
explicate
folk emotion categories, transforming
them so as to increase theoretical fruitfulness while giving up on
some degree of ordinary language compatibility (Carnap 1950).
Theoretical fruitfulness, however, is conceived differently by
philosophers and affective scientists. The former often have as their
primary target making sense of the human experience of emotions and
sometimes to contribute to other projects in philosophy, such as
explaining the origins of rational action or moral judgment, or
shedding light on what makes life worth living, or investigating the
nature of self-knowledge. Affective scientists, by contrast, are more
likely to favor a third-person approach that may be highly revisionary
with respect to our first-person self-understanding. And their
prescriptive definitions are often designed to promote measurement and
experimentation for the purposes of prediction and explanation in a
specific scientific discipline.
In this entry, we will assess philosophical and scientific definitions
of emotions in terms of both ordinary language compatibility and
theoretical fruitfulness, but acknowledge that the field currently
lacks clear guidelines for how to strike a proper balance between
these two desiderata.
2. Three Traditions in the Study of Emotions: Emotions as Feelings, Evaluations, and Motivations
“Emotion” is a term that came into use in the English
language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a translation
of the French term “
émotion
” but did not
designate “a category of mental states that might be
systematically studied” until the mid-nineteenth century (Dixon
2012: 338; see also Dixon 2003; Solomon 2008). At the same time, many
of the things we call emotions today have been the object of
theoretical analysis since Ancient Greece, under a variety of
language-specific labels such as
passion
sentiment,
affection, affect, disturbance, movement, perturbation, upheaval,
or
appetite
. This makes for a long and complicated history,
which has progressively led to the development of a variety of shared
insights about the nature and function of emotions, but no consensual
definition of what emotions are, either in philosophy or in affective
science.
A widely shared insight is that emotions have components, and that
such components are jointly instantiated in prototypical episodes of
emotions. Consider an episode of intense fear due to the sudden
appearance of a grizzly bear on your path while hiking. At first
blush, we can distinguish in the complex event that is fear an
evaluative
component (e.g., appraising the bear as
dangerous), a
physiological
component (e.g., increased heart
rate and blood pressure), a
phenomenological
component (e.g.,
an unpleasant feeling), an
expressive
component (e.g., upper
eyelids raised, jaw dropped open, lips stretched horizontally), a
behavioral
component (e.g., a tendency to flee), and a
mental
component (e.g., focusing attention).
One question that has divided emotion theorists is: Which subset of
the evaluative, physiological, phenomenological, expressive,
behavioral, and mental components is
essential
to emotion?
The answer to this “problem of parts” (Prinz 2004) has
changed at various times in the history of the subject, leading to a
vast collection of theories of emotions both in philosophy and in
affective science. Although such theories differ on multiple
dimensions, they can be usefully sorted into three broad traditions,
which we call the
Feeling Tradition,
the
Evaluative
Tradition
and the
Motivational Tradition
(Scarantino
2016).
The Feeling Tradition takes the way emotions feel to be their most
essential characteristic, and defines emotions as distinctive
conscious experiences. The Evaluative Tradition regards the way
emotions construe the world as primary, and defines emotions as being
(or involving) distinctive evaluations of the eliciting circumstances.
The Motivational Tradition defines emotions as distinctive
motivational states.
Each tradition faces the task of articulating a prescriptive
definition of emotions that is theoretically fruitful and compatible
at least to some degree with ordinary linguistic usage. And although
there are discipline-specific theoretical objectives, there also is a
core set of explanatory challenges that tends to be shared across
disciplines:
Differentiation
: How are emotions different from one
another, and from things that are not emotions?
Motivation
: Do emotions motivate behavior, and if so
how?
Intentionality
: Do emotions have object-directedness, and
if so can they be appropriate or inappropriate to their objects?
Phenomenology
: Do emotions always involve subjective
experiences, and if so of what kind?
For example, a viable account of anger should tell us how anger
differs from fear and from non-emotional states (differentiation),
whether and how anger motivates aggressive behaviors (motivation),
whether and how anger can be about a given state of affairs and be
considered appropriate with respect to such state of affairs
(intentionality), and whether and how anger involves a distinctive
subjective experience (phenomenology).
We now consider some of the most prominent theories within each
tradition, and assess how they fare with respect to these four theoretical challenges and
others. As we shall see, each tradition seems to capture something
important about what the emotions are, but none is immune from
counterexamples and problem cases. As a result, the most recent trend
in emotion theory is represented by theories that straddle traditions,
in an attempt to combine their distinctive insights. Although we begin
our investigation with William James and will occasionally mention
earlier accounts, our primary focus will be on theories developed in
the last 50 years.
3. The Early Feeling Tradition: Emotions as Feelings
The simplest theory of emotions, and perhaps the theory most
representative of common sense, is that emotions are simply a class of
feelings, differentiated by their experienced quality from other
sensory experiences like tasting chocolate or proprioceptions like
sensing a pain in one’s lower back. The idea that emotions are a
specific kind of subjective experiences has dominated emotion theory
roughly from Ancient Greece to the beginning of the twentieth
century.
This idea can be interpreted in either of two ways. The great
classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes,
Hobbes, Hume, Locke—all understood emotions to involve feelings
understood as primitives without component parts. An alternative idea
was first introduced by William James, who argued that scientific
psychology should stop treating feelings as “eternal and sacred
psychic entities, like the old immutable species in natural
history” (James 1890: 449).
James’ proposal, often labeled as the James-Lange theory because
it is rather similar to the one offered around the same time by Lange
(1885), stated that emotions are feelings constituted by perceptions
of changes in physiological conditions relating to the autonomic and
motor functions. When we perceive that we are in danger, for example,
this perception directly sets off a collection of bodily responses,
and our awareness of these responses is what constitutes fear. James
thus maintained that “
our feeling of [bodily] changes as
they occur
IS
the emotion”
(James 1884:
189–190, emphasis in original).
The James-Lange theory fared well with respect to the problem of
phenomenology, in the sense that it replaced the brute phenomenology
favored by earlier accounts with a constructivist account of the
“processes that generate and construct…conscious
experiences” (Mandler 1990: 180). This approach has acquired new
prominence in recent times with the affirmation of the
psychological constructionist
movement in affective science
section 8.2
).
But the James-Lange theory seemed less successful with respect to the
challenges of motivation, differentiation and intentionality. First,
James stated that common sense is wrong about the direction of
causation concerning emotions and bodily changes: a more appropriate
statement is that
we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because
we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are
sorry, angry, or fearful. (James 1884: 190)
The counterintuitive implication that emotions do not cause their
manifestations but rather emerge from them struck many as problematic,
because it seemed to undermine the idea that emotions are important to
us. How could they be so important, critics like Dewey (1894, 1895)
asked, if they have no causal import with respect to actions? And why,
one might add, does science not first seek to explain the cause and
function of those original “bodily changes”, namely
why
the emotion is elicited in the first place? (Arnold
1960).
Furthermore, the theory lacked an adequate account of the differences
between emotions. This objection was influentially voiced by Walter
Cannon (1929). According to a common interpretation of the James-Lange
theory, what distinguishes emotions from one another is the fact that
each involves the perception of a distinctive set of bodily changes.
Cannon countered that the visceral reactions characteristic of
distinct emotions such as fear and anger are indistinguishable, and so
these reactions cannot be what allows us to tell emotions apart.
Subsequent research has not fully settled whether emotions do, in
fact, have significantly different bodily profiles, either at the
autonomic, expressive or neural level (for the latest on bodily
signatures, see Clark-Polner et al. 2016; Duran et al. 2017; Kragel
& LaBar 2016; Nummenmaa & Saarimäki forthcoming; Keltner
et al. 2016). Independently of how the empirical debate on bodily
signatures is settled, brain or bodily changes and the feelings
accompanying these changes can get us only part way towards an
adequate taxonomy.
Another major stumbling block for the James-Lange theory is that it
does not yield any insight into emotions’ role in our life as
rational agents and thinkers. Emotions, however, are capable of being
not only explained, but also justified. If someone angers me, I can
cite my antagonist’s deprecatory tone; if someone makes me
jealous, I can point to his poaching on my emotional property (Taylor
1975). If emotions were
merely
feelings, as James suggested,
it would be difficult to explain why they can be justified in light of
reasons, just as we would be hard pressed to justify the sensory
experience of tasting chocolate or feeling pain in one’s lower
back.
4. Emotions and Intentional Objects
To shed light on the sense in which emotions can be justified requires
a brief detour on the topic of their “object-directedness”
or “aboutness” or “intentionality”. The first
distinction we need to draw is the one between
particular
objects and
formal
objects of emotions. As Kenny (1963) first
emphasized, any
that I can have emotion
about
is a particular object of
, whereas the formal
object of
is the property which I implicitly ascribe to
by virtue of having
about
For example, the particular object of fear is anything a person can be
afraid of, whereas the formal object of fear is “that which
constitutes danger”, on the assumption that only what is
evaluated as dangerous can intelligibly be feared. Particular and
formal objects constitute the two principal aspects of emotional
intentionality: emotions are
object-directed
insofar as they
have particular objects, and they are
fitting
insofar as
their particular objects instantiate the formal objects represented by
the emotion (see
section 10.1
).
The second distinction we wish to draw is that between two types of
particular objects of emotions: target objects and propositional
objects (de Sousa 1987). The target object of an emotion is the
specific entity the emotion is about. For example, love can be about
Mary, or about Bangkok, or about Homer Simpson and so on. These are
all possible targets of love, and they may be real or imaginary.
Not every emotion has a target. I may be angry that my life has turned
out a certain way, without there being any particular
entity—myself or anyone else—at which my anger is
directed. Propositional objects capture facts or states of affairs,
real or imagined, towards which my emotion is directed. Conversely,
not all emotions have a propositional object. For example, if Mary is
the target of my love, there may be no proposition, however complex,
that captures what it is that I love about Mary (Kraut 1986; Rorty
1987 [1988]).
Finally, there also appear to be affective states that lack both types
of particular objects: they are neither directed at a particular
entity nor are they about a state of affairs captured by a
proposition. For example, I can be depressed or elated but not
depressed or elated about any specific target or fact. These seemingly
objectless affective states share many properties with object-directed
emotions, especially with respect to their physiological and
motivational aspects, so we may consider them to be emotions without
objects.
On the other hand, some have suggested that such objectless states are
better regarded as moods (Frijda 1994; Stephan 2017a). Whether we think
of seemingly objectless affective states as emotions or moods, we must
decide what kinds of objects they lack. Here two main options are
available. The first is to assert that some affective states have
neither particular objects nor formal objects. If we think of moods
and objectless emotions that way, it becomes hard to explain how such
affective states may have conditions of correctness—formal
objects being among other things descriptions of what the world must
be like for the affective state to be fitting (Teroni
2007).
If instead we think of such affective states as having formal objects
and conditions of correctness, then their objectlessness is only
apparent, because they need to have targets or propositional objects
of some kind to which they implicitly ascribe the property defined by
the formal object. This is the view of moods defended among others by
Goldie (2000), who thinks moods take the whole world as their object,
and by Price (2006), who thinks that moods have generic objects but
“watch out” for particular ones.
What are the formal objects of specific emotions? This is a
controversial topic, because the ascription of formal objects commits
one to the claim that each emotion, on conceptual grounds, ascribes a
specific property to its particular object. This is often identified
with one of a number of “core relational themes”
originally offered by Richard Lazarus (1991a,b) to explain what sorts
of evaluations cause emotions, one of the primary concerns of
appraisal theories in psychology
section 6
).
Within that framework, anger represents slights, fear represents
dangers, shame represents failures to live up to an ego ideal, sadness
represents losses, happiness represents progress towards goal
achievement, pride represents enhancement of one’s ego identity
(Prinz 2004; Lazarus 1991b). Once the formal object of an emotion has
been clarified, we can use it to justify emotions by citing their
conditions of elicitation. For example, if anger represents slights,
then my antagonist’s deprecatory tone can be cited as a
justification of my anger, because a deprecatory tone instantiates the
very property that anger represents.
5. The Early Evaluative Tradition in Philosophy: Emotions as Judgments
Evaluative theories of emotions, a.k.a. cognitive theories of
emotions, became popular in both philosophy and affective science
roughly in the 1960s and come in many flavors. A key distinction is
that between
constitutive
and
causal
evaluative
theories. Constitutive theories state that emotions
are
cognitions or evaluations of particular kinds, whereas causal theories
state that emotions are
caused by
cognitions or evaluations
of particular kinds. The constitutive approach tends to be dominant in
philosophy, while the causal approach enjoys significant support in
psychology. Let us consider these two strands of cognitivism in
turn.
The emergence of the constitutive approach in philosophy in the middle
of the twentieth century can be traced to a pair of articles by C.D.
Broad (1954) and Errol Bedford (1957), and a book by Anthony Kenny
(1963) (see also Pitcher 1965; Thalberg 1964). These authors were not
the first to emphasize that emotions are object-directed or endowed
with intentionality—Brentano (1874 [1995]) had already done so
with inspiration from various medieval authors (King 2010). But these
mid-twentieth century philosophers were the first to articulate an
influential argument to the effect that, in order to account for their
intentionality, emotions must be cognitive evaluations of some kind
rather than feelings (see also Meinong 1894).
The argument goes roughly like this. If emotions have intentionality,
it follows that there are internal standards of appropriateness
according to which an emotion is appropriate just in case its formal
object is instantiated (Kenny 1963). But feelings are not the kinds of
things that can enter into conceptual relations with formal objects.
So, to be properly embedded in conceptual relations of this sort,
emotions need to be or involve “cognitive evaluations” of
some kind.
What kinds of cognitive evaluations? The most parsimonious type of
cognitivist theory follows the Stoics in identifying emotions with
judgments. Robert Solomon (1980), Jerome Neu (2000) and Martha
Nussbaum (2001) take this approach. On a common interpretation of
their view, my anger at someone is the judgment that I have been
wronged by that person. To generalize, the proposal is that an emotion
is a judgment that the formal object of
is
instantiated (by some particular object
).
This theory is often referred to as
judgmentalism
, but the
label is potentially misleading, because it suggests that for the
theory’s proponents an emotion is nothing but a judgment,
understood as an assent to a proposition. This interpretation is
indeed presupposed by some of the standard critiques of
judgmentalism.
First, it is argued that judgmentalism does not explain how emotions
can motivate, because one can hold a judgment—say the judgment
that I have been wronged—without being motivated to act on it.
Second, it does not explain the phenomenology of emotions, because
holding a judgment lacks the bodily, valence and arousal dimensions
that typically characterize the experience of emotion. Third, it fails
to account for the emotions of animals and infants, who arguably lack
the capacity of assenting to propositions (Deigh 1994). Fourth, it
does not explain the “recalcitrance to reason” some
emotions display when they are not extinguished by judgments that
contradict them, as when someone judges that flying is not dangerous
but continues to be afraid of it (D’Arms & Jacobson
2003).
Judgmentalists have tried to address these critiques by clarifying
what sorts of judgments emotions are (and some, like Nussbaum and Neu,
have explicitly rejected the label of judgmentalism). It has been
argued for instance that we should think of judgments as
“enclosing a core desire” (Solomon 2003: 105–106),
which makes them motivational (e.g., fear encloses the core desire to
flee). Such judgments are also “dynamic” and able to
“house…the disorderly motions of emotion” (Nussbaum
2001: 45), and thus phenomenologically salient; since they involve
pre-linguistic and non-linguistic acceptance of how the world seems,
they are available to infants and animals; finally, as they are
capable of being held jointly with contradictory judgments, they can
explain recalcitrance to reason (Nussbaum 2001).
Several objections have been launched against this strategy. Just to
pick a prominent example among many, it has been argued is that
explaining recalcitrance to reason in terms of contradictory
judgments—judging that
and that
not-
—ascribes to agents the wrong kind of irrationality
(Helm 2001, 2015; see also Döring 2008; Benbaji 2012; Brady 2009;
Tappolet 2000, Faucher & Tappolet 2008a, b). There may be a broader
problem at work here, namely that judgmentalists stretch the meaning
of the concept of “judgment” in an unprincipled way to
account for all counterexamples, instead of distinguishing between
importantly different types of cognitive states all subsumed under the
same heading.
The trouble with this
elastic strategy
is not only that it is
ad hoc, but also that it creates cross-purpose talk and ultimately
amounts to a pyrrhic victory for the evaluative theory, because, on a
sufficiently expanded notion of judgment, the identification of
emotions with judgments becomes at best trivially true and fails to
shed light on what emotions are (Scarantino 2010).
Two more promising strategies have been put in place to defend
cognitivism from counterexamples. The first, which we call the
judgmentalist
add-on strategy
(Goldie 2000), consists of
explicitly adding on to judgments other components of emotions, rather
than embedding them into judgments through the elastic strategy. For
instance, the motivational dimension of emotions has been accounted
for by suggesting that emotions are not just judgments, but rather
combinations of judgments (or beliefs) and desires (Marks 1982; Green
1992; Gordon 1987). Other authors have added further elements,
proposing that emotions are combinations of judgments, desires and
feelings, a move intended to account for both motivational and
phenomenological dimensions of emotions (Lyons 1980).
Another strategy, which may be called the
alternate cognitions
strategy
, consists of replacing the broad notion of judgment with
a variety of other types of cognitive evaluations that can account for
the intentionality of emotions while avoiding some of the critiques
that have been raised against judgmentalism. Since most of the action
in contemporary philosophy of emotions focuses on which alternate
cognitions are to be preferred, we will devote a whole section to the
topic. First, we discuss how the Evaluative Tradition has been
developed in affective science.
6. The Evaluative Tradition in Affective Science: Appraisal Theories
Roughly around the time when the Evaluative Tradition became popular
in philosophy, a parallel tradition emerged in affective science
through the pioneering work of Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus. What
powered this development was in part the cognitivist revolution, the
intellectual movement that replaced behaviorism in the 1960s and put
the cognitive processing of mental representations at the heart of the
science of psychology.
Arnold argued that emotion research had neglected to explain how
emotions are elicited. To shed light on the matter, she introduced the
notion of
appraisal
, the process through which the
significance of a situation for an individual is determined. Appraisal
gives rise to attraction or aversion, and emotion is equated for
Arnold with this
felt tendency toward anything intuitively appraised as good
(beneficial), or away from anything intuitively appraised as bad
(harmful). (Arnold 1960: 171)
Several authors prior to Arnold had acknowledged that emotions must be
produced by some sort of cognitive evaluation of the eliciting
circumstances, either in the form of a judgment, a thought, a
perception, or an act of imagination. After all, it is quite clear
that the same stimulus can generate different emotions in different
people, or in the same person at different times, which suggests that
it is not stimuli as such that elicit emotions, but stimuli as
appraised.
Arnold (1960) was the first to subject the internal structure of the
appraisal process to scientific investigation. Appraisals, she
suggested, are made along three primary dimensions: eliciting
circumstances can be evaluated as good or bad, present or absent, and
easy to attain or avoid. For example, the cognitive evaluation that
causes fear can be described as the appraisal of an event as bad,
absent but possible in the future, and hard to avoid; whereas the
cause of joy can be described as the appraisal of an event as good,
present and easy to maintain.
Broadly speaking, appraisal theories of emotions are accounts of the
structure of the processes that extract significance from stimuli and
differentiate emotions from one another. It is also frequently assumed
that appraisal is a dynamic process: appraisals are followed by
re-appraisals, which follow changes in the environment and in internal
variables, and incrementally shape emotions over time.
It should be noted that appraisal theories do not properly qualify as
theories of what emotions are, even though individual appraisal
theorists often articulate such theories as a complement to their
theories of the structure of appraisal. More specifically, appraisal
theories are in principle compatible with theories of emotions that
identify them as evaluations, feelings, or motivations, as long as
such theories acknowledge that appraisals play an essential role in
differentiating emotions from one another. This being said, a great
many influential appraisal theorists—including Arnold, Lazarus
and Scherer—offer theories of emotions that would best fit into
the Motivational Tradition.
Scientific theories have significantly developed our understanding of
the nature of appraisal, endowing it with even more structure than
Arnold originally envisioned (e.g., C. Smith & Ellsworth 1985;
Frijda 1986; Lazarus 1991a,b; Roseman 1996; Scherer 2001; Ellsworth
& Scherer 2003; Roseman & Smith 2001; Oatley &
Johnson-Laird 1987).
Lazarus (1991b), for instance, introduced six structural dimensions of
assessment, including (1) goal-relevance, (2) goal-congruence or
incongruence, (3) type of ego-involvement, (4) blame or credit, (5)
coping potential, and (6) future expectancy. For example, guilt is
assumed to be caused by the appraisal of an event as goal relevant,
goal-incongruent, involving a moral transgression, and one for which
the self is to blame (coping potential and future expectancy
appraisals are left open). Lazarus’ own theory of emotions is
labeled as cognitive-relational-motivational, because it holds that
emotion is a complex state, an AB, with [appraisal] A as cause and B
as a combination of an action tendency, physiological change, and
subjective affect, (Lazarus 1991a: 819)
whereby the appraisal is not just a cause of emotion but also a part
of it (see Moors 2013 for a critique of this assumption).
Scherer et al. (2001) distinguished between sixteen dimensions of
appraisal, labeled Stimulus Evaluation Checks (SECs), which can be
grouped into four classes: appraisals of relevance, appraisals of
consequences, appraisals of coping potential, and appraisals of
normative significance. On Scherer’s component process model,
[e]motion is defined as an episode of interrelated, synchronized
changes in the states of all or most of the five organismic subsystems
in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus
event as relevant to major concerns of the organism. (Scherer 2005:
697)
The five organismic subsystems underlie five emotion components which,
when engaged in coordinated changes, instantiate emotions: an
appraisal, autonomic physiological changes, an action tendency, a
motor expression, and a subjective feeling. In his more recent
collaborative work (Moors & Scherer 2013), Scherer has suggested that
the point of each stimulus evaluation check is actually to determine
action tendencies, which would give pride of place to the motivational
component and make his theory an evaluative-motivational hybrid (see
also Scherer & Moors forthcoming).
A variant of appraisal theories has recently attracted some interest in
affective computing, an interdisciplinary approach that combines
insights from affective science and computer science (see Picard
1997). This is the Belief and Desire Theory of Emotions (BDTE)
developed by Reisenzein (2009a,b; see also Miceli & Castelfranchi
2015). The BDTE holds that emotions are caused by a combination of
cognitive evaluations (beliefs) and conative motivations (desires),
whereas standard appraisal theories postulate cognitive evaluations of
motive-congruence, which in effect assesses the degree to which the
stimulus is congruent with the goals/desires of the agent.
BDTE’s core thesis is that emotions are elicited by hardwired
mechanisms whose evolutionary function is to compare newly acquired
beliefs with existing desires and existing beliefs, thereby monitoring
and updating the central representational system of humans (the
belief–desire system). For example, suppose you have a belief
that your favorite candidate will lose the election and a desire that
she win the election (Reisenzein 2009a). Once new information that she
has in fact won the election is acquired, a belief-belief-comparator
system produces a belief disconfirmation signal subjectively
experienced as surprise, and a belief-desire-comparator system
produces a desire fulfillment signal subjectively experienced as
pleasure. This in turn leads to adaptive responses which include a
refocusing of attention to the new content that one’s favorite
candidate won, the deletion of the belief that one’s favorite
candidate was going to lose, and the subjective experience of
happiness.
To generalize, emotions are for the BDTE combinations of belief
disconfirmation/confirmation signals and desire
fulfillment/frustration signals experienced as, respectively,
surprise/expectancy confirmation and pleasure/displeasure, which blend
into an emergent experience of a specific emotion (e.g., happiness,
fear, hope, etc.). These signals are non-conceptual, in the sense that
they do not presuppose concept use, and they bring about redirection
of attention, updates of the belief and desire store, and, when above
threshold, distinctive subjective experiences.
A challenge faced by appraisal theories concerns whether appraisals
are causes of emotions, entailments of emotions, parts of emotions, or
some combination of the above. These questions raise complex conceptual issues we
cannot address here (see Moors 2013), but they are essential for
assessing the evidentiary support for appraisal theory. A long-running
critique of the research program (Oatley 1992; Parkinson &
Manstead 1992; Parkinson 1997; Russell 1987; Frijda 1993) has been
that the self-report evidence commonly taken to support a causal
interpretation of the relation between appraisals and emotions only
supports a relation of conceptual entailment between them because it
unveils people’s beliefs about what makes emotions
appropriate
rather than what
causes
emotions (see
Scherer 2009 for a response).
7. The Hybrid Evaluative-Feeling Tradition in Recent Philosophy
We mentioned earlier that a popular response to the critiques received
by philosophical judgmentalism has been the
alternate cognitions
strategy
, intended to better account for their intentionality,
differentiation, motivational power, and phenomenology, as well as
their potential recalcitrance.
This has led to a gradual convergence of the Evaluative and Feeling
Traditions, with the former now identifying emotions as evaluative
perceptions with a distinctive phenomenology and the latter
identifying emotions as evaluative feelings with a distinctive
intentionality. As a result, the distinction between evaluative (or
cognitivist) theories and feeling theories is increasingly blurred,
with most of the dominant accounts in the philosophy of emotions now
qualifying as hybrids.
7.1 Emotions as Evaluative Perceptions
Perceptual theories come in literal/strong and non-literal/weak
varieties (Brady 2013; Salmela 2011). Strong versions generally assume
that emotions are genuine forms of perception along the lines of
sensory perception; weak versions stress key properties emotions share
with sensory perception, while also acknowledging important
differences.
Prinz’s Neo-Jamesian theory is a good example of a strong
perceptual theory. For Prinz (2004), we can speak of a
bona
fide
perceptual system when we are in the presence of a dedicated
input system with specialized transducers and mental representations.
Sensory perception clearly has input systems dedicated to vision,
olfaction, touch, hearing, and taste. Following in the footsteps of
Damasio’s (1994, 2003) neuroscientific work, Prinz suggests that
emotions can also rely on a dedicated system within the somatosensory
system. Thus, emotions literally are perceptions of bodily changes,
either at the visceral, hormonal, or musculoskeletal levels, or in the
form of changes in the somatosensory brain areas.
Prinz adds that emotions are not
just
perceptions of bodily
changes, from which it follows that two emotions can differ from one
another despite involving indistinguishable perceptions of bodily
changes. For example, fear is not just the perception of “a
racing heart and…other physiological changes” (Prinz
2004: 69): it also has a distinctive function—being elicited by
danger—and a specific negative valence marker—less of
this!—which motivates avoidant action. Since on a teleosemantic
theory of representation mental states represent what they have the
function of indicating (Prinz 2004; Dretske 1988), Prinz concludes
that perceiving a racing heart can also represents danger insofar as
it has the function of indicating it (but see Shargel & Prinz
2018; Robinson 2005). To sum up, subjects literally perceive bodily
changes (the nominal content) and indirectly perceive the formal
object (the real content) by virtue of the fact that bodily changes
represent formal objects.
Weak perceptual theories take emotions to be relevantly analogous to
sensory perception or proprioception. In addition, most take emotions
to be direct perceptions of formal objects rather than perceptions of
bodily changes with the function of tracking formal objects.
An influential proposal in this vein is offered by Roberts (2003), who
holds that “emotions are a kind of perception” (2003: 87) in the
form of concern-based construals. Roberts clarifies that construals
are “impressions, ways things appear to the subject” (2003: 75)
and that they are concern-based by virtue of being based on the
subject’s desires and aversions. For example, a father’s
fear that a fire will hurt his daughter is a construal of the fire as
dangerous based on the father’s desire that nothing bad happen
to his daughter.
Along similar lines, Tappolet (2016) suggests that emotions are
perceptual experiences of evaluative properties (a.k.a. values) like
dangerousness (fear) or slights (anger). Some authors add that such
evaluative properties are not available through any others means, just
like color properties are not available except by courtesy of visual
perception (see, e.g., Johnston 2001).
Tappolet emphasizes that evaluative perception, just like sensory
perception, is non-conceptual in nature and cognitively impenetrable
(see also Döring 2007; Döring & Lutz 2015; Goldie 2000;
Tappolet 2000; Goldie 2002; Wollheim 1999; Charland 1995; Zajonc
2000). This would explain why creatures who do not possess concepts,
like animals and pre-linguistic infants, can have emotions, and it
would account for emotional recalcitrance, which can be understood
along the lines of a visual illusion. As we visually perceive a pencil
as bent while judging it to be straight, so we emotionally perceive a
transparent platform over the Grand Canyon as dangerous while judging
it to be non-dangerous.
Tappolet (2016) lists additional features that help explain why so
many authors have come to think of emotions as perceptions: (a) both
emotions and perceptions have salient phenomenal properties, (b) both
are elicited automatically by real or imagined objects, (c) both have
correctness conditions because they represent the world as being a
certain way, and (d) both play the epistemic role of providing
defeasible reasons for belief (e.g., visual perception for the belief
that something is blue, and fear for the belief that something is
dangerous).
These analogies notwithstanding, several critics have rejected
perceptual theories of emotions (e.g., Salmela 2011; Dokic &
Lemaire 2013). A prominent critique concerns their inability to
account for emotional recalcitrance. For example, Helm (2001) has
argued that perceptualists have ended up removing the irrationality
that is distinctive of recalcitrance. If perceiving a transparent
platform over the Grand Canyon as dangerous while judging it to be
non-dangerous were just like a visual illusion, then there would be
nothing irrational about it, as there is nothing irrational in seeing
a pencil as bent while judging it to be straight. But there clearly is
some measure of irrationality involved in recalcitrant emotions:
unlike perceptual illusions, they motivate us to act. In other words,
they involve a passive assent which contradicts the active assent
captured by the contradicting judgment.
7.2 Emotions as Evaluative Feelings
Several authors have proposed theories that endow feelings with
intentionality. A notable example is that of Goldie (2000), who
identifies the intentionality of emotions with that of
feelings
towards
, which are not just bodily feelings that borrow their
intentionality from somewhere else, as in Prinz’s account, but
are instead supposed to have their own, intrinsic intentionality (see
also Döring 2007; Pugmire 1998). For example, when I feel fear
about slipping on ice, my feeling is towards the ice as being
dangerous. This sort of feeling is a matter of thinking of the ice
with feeling, and cannot be reduced to a combination of a
non-intentional bodily feeling and a non-emotional evaluative thought.
As Goldie puts it,
emotional feelings are inextricably intertwined with the
world-directed aspect of emotion, so that an adequate account of an
emotion’s intentionality…will at the same time capture an
important aspect of its phenomenology. (Goldie 2002: 242; see also
Ratcliffe 2005, 2017)
In a similar vein, Helm (2009: 8) proposes that “emotions are
intentional feelings of import” which are either pleasurable or
unpleasant. On Helm’s view,
[f]or something to have import to you—for you to
care
about it—is (roughly) for it to be worthy of attention and
action. (Helm 2009: 252)
This explains why emotions motivate action: feeling that something is
worthy of attention and action is being motivated. It also explains
what makes a recalcitrant emotion irrational. By judging a transparent
platform over the Grand Canyon as not dangerous and yet fearing it,
the subject is judging that what he or she feels is worthy of
attention and action actually isn’t, thereby undertaking
evaluative commitments at odds with one another (Helm 2015:
430–431).
Some of the views that ascribe intentionality to feelings are inspired
by the broader research program of
representationalism
in the
philosophy of mind, which is the view that phenomenal properties are
identifiable with, or at least reducible to, intentional properties
(Dretske 1995; Horgan & Tienson 2002). In some variants of
representationalism, the emotional phenomenology that gets to be
reduced is merely somatic, in the sense that the feeling is directed
at
bodily events (e.g., Tye 1995). In other variants, the
phenomenology is much richer, as it comprises somatic, cognitive,
conative and irreducibly affective components directed
at
particular and formal objects in the world (e.g., Kriegel 2012).
An alternative embraced by some contemporary feeling theorists is to
argue that emotions are feelings devoid of any intentional objects.
The contrary impression is an illusion, deriving from the fact that
the feelings we call emotions are typically caused by thoughts with an
intentional structure with which they are associated in a
“composite” experience (Whiting 2011; Goldstein 2002). On
this view, fear of the ice is a composite mental state consisting of
an emotion—the objectless feeling of fear—plus a thought
with the ice as its intentional object. In themselves, emotions are
merely hedonic feelings without intentionality. The grounds claimed
for this view are explicitly phenomenological, however, and since most
researchers’ introspection appears to deliver the contrary
verdict that emotions are themselves object-directed, the composite
view fails to persuade (for a different argument for objectlessness
based on social psychology data, see Shargel 2015).
7.3 Emotions as Patterns of Salience
Another influential approach in recent philosophy of emotions takes
them to be
mechanisms that control the crucial factor of salience among what
would otherwise be an unmanageable plethora of objects of attention,
interpretations, and strategies of inference and conduct. (de Sousa
1987: xv; see also Elgin 2006; Evans 2001; Ben-Ze’ev 2000)
For example, there are innumerable things I could in principle be
focusing on as I find myself face to face with a grizzly bear on a
hike, but my fear focuses my attention squarely on the bear, on how
to interpret its movements, and on how to infer and execute an escape
strategy. This approach may be taken to have a “perceptual
flavor” (Prinz 2004: 223) because it describes emotions as
mechanisms for changing salience, and perceptions can certainly affect
salience. But de Sousa aims to draw attention to the broader role
emotions play in providing the framework for cognitions of both
perceptual varieties (e.g., what we see and hear) and non-perceptual
varieties (e.g., what we believe and remember).
Some philosophers suggest that the directive power that emotions exert
over cognitions is partly a function of their essentially dramatic or
narrative structure (Rorty 1987 [1988]). Goldie (2012) offers a
particularly subtle examination of the role of narrative in
constituting our emotions over the long term. It seems conceptually
incoherent to suppose that one could have an emotion—say, an
intense jealousy or a consuming rage—for only a fraction of a
second (Wollheim 1999). One explanation of this feature of emotions is
that a story plays itself out during the course of each emotional
episode, and stories take place over stretches of time. Interestingly,
Goldie argues that the narrative structure of emotions is the same
whether emotions are experienced towards real or fictional objects,
which explains why we can respond to fictional characters with
full-fledged, although motivationally muted, emotional responses (for
a review of other solutions to the so-called
paradox of
fiction
, see Cova & Friend forthcoming).
De Sousa (1987) has suggested that the stories characteristic of
different emotions are learned by association with “paradigm
scenarios”. Paradigm scenarios involve two aspects: first, a
situation type providing the characteristic objects of the specific
emotion-type (where objects can be particular and formal), and second,
a set of characteristic or “normal” responses to the
situation, where normality is determined by a complex and
controversial mix of biological and cultural factors. These scenarios
are drawn first from our daily life as small children and later
reinforced by the stories, art, and culture to which we are exposed.
Later still, they are supplemented and refined by literature and other
art forms capable of expanding the range of one’s imagination of
ways to live (de Sousa 1990; Faucher and Tappolet 2008b).
Once our emotional repertoire is established, we interpret new
situations through the lens of different paradigm scenarios. When a
particular scenario suggests itself as an interpretation, it arranges
or rearranges our perceptual, cognitive, and inferential dispositions.
When a paradigm scenario is evoked by a novel situation, the resulting
emotion may or may not be appropriate to the situation that triggers
it. Thus, a childhood fear of clowns may be reappraised and overcome
in adult life as a result of a more realistic appraisal. In that sense
at least, emotions can be assessed for rationality (see
section 10
for further discussion).
8. The Motivational Tradition in Affective Science and Its Opponents
The third tradition in the study of emotions identifies them
essentially with special kinds of motivational states, where a
motivational state broadly understood is an internal cause of
behaviors aimed at satisfying a goal. Members of this research
tradition think that the central problem a theory of emotions needs to
solve is explaining how emotions and actions are related, because it
is ultimately what we do when we emote that produces significant
personal and social consequences.
The Motivational Tradition was anticipated by many theorists of
emotions in Ancient Greece and throughout the Middle Ages who
emphasized the constitutive relation between emotions and behavioral
impulses (King 2010), but it finds its first modern precursor in Dewey
(1894, 1895). Dewey was unhappy with the reversal of common sense
entailed by the Jamesian idea that emotions are feelings that emerge
in response to proprioceptions. If we truly were angry
because
we strike, Dewey countered, anger could not cause the
striking, and this would deprive anger, as well as other emotions, of
their explanatory importance.
Dewey’s main suggestion was that there is a difference between
the feeling of anger and anger itself: an emotion “in its
entirety” is “a mode of behavior which is purposive”
and “which also reflects itself into feeling” (Dewey 1895:
15). When we say that someone is angry, Dewey concluded, “we do
not simply, or even chiefly, mean that [such person] has a certain
‘feel’ occupying his consciousness”. Rather,
“[w]e mean He…has assumed a readiness to act in certain
ways” (Dewey 1895: 16–17). The view that emotions are
essentially either mechanisms that change one’s readiness to act
or states of action readiness themselves has since been developed in a
variety of ways in affective science and in the philosophy of
emotions. Let us begin from an influential evolutionary variant of the
Motivational Tradition in affective science.
8.1 Basic Emotion Theory: Emotions as Evolved Affect Programs
Basic emotion theory emerged in the 1970s from the pioneering work of
Silvan Tomkins, whose orienting insight was that “the primary
motivational system is the affective system” (Tomkins 2008: 4).
Tomkins proposed that there are nine basic or innate affects
controlled by inherited programs: interest, enjoyment, surprise, fear,
anger, distress, shame, contempt and disgust. Their motivational power
comes from their feeling pleasurable or painful, with such hedonic
feelings emerging from the perception of facial changes providing
“motivating feed-back” (Tomkins 2008: 623).
Tomkins’ theory of basic affects was followed by two related
developments. The first was the birth of modern-day basic emotion
theory, with its consuming attention for the universality of facial
expressions, present especially in the work of Paul Ekman (Ekman et
al. 1972; Ekman 1980, 1999a, 2003; Ekman & Friesen 1969) and
Carrol Izard (1971, 1977, 1992, 2007). The second was the emergence of
the evolutionary psychology approach to emotions understood as
solutions to recurrent evolutionary problems, with prominent
contributions by Plutchick (1980) and Tooby and Cosmides (2008) (see
also Shand 1920 and McDougall 1908 [2001] for earlier examples of
evolutionary theories of emotions).
Starting in the 1990s, the two approaches have progressively merged,
although evolutionary psychologists are more inclined than basic
emotion theorists to conclude that a given emotion solves an
evolutionary problem merely on the basis of plausibility arguments.
According to Ekman (1999a: 46), “emotions evolved for their
adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life tasks” such as
[f]ighting, falling in love, escaping predators, confronting sexual
infidelity, experiencing a failure-driven loss in status, responding
to the death of a family member. (Tooby & Cosmides 2008: 117; see
also Keltner & Haidt 2001)
They have adaptive value because they quickly mobilize and coordinate
resources needed to successfully deal with life tasks, and because
they communicate socially relevant information via bodily expressions.
As soon as a basic emotion program is activated, a
cascade of changes (without our choice or immediate awareness) occurs
in split seconds in: the emotional signals in the face and voice;
preset actions; learned actions; the autonomic nervous system activity
that regulates our body; the regulatory patterns that continuously
modify our behavior; the retrieval of relevant memories and
expectations; and how we interpret what is happening within us and in
the world. (Ekman & Cordaro 2011: 366)
From this follows the central empirical hypothesis of traditional BET:
there should be bodily signatures for each basic emotion consisting of
highly correlated and emotion-specific changes at the level of facial
expressions, autonomic changes and preset and learned actions. More
specifically, Ekman defined basic emotions in terms of (a) distinctive
universal signals, (b) distinctive physiology, (c) distinctive
thoughts, memories and images, (d) distinctive subjective experiences,
(e) predictable developmental appearance, (f) homologous presence in
other primates, (g) automatic appraisals tuned to distinctive
universals in antecedent events, (h) quick onset, brief duration, and
unbidden occurrence (Ekman 1999a: 5). Some basic emotion theorists
have also suggested that basic emotions are associated with
distinctive hardwired neural circuits (e.g., Izard 2011; Levenson
2011; Panksepp 1998, 2000).
Armed with this definition, Ekman proceeded to argue that we have
empirical evidence for six basic affect programs (happiness, sadness,
anger, fear, disgust, and surprise), later on expanding the list to
include states whose basic status is likely to be proven in the future
such as amusement, contempt, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride
in achievement, relief, satisfaction, wonder, ecstasy, sensory
pleasure, and shame (Ekman & Cordaro 2011). Scientifically-minded
philosophers often restrict their discussions of emotions to the basic
affect programs, since these are argued to be the only natural kinds
so far discovered in the affective domain (Griffiths 1997; DeLancey
2002).
The main source of evidence for basic affect programs arguably comes
from cross-cultural studies on facial expressions that use a
recognition technique first described by Darwin (1872). It consists of
showing pictures of emotional expressions and asking observers what
emotions they express from a list of six to ten emotion terms in the
observer’s language. As reported by Ekman (1999b), experiments
of this sort have so far been performed with observers from dozens of
countries, revealing significant agreement on which emotion is
portrayed (the recognition rates are strongest for happiness, sadness
and disgust). This being said, membership to a given culture increases
recognition of expressions from that culture, which has led some to
argue that emotional expressions are a universal language with
different dialects (Elfenbein et al. 2007).
In combination with complementary data on the production of facial
expressions (Matsumoto et al. 2008), the recognitional data have been
taken to speak in favor of the hypothesis that affect programs are
evolutionary adaptations producing the same mandatory facial changes
in all cultures, although culturally specific display rules can
partially mask such cross-cultural universality.
The evidence for universality has been criticized on methodological
and conceptual grounds. Methodologically, it has been argued that the
experiments are defective because they rely on a forced choice
paradigm which inflates consensus and because they rely on
ecologically unrealistic stimuli such as actors’ posed faces
(Russell 1994). Conceptually, it has been argued that the evolutionary
hypothesis that selection would favor the production of mandatory
facial expressions is implausible, because in conflict situations it
may not be in the evolutionary interest of the emoter to let observers
know about what emotions they are experiencing (e.g., communicating
fear during a confrontation). And even if there were universality of
recognition and production of emotional expressions, alternative
explanations like species constant learning would be able to account
for the data (Fridlund 1994).
8.2 The Behavioral Ecology View, Psychological Constructionism and Social Constructionism: Emotions as Constructions
An influential alternative to the Basic Emotions view of facial
expressions is the Behavioral Ecology view (Fridlund 1994), which
replaces the notion of
expressions of emotion
with that of
displays
produced in an audience-dependent fashion when
signalers expect benefits from them. Audience-dependence entails that
signalers tailor their context-sensitive facial displays to their
audience and do not produce them mandatorily upon experiencing a given
emotion. Displays are rather
declarations that signify our trajectory in a given social
interaction, that is, what we will do in the current situation, or
what we would like the other to do. (Fridlund 1994: 130)
For example, what Ekman would describe as an anger face, a sad face or
a happy face is described by behavioral ecologists as, respectively, a
display of readiness to attack, a display of intent to affiliate and a
display of recruitment of succor (Fridlund 1994). A number of
theorists have argued that Ekman’s and Fridlund’s
approaches can be reconciled: emotions can at the same time express
emotions and make declarations that are credible precisely because
they are associated with emotions (M. Green 2007; Scarantino 2017;
Hess, Banse, & Kappas 1995; see also Bar-On 2013).
The broader problem with traditional BET is that the distinctive
response profiles allegedly produced in cascade-like fashion have not
been convincingly demonstrated either at the level of expressive
responses or at the level of autonomic changes, neural changes, preset
actions or learned actions (Ortony & Turner 1990; Mauss et al.
2005; Barrett 2006; Lindquist et al. 2012). This lack of clear and
distinctive bodily signatures has led to a variety of attempts to save
BET from empirical refutation. Some basic emotion theorists have
suggested, for instance, that basic emotions can be regulated, which
would mask their mandatory effects, or that they cannot be elicited at
the right level of intensity by laboratory stimuli, or that they often
mix with other affective and cognitive states in ways that blur their
distinctive responses (Ekman & Cordaro 2011).
Others have offered new meta-analyses that are more favorable to the
existence of emotion-specific biological signatures, especially at the
level of autonomic and neural changes (Kreibig 2010; Stephens et al.
2010; Nummenmaa & Saarimäki forthcoming). A third option is
to transition to a New Basic Emotion Theory which replaces the
assumption of cascade-like responses with that of action tendencies
with control precedence, which would account for some of the
variability of responses while preserving the core idea that basic
emotions are geared towards solving evolutionary problems (Levenson
2011; Scarantino & Griffiths 2011; Scarantino 2015).
A more radical proposal has been offered by psychological
constructionists, who have suggested that we should abandon entirely
the “latent variable” model distinctive of basic emotion
theory, replacing it with an “emergent variable” model
according to which emotions do not cause facial expressions, autonomic
changes and preset and learned actions but rather emerge from them
(Barrett & Russell 2015). Specifically, psychological
constructionists have argued that there is no one-to-one
correspondence between anger, fear, happiness, sadness, etc. and any
neurobiological, physiological, expressive, behavioral, or
phenomenological responses, and that the different responses allegedly
diagnostic of basic emotions are not even strongly correlated with one
another.
Psychological constructionists have concluded that this variability
calls into question the very idea that
emotions have ontological status as causal entities [and that they]
exist in the brain or body and cause changes in sensory, perceptual,
motor, and physiological outputs. (Barrett 2005: 257)
This view is at the polar opposite of the Motivational Tradition,
which takes emotions to be motives—causal determinants of the
changes in outputs we observe.
It has also been suggested that the folk psychological categories
commonly invoked by basic emotion theorists—e.g., anger, fear,
disgust, etc.—are not suitable objects of scientific
investigation, and should be replaced by categories that describe
emotion components rather than discrete emotions themselves (Russell
2003; Barrett 2006, 2017).
Constructionists are convinced that emotions are put together on the
fly and in flexible ways using building blocks that are not specific
to emotions, roughly in the way cooked foods are constructed from
ingredients that are not specific to them and could be used according
to alternative recipes. One of the ingredients out of which emotions
are built is said to be
core affect
, which is a
neurophysiological state that is consciously accessible as a simple,
nonreflective feeling that is an integral blend of hedonic
(pleasure–displeasure) and arousal (sleepy–activated)
values. (Russell 2003: 147)
Psychological constructionists emphasize that we are always in some
state of core affect, which is a sort of barometer that informs us of
our “relationship” to the flow of events. The readings of
the barometer are feelings, understood as blends of
pleasure-displeasure and activation-deactivation. These readings can
be represented as points along a “circumplex structure”, with the vertical axis representing the degree of activation-deactivation and the horizontal axis representing the degree of pleasure-displeasure
(Russell 1980):
Different constructionists describe the way in which emotions are
built out of core affect and other ingredients in different ways. For
example, in Barrett’s influential Conceptual Act View,
conceptualization plays a key role (Barrett 2006, 2013, 2017; Barrett
& Satpute 2013). Being afraid amounts to categorizing a core
affective state of high arousal and high displeasure under the
“fear” concept. Being happy amounts to categorizing a core
affective state of high arousal and high pleasure under the
“happiness” concept. More generally, Barrett (2017) takes
emotions to be experiences that emerge from the categorization of
sensations from one’s own body and the world. This view, which
resembles Schachter and Singer’s (1962) cognition-arousal theory
and merges themes from the Feeling Tradition and the Evaluative
Tradition, has been criticized for conflating emotions with verbal
labeling, for making it impossible for adult humans to mislabel their
own emotions, and for preventing infants and animals from having
emotions in the first place (e.g., Scherer 2009, see Barrett 2015 for
a reply).
Russell (2003) considers conceptualization to affect only the
meta-experience
of emotion, i.e., the realization that one is
afraid, and allows emotion episodes to be constructed without the
involvement of categorization. On his view, there are a variety of
independent causal mechanisms, rather than any emotion-specific
mechanism, that explain why there is some degree of correlation
between expressive, autonomic and behavioral changes in emotional
episodes, even though it is emphasized that the correlations are much
weaker than what Ekman’s (1999a) model would predict (Russell
2012).
In recent times, some proposals have been made to integrate
psychological constructionism with other research programs. Some have
suggested that progress lies in merging appraisal theory with
Russell’s version of psychological constructionism and have
offered a general theory of how emotional action tendencies are caused
by the weighing of the expected utilities of action options (Moors
2017). Others have proposed that we sharply distinguish between the
phenomenological and the motivational side of affective phenomena,
handing out the motivational side of (some) basic emotions to a new
theory of survival circuits and reserving folk psychological emotion
terms to designate feelings exclusively, with the latter understood as
cognitively constructed (LeDoux 2015, 2017; note the contrast with
LeDoux 1996).
Another option with some elements of overlap with psychological
constructionism is social constructionism. The social constructionist
approach found its first advocates in the 1920’s when a number
of anthropologists and social scientists started questioning
Darwin’s (1872) evidence for the universality of emotional
expressions (e.g., Allport 1924; Landis 1924; Klineberg 1940).
These researchers initiated what we may call the “cultural
variability” strand of social constructionism, related to the
thesis that emotions are different in several essential respects in
different cultures. These differences have since been shown with
respect to both the emotion lexicon (e.g., Russell 1991; Wierzbicka
1999) and the diagnostic characteristics of emotions (e.g., Mesquita
& Frijda 1992; Mesquita & Parkinson forthcoming).
The strand of social constructionism that is more germane to the
Motivational Tradition is the “social role” strand,
related to the thesis that emotions fulfill social functions by virtue
of which they should be considered actions or roles rather than
passions (see, e.g., Solomon 1976 and Averill 1990 on the “myth
of passions”). Jean Paul Sartre (1939 [1948]) can be considered
the first to offer a general, although idiosyncratic, theory of
emotions as social roles, a view developed in the early 1980s by
philosophers (e.g., Harré 1986, Armon-Jones 1986),
psychologists (e.g., Averill 1980), and anthropologists (e.g., Lutz
1988). In recent times, Parkinson (1995, 2008, 2009), Parkinson,
Fischer, and Manstead (2005), Griffiths (2004), Mesquita and Boiger
(2014) and Van Kleef (2016) have articulated sophisticated social
constructionist accounts that add to the social constructionist
tradition themes from evolutionary accounts.
9. The Motivational Tradition in Recent Philosophy
9.1 Attitudinal and Motivational Theories: Emotions as Attitudes and Motive States
There are two main flavors of the Motivational Tradition in
contemporary philosophy of emotions. The
phenomenological
version
, articulated by Deonna and Teroni (2012, 2015), assumes
that emotions are feelings of action readiness. The
non-phenomenological version
, articulated by Scarantino
(2014, 2015) identifies emotions as causes of states of action
readiness which may or may not be felt. Both versions agree that the
fundamental aspect of an emotion is the way it motivates the emoter to
act.
Deonna and Teroni argue that both judgmentalist and perceptual
theories of emotion make the mistake of identifying emotions in terms
of
content
rather than in terms of
attitude
or
mode
. As Searle (1979: 48) points out, “[a]ll
intentional states consist of a representative content in a
psychological mode”. For example, believing and desiring are
different psychological modes or attitudes, and they each have a
content—respectively, what is believed or desired as captured by
a proposition.
If emotions were special kinds of judgments or perceptions, they would
differ from other kinds of judgments or perceptions not in terms of
attitude but merely in terms of content—
what
is judged
or perceived when we emote. Furthermore, the emotions themselves would
differ from one another only in terms of content rather than attitude,
because there would be no attitude specific to, say, anger, shame,
guilt and so on, but rather a common attitude—the judging
attitude or the perceiving attitude—towards different contents.
Deonna and Teroni (2015) think that this approach fails to capture not
only what differentiates emotions from one another, but also what
makes them special as motivational states.
As an alternative, they propose an
attitudinal theory of
emotions.
On this view, fear of a tiger is neither the judgment
nor the perception that there is something dangerous at hand, but
rather the attitude of taking-as-dangerous directed towards the
content that there is a tiger. What gives emotional attitudes their
content, Deonna and Teroni continue, are their
cognitive
bases
, which are the ways in which the content that there is a
tiger is cognized—e.g., through perception, imagination,
inference and so on (e.g., the perception that there is a tiger).
But what sort of attitude is the one that constitutes an emotion
rather than, say, a judgment or a perception? Deonna and Teroni
consider emotional attitudes to be essentially experiences of feeling
one’s body ready for action. For example, fear of a dog amounts
to “an experience of the dog as dangerous” insofar as it
is “an experience of one’s body being prepared” for
avoidance (Deonna & Teroni 2015: 303). Similarly, anger at a
person “is an experience of offensiveness insofar as it consists
in an experience of one’s body being prepared to
retaliate” (2015: 303). Thus, emotions are felt attitudes of
action readiness irreducible to non-emotional attitudes and specific
to each emotion (for a critique of the attitudinal theory, see Rossi
& Tappolet forthcoming).
The starting point of Scarantino’s (2014)
Motivational
Theory of Emotions
is the conviction that emotions are
irreducible not just to judgments and perceptions, but also to
feelings, and should be understood instead as special kinds of
“central motive states” or “behavioral
programs”. Central motive states or behavioral programs are
defined by what they do rather than by how they feel. And what they do
is to provide a “general direction for behavior by selectively
potentiating coherent sets of behavioral options” (Gallistel
1980: 322).
This selective potentiation can result in feelings, but the phenomenal
changes are not necessary to the potentiation itself, which consists
of changes in the probabilities of behavioral options. To exemplify,
fear involves the selective potentiation of options that share the
goal of avoiding a certain target appraised as dangerous, anger
involves the selective potentiation of options that share the goal of
attacking a certain target appraised as offensive, guilt involves the
selective potentiation of options that share the goal of repairing a
relationship appraised as damaged by actions that fell short of
one’s moral standards, and so on.
The Motivational Theory of Emotions is inspired by Frijda’s
(1986) theory of emotions as action tendencies, but there are some
differences. Scarantino (2014, 2015) draws a distinction between an
emotion
and an
episode of emotion
, with the emotion
corresponding to what causes a change in action readiness and the
episode of emotion corresponding to the actual change of action
readiness. But Scarantino borrows a key ingredient from Frijda’s
(1986) theory, namely the assumption that action tendencies must have
control precedence
to become emotional. Control precedence
involves interrupting competing processes, preempting access—in
memory, inference, perception, etc.—to information not related
to the avoidance goal and preparing the body for action.
The idea that emotions are behavioral programs that bring about
prioritized impulses to act can be combined with an
origin
story
about how some of such programs evolved to deal with
fundamental life tasks, leading to what Scarantino (2015) has labeled
the New Basic Emotion Theory. According to it, learning can affect
both what activates the evolved program (input) and what responses the
program brings about (output) through the interplay of the prioritized
action tendency and regulation. This will result in massive
variability of the actual responses observed upon the activation of
any basic emotion, shielding the New BET from the lack of
“bodily signatures” problem.
Finally, Scarantino (2014) endorses a teleosemantic theory of content
for emotions to deal with the problem of intentionality, and proposes
that different emotions differ from one another and from non-emotional
states
both
in terms of the state of prioritized action
tendency they cause (the attitude) and in terms of what they represent
(the content). On this view, fear is a prioritizing action control
program which represents dangers because it has the function of
causing avoidant behaviors in the presence of danger, anger is a
prioritizing action control program which represents slights because
it has the function of causing aggressive behaviors in the presence of
slights, and so on.
A central challenge for motivational theories of emotions of both
phenomenological and non-phenomenological varieties is to account for
the states of action readiness distinctive of different emotions.
First, many emotions do not appear to motivate action at all. Grief
and depression, for example, seem to involve a general depotentiation
of the readiness to act. Second, it is unclear which action tendencies
“backward-looking” emotions like regret could elicit,
because they focus on what happened in the past, which cannot be
changed. Third, emotions like joy involve the selective potentiation
of a fairly open range of behavioral options, so it is unclear what
action tendency may be associated with them. Fourth, it seems to be
possible for the same action tendency to be associated with different
emotions, and for different emotions to be associated with the same
action tendency, provided that these tendencies are described at a
sufficiently abstract level of analysis (for critiques of motivational
approaches, see, e.g., Reisenzein 1996; Prinz 2004; Tappolet 2010,
2016; Eder & Rothermund 2013).
9.2 Enactivist Theories of Emotions: Emotions as Enactions
Enactivism is an interdisciplinary research program which begins with
dissatisfaction with the way cognitive processes have long been
studied in cognitive science (Di Paolo & Thompson
2014; Gallagher 2017). Two enactivist themes in particular are relevant for emotion
theory. The first is the focus on the active role played by the
cognizer in his or her relation with the external world, which is for
enactivists not given and passively detected but rather
enacted
and actively shaped by the “sense making”
powers of the cognizer. This “sense making” activity is at
the heart of cognition as enactivists understand it, and it is
available to all living beings, no matter how simple they may be,
insofar as they are autonomous and adaptive systems (Thompson 2007).
The second theme is the focus on the
embodied
embedded
and
extended
character of cognitive
processes (the theme of embodiment looms large in affective
science as well; see, e.g., Niedenthal 2007; Wilson-Mendenhall et al. 2011; Carr et al. forthcoming).
Whereas traditional cognitive science and neuroscience have focused on
the brain in isolation from the rest of the body and from the
environment, enactivists argue that we will fail to understand
cognition if we neglect the reciprocal causal interactions between
brain, body and environment as they dynamically unfold over time.
The idea that complex cognitive abilities can rely on the scaffolding
provided by the external environment has proven especially popular
among emotion theorists. It has led on the one hand to a renewed
attention to the role played by interpersonal communication in social
environments (Griffiths & Scarantino 2009), and on the other hand
to the suggestion that emotions are ontologically extended beyond the
narrow confines of the cranium (Stephan et al. 2014; Krueger 2014;
Colombetti & Roberts 2015; Colombetti 2017).
To which tradition of research do enactivist theories of emotions
belong? The focus on experience might appear to nudge enactivism
towards the Feeling Tradition (see, e.g., Ratcliffe 2008). Enactivism
is indeed influenced by the notion, central to the phenomenological
philosophical tradition, that the body is an
experienced
structure (Husserl 1952 [1989]; Merleau-Ponty 1945 [1962]) rather than
simply a
physical
structure. And what we can experience
limits the world we inhabit, our “
Umwelt
” (Uexküll
(1934 [2010]).
Colombetti (2014) has made the case that the phenomenological
tradition can enrich the affective neuroscience of emotions. Relying
on Varela’s (1996) method of
neurophenomenology
Colombetti has developed a framework for integrating third-person
methods like brain imaging with first-person methods like
self-reports. It is also quite clear that enactivists, in opposition
to the “disembodied stance” (Colombetti & Thompson
2008) of many cognitivist theories, view emotions as bodily and
experiential processes rather than intellectual ones.
Nevertheless, it is more appropriate to slot the enactivist movement
into the phenomenological side of the Motivational Tradition. This is
because enactivists also greatly emphasize the role of
action
in cognition. A number of them have recently offered accounts of
emotions that emphasize their action-oriented nature (Hufendiek 2016;
Slaby & Wüschner 2014; Shargel & Prinz 2018). Cognition
is said to be enacted by inherently teleological living systems for
the purposes of action. More radically, some cognitive processes like
perception are described as constitutively dependent on motoric
processes, as in the sensorimotor theory of visual consciousness
(Hurley 1998; O’Regan & Noë 2001).
There is no unified understanding of the relation between emotions and
action among enactivists, but rather a number of distinct proposals.
In Colombetti’s work, for instance, the notion of
self-organization
plays an orienting role. Her view is that
emotional episodes are “self-organizing patterns of the
organism, best described with the conceptual tools of dynamical
systems theory”, a branch of mathematics designed to account for
the temporal evolution of systems that change over time (Colombetti
2014: 53; see also Lewis 2005).
Self-organization is the capacity of a complex system to reach and
preserve a state of order through reciprocal causal influences among
simpler component parts. When applied to the emotions, the idea is
that emotion components self-organize, which helps explain the
variability of emotional episodes, because self-organizing systems can
end up in multiple end states depending on how their components
interact (see A. Clark 2001: 113–114).
Although there are analogies between this view and psychological
constructionism, especially with respect to the emphasis on emotions
as emergent and flexible phenomena, Colombetti denies that conceptual
acts bring about emotions, assuming that “sense making” is
a much more primitive phenomenon available from bacteria to humans.
Creatures engage in “sense making” when they assess the
environment in terms of whether it promotes their self-maintenance,
and act so as to improve their viability within the environment, as a
bacterium does when swimming away from a noxious substance.
At the same time, Colombetti uses the assumption of self-organization
of emotional phenomena to oppose the notion that emotional episodes
are caused either by affect programs (contra the basic emotion
tradition) or by appraisals (contra the appraisal tradition).
Incidentally, Colombetti (2014) thinks that the very notion of basic
emotion is arbitrary and not worth keeping because it discourages
research on the neural, behavioral, and bodily features of allegedly
non-basic emotions. Hufendiek (2016) makes the complementary case that
allegedly non-basic emotions manifest a great many of the
characteristics distinctive of basic emotions (see also J. Clark
2010).
Another distinctive feature of enactivism is its
anti-representational stance
(Varela et al., 1991; Hutto
& Myin 2013; Gallagher 2017). For example, Hutto (2012) has proposed that
“we let go of the idea that emotions represent situations in
truth-evaluable ways” (2012: 4), suggesting that emotions do not
represent core relational themes. For instance, fear does not
represent that there is danger at hand, and anger does not represent
that there has been a slight against me or mine. Hutto’s (2012)
main concern with respect to ascribing representational powers to
emotions is that such powers are posited despite not having
explanatory value (see Hufendiek 2018 for discussion). Specifically,
Hutto (2012) follows Ramsey (2007) in assuming that a mental state
counts as a representation only if it is consumed by other systems in
light of what it says or indicates, and concludes that emotions fail
to play this larger explanatory role in the cognitive economy of the
organism and should therefore not be considered representations.
Prinz (2004) used to think that emotions represent core relational
themes because they have the function of correlating with them, but in
his recent work he has changed his mind. Schargel and Prinz (2018)
have argued that a teleosemantic approach is a threat to the truly
embodied character of a theory of emotions in the James-Lange mold,
the approach they favor. This is because any non-embodied
vehicle—e.g., a disembodied judgment—that has the function
of correlating with a core relational theme would just as well
represent such theme as an embodied vehicle does (Shargel 2014).
As an alternative, Shargel and Prinz (2018) embrace a
non-representational, enactivist theory of content for emotions,
according to which emotions create, by virtue of the bodily
preparation they involve, action possibilities (see also Griffiths
& Scarantino 2009; Hufendiek 2016). These action possibilities,
unlike standard affordances in the Gibsonian tradition, which
pre-exist emotions and are motivationally inert, are
“state-dependent (they typically arise only once the emotion has
been initiated), and imperatival (they motivate action)”
(Shargel & Prinz 2018: 119). On this view, fear generates
possibilities for escape which would not be there in the absence of
fear, and which work as dynamic attractors, pulling the agent towards
escape. The enactive content of fear, then, is not danger, but the
presentation of a certain situation as something to be escaped,
jointly with an impulse to move away from it, a content that is
essentially embodied since it involves bodily preparation for
escape.
A central challenge for enactivist theories of emotions of the
non-representational variety is to account for our normative practices
with respect to emotions. Once we realize that someone’s fear
moved him or her to avoid a certain state of affairs, or that
someone’s anger motivated him or her to attack someone, we still
ask whether or not what motivated avoidance is a danger and whether or
not what motivated retribution is a slight. In other words, we still
treat emotions as appropriate and inappropriate with respect to their
circumstances of elicitation, and it is an open question if and how
these forms of appropriateness can be made sense of if emotions do not
represent core relational themes (see Hufendiek 2016, 2017, 2018 for
further discussion).
10. Rationality and Emotions
10.1 Cognitive Rationality as Fittingness, Warrant and Coherence
We distinguish between the
cognitive rationality
of emotions,
consisting of their ability to represent the world as it is and
properly relate to other evidence-sensitive evaluative processes, and
the
strategic rationality
of emotions, consisting of their
ability to lead to actions that promote the agent’s interests
and properly relate to other action-influencing processes (De Sousa
1987, 2011; see also Greenspan 2000; Mulligan 1998; Solomon 1980; Thagard
2006; Stephan 2017b).
Emotions have long been thought to score poorly in terms of both
cognitive and strategic rationality. The Stoics famously argued that
emotions are false judgments. For example, fearing a tiger would
involve the false judgment that one’s endangered life is
important, whereas the sage should be indifferent to everything except
virtue. Failures of the emotions at the strategic level are also
deeply ingrained in both theoretical approaches and common sense.
Ira brevis furor
, said the Romans: anger is a brief bout of
madness. In recent times, the pendulum has swung back, and researchers
in both philosophy and affective science have started rehabilitating
the emotions in terms of both cognitive and strategic rationality. A
proper appreciation of the role of emotions with respect to
rationality requires a number of distinctions.
Our first distinctions pertain to three varieties of cognitive
rationality for emotions:
rationality as fittingness
rationality as warrant
and
rationality as coherence
The dominant view on emotions is that they are representations of core
relational themes or formal objects. Therefore, a first dimension of
assessment for rationality concerns whether or not such core
relational themes/formal objects are instantiated. We may for instance
say that fear is
rational in terms of fittingness
just in
case it is directed towards things that are truly dangerous, because
this is what fear represents. Being afraid of a shark swimming
alongside you is fitting, because the shark is dangerous. As
D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) have emphasized, fittingness is importantly different
from forms of appropriateness that are moral or strategic. For
example, amusement at a funny joke may be fitting even if being amused
by it is both morally inappropriate due to the sexist content of the
joke, and costly in terms of self-interest, because those who witness
the amusement may form a bad opinion of the amused agent.
Suppose now that fear is elicited by something that is not dangerous.
Fear could still manifest
rationality as warrant
if its
particular object manifests relevant evidential cues of dangerousness.
For example, being afraid of a realistic replica of a shark moving
alongside you in the water would be rational in the warrant sense, even though,
unbeknownst to you, the shark replica is being remote-controlled by
a group of innocuous marine biologists.
A third dimension of cognitive rationality concerns the
consistency
of emotions with other representations of what
the world is like. If someone experiences fear of flying and believes
that flying is dangerous, there is rationality as coherence between
what they fear and what they believe (even though fear is unfitting
given the extremely low likelihood of plane accidents).
As noted in
section 7.1
emotions are often
recalcitrant to reason
: many people do
not
believe that flying is dangerous, and yet continue to
fear it. But emotions manifest rationality as coherence in a great
many cases. This is due in part to the fact that emotions have
cognitive bases
, which consist of cognitions whose function
is to provide emotions with their particular objects—I must
believe, perceive or imagine being on an airplane prior to fearing
it.
When such cognitions are beliefs, their modification tends to be
coherently reflected in changes of the emotions. For example, if I am
angry at Tom based on my belief that he has bad mouthed me with a
colleague, my anger is unlikely to survive the realization that he has
not, in fact, bad mouthed me with a colleague. On occasion, however,
my anger toward Tom will persist despite my belief that no slight
whatsoever has taken place, thereby revealing irrationality as
incoherence.
A special case of rationality as coherence regards the coherence of
sets of emotions. Helm (2009) has argued that emotions come in
rational patterns centered around the things that have import for the
agent. For instance, if avoiding death is a concern of mine, then I
should not only feel fear when my life is threatened by a deadly disease, but I should
also feel, on pain of irrationality, relief once the threat
dissipates and sadness or disappointment if the disease progresses instead.
10.2 Instrumental and Substantive Strategic Rationality
The
strategic (or prudential) rationality
of emotions
concerns their ability to lead to actions that promote the
agent’s interests and properly relate to other processes that
affect actions, notably decision-making. Although emotions that are
strategically rational will also generally be cognitively rational in
the fittingness and in the warrant sense, exceptions are possible. For
example, some instances of anger which are not produced in the
presence of either actual slights (fittingness) or evidential cues of
slights (warrant) end up promoting the agent’s interests. A case
in point may be the anger of a customer whose interests would be best
served by returning used merchandise but who has lost the receipt, and
angrily dresses down a blameless clerk, which gets him the
sought-after concession because the clerk gets intimidated.
We can distinguish two components of strategic rationality: an emotion
is strategically rational insofar as it leads an agent (i) to select
means conducive to the agent’s ends (instrumental strategic
rationality) and (ii) to pursue ends that align with the agent’s
interests all things considered (substantive strategic irrationality).
An example of instrumental irrationality would be that of an agent who
gets into a panic while trying to exit a house on fire, fails to
listen to the fireman’s directions, goes for the closest door
forgetting that it leads into the only area of the house without an
exit, and perishes in the process. There is nothing wrong here with
the end towards which panic predisposes the agent—seeking
safety—but the means chosen are clearly suboptimal.
Substantive irrationality can be argued for with respect to both
emotion types and emotion tokens. For instance, some have proposed that
grief is a substantively irrational emotion
type
, because it
always involves the belief that a person dear to the grieving agent is
dead and the desire that such person is not dead, which is an
unsatisfiable desire given what one believes (Gustafson 1989; see
Cholbi 2017 for a response).
More commonly, theorists have argued that specific
tokens
of
certain emotion types can be substantively irrational. For example, it
would be contrary to an agent’s interests to get angry at a
potential employer during a job interview, since it will likely result
in not getting the job offer and thus frustrate self-interest.
By contrast, anger at someone cutting the line at the airport can be
substantively rational, since the end of stopping the offensive
behavior is conducive to one’s interests. Nussbaum (2016) has
recently argued that this can only be the case if the angry
agent’s focus is not at all on payback for the offensive
behavior but entirely on preventing the offensive behavior from
happening again, because the desire for payback is either
straightforwardly irrational or problematic in other ways (Nussbaum refers to the unproblematic forms of anger as
transition-anger
).
A common reason for doubting the strategic rationality of emotions is
that they often appear to lead to
impulsive
physical and
mental actions. Impulsivity involves acting quickly prior to having
considered all relevant information (Frijda 2010; Elster 1999, 2010).
Some have argued that this is precisely what helps emotions provide an
optimal compromise between speed and flexibility, allowing emotions to
function as “decoupled reflexes” (Scherer 1984).
Others have noted that emotions often lead to “arational”
actions, namely emotional actions not performed “for a
reason” (Hursthouse 1991). Paradigmatic examples include actions
like jumping up and down out of joy or rolling around in one’s
dead wife’s clothes out of grief. In such cases, Hursthouse
argued, there is no belief and desire pair that can be posited to
provide a Humean reason for such actions, which are to be explained
simply by saying that the agent is in the grip of an emotion. The
debate on arational actions has taken off in recent philosophy of
emotions, and a number of proposals, both in favor and against
Humeanism, are available (see M. Smith 1998; Goldie 2000, Döring
2007; Kovach & De Lancey 2005; Scarantino & Nielsen 2015).
Emotions are notoriously apt to make us act in ways we regret.
Notably, they can be a source of weakness of the will, the failure to
act on one’s best reasons (Davidson 1970 [1980]). But they just
as often help agents stick to their long-term goals (Tappolet 2016:
227). For example, a gut feeling of guilt may help an agent resist a
cheating temptation and is in this sense a means to the end of
successfully exercising self-control. On occasion, emotions can even
ground the phenomenon of inverse akrasia (McIntyre 1990; Arpaly &
Schroder 2000), which consists in failing to do what you judged best
only to discover that you in fact did what was best for you, contrary
to your former judgment. For example, one may judge best to become a
professional musician, but be crippled by stage fright and end up in
law school, only to later realize that this course of action best
serves one’s long-term interests.
A further threat to the strategic rationality of emotions comes from
their relation to self-deception (Fingarette 1969; Mele 1987; van
Leeuwen 2007), which is commonly regarded as irrational. Roughly,
self-deception involves forming beliefs that are contrary to what the
available evidence supports but conformant to what the self-deceived
agent desires. Emotions can cause self-deception because they can lead
to powerful desires that something be or not be the case, which
causally impact the subject’s ability to process evidence.
This feature is principally related to the fact that emotions
determine salience among potential objects of attention. Poets have
always known that the main effect of love is to redirect attention:
when I love, I notice nothing but my beloved, and nothing of his or
her faults. But this carries a risk, because I may fail to notice that
there is massive evidence that I am being deceived in some harmful
way. My desire that I not be deceived, motivated by my love, is what
drives the faulty processing of evidence, resulting in
self-deception.
This potential of emotions for “skewing the epistemic
landscape” (Goldie 2004: 259) in negative ways is compensated by
emotion’s important role in promoting rational epistemic
thinking.
Epistemic emotions
are those that are particularly
relevant to our quest for knowledge and understanding. Curiosity
motivates inquiry; interest keeps us at it, and, as both Plato and
Descartes noted, doubt is crucial to our ability avoid prejudice.
These “epistemic” emotions can guide us specifically in
the context of our attempts to gain knowledge (Silvia 2006; Brun,
Doğuoğlu, & Kuenzle 2008; Morton 2010).
But even garden-variety, non-epistemic emotions can promote
understanding of the world and of the self within it (see also the
feeling-as-information hypothesis in affective science; Schwarz 2012).
According to Brady (2013), the principal way in which emotions can do
so is by motivating us to search for information that has a bearing on
the fittingness of our emotions, and on the adequacy of their
underlying concerns. Once again, the mechanism is that of changing
salience among potential objects of attention. Suppose for instance
you feel afraid when about to give a toast at a wedding. Your fear
promotes understanding because it prompts you to determine whether the
situation is truly dangerous, and whether you should care that much
about giving a brilliant toast.
More broadly, it has been argued that the ability of emotions to shift
attention on some features rather than others provides an essential
solution to the so-called
frame problem
, which is the problem
of sorting relevant from irrelevant information in decision-making. De
Sousa has made the case in philosophy, suggesting that
emotions spare us the paralysis potentially induced by [the frame
problem] by controlling the salience of features of perception and
reasoning…[thereby] circumscribing our practical and cognitive
options. (de Sousa 1987: 172)
For example, being afraid of a bear focuses attention exclusively on
the features of the situation that are relevant to escaping it,
without wasting time on deciding what irrelevant factors to
ignore.
Damasio (1994, 2003) has given neurobiological foundations to this
proposal, suggesting that emotions simplify the decision process by
quickly marking deliberative options in the prefrontal cortex as
positive or negative in light of their expected emotional
consequences. Patients with ventromedial prefrontal damage, Damasio
argued, become irrationally Hamlet-like when faced with trivial
decisions such as choosing a date for their next doctor’s
appointment, irrationally risk-prone when faced with gambling
decisions, and irrationally impatient when faced with decisions
demanding deferred gratification. The debate on whether the empirical
evidence supports Damasio’s “somatic marker
hypothesis” is still ongoing (see, e.g., Dunn, Dalgleish, &
Lawrence, 2006; Reimann & Bechara, 2010; Beer 2017).
Another influential view on the rationality of emotions is that they
help solve the
commitment problem
(Schelling 1960;
Hirshleifer 1987; Frank 1988), which is the problem of convincing
potential cooperative partners that one will fulfill promises and
threats even when narrowly self-interested considerations would demand
otherwise. For example, Frank (1988) has described the expression of
sympathy as a mechanism to convince potential cooperators that one
will behave honestly in future interactions even in the presence of
temptation, and the expression of anger as a mechanism to convince
potential cooperators that one will behave aggressively if messed with
even when aggression is costly. These emotional signals are said to be
credible because hard to fake, and they end up benefitting both
partners, because they help secure the parties’ willingness to
cooperate honestly in mutually beneficial projects (see also Ross
& Dumouchel 2004; O’Connor 2016).
11. Concluding Remarks
One may be tempted to conclude from this overview of emotion theories
across disciplines that the field is deeply divided on just about
everything. This would be hasty. Despite the great diversity of views
on the nature and function of emotions we have documented, a broad
consensus has emerged on a number of topics. Here is a tentative list
of what a plurality of emotion theorists agree about, with brief
mention of where the disagreements begin:
Emotion episodes involve, at least in prototypical cases, a set
of evaluative, physiological, phenomenological, expressive,
behavioral, and mental components that are diagnostic of emotions and
are to some degree correlated with one another.
The degree to which these correlations are instantiated continues
to be a central topic of theoretical debate: latent variable models
assume that emotions cause the changes in components and expect to
find strong correlations, whereas emergent variable models assume that
emotions emerge from changes in components caused by something other
than emotions and expect to find weak correlations.
Token episodes of the same folk emotion type (e.g., anger, fear,
shame) manifest a great deal of variability with respect to
expressive, behavioral, physiological and phenomenological features,
as well as intensity, duration, valence, arousal, type and range of
intentional objects.
Researchers disagree on whether underlying all this variability
there exist measurable bodily patterns of some kind that are still
distinctive of different emotions.
Emotions have intentionality or the ability to represent.
Researchers disagree on whether emotions represent descriptively
or imperatively or both, on what exact contents they represent, and on
what grounds the emotion-world representation relation. A small
minority of researchers, hailing mostly from the enactivist movement,
have argued that emotions lack representational qualities.
The physical seat of emotions is the brain, but there are no
neural circuits that correspond one-to-one with any folk emotion type,
and brains are embodied and embedded in environments that are essential to their
proper functioning.
Researchers disagree on how exactly the brain implements tokens
of different emotion types, and whether emotional phenomena are best
understood in terms of emotion-specific or emotion-unspecific neural
mechanisms.
Emotions typically involve conscious experiences, but such
experiences are not strictly necessary for an emotion to be
instantiated, in part because some emotion terms refer to dispositions
and in part because most theorists consider feelings conceptually
distinct from non-dispositional emotions.
A handful of influential researchers such as LeDoux (2017) and
Barrett (2017) continue to identify emotions with conscious
experiences.
Evolutionary and socio-cultural considerations must both
contribute to our understanding of a great many emotions’
functions. These are both intra-personal functions —e.g., helping organisms
coordinate organismic resources to deal with urgent demands—and
interpersonal functions —e.g., communicating information useful for the
negotiation of social transactions.
Researchers continue to debate whether there is sufficient
empirical evidence for basic emotions and other special-purpose emotion
mechanisms. Some see the role of evolution as limited to the shaping
of general-purpose adaptations, such as core affect and the ability to
categorize, which jointly lead to the emergence of emotions.
Emotions are no longer considered structurally opposed to reason
Researchers continue to debate the circumstances in which
emotions manifest various kinds of cognitive and strategic
irrationality.
Emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate with respect to
their intentional objects
Researchers debate the grounds of, and distinctions between,
different forms of appropriateness (e.g., fittingness, moral
appropriateness).
Emotions typically involve appraisals of the significance of the
stimulus situation, ranging between primitive and sophisticated forms
of information processing.
Researchers debate what the structure of appraisals is, and
whether appraisals cause or constitute emotions or both.
Emotions typically correlate with changes in motivation to do
things.
Some researchers think emotions cause or consist in such changes
in motivation, whereas others think that changes in motivation have
other causes, or are too unspecific to ground a theory of what
emotions are.
The exploration of these insights and the resolution of the
disagreements around them is a thriving interdisciplinary project in
contemporary emotion theory. Philosophers and affective scientists
will continue to engage in it for years to come, putting their
distinctive theoretical skills at the service of projects of common
interest.
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Acknowledgments
We want to thank Manula Adhihetty for his valuable work helping us
edit the entry and completing the bibliography. We received excellent
feedback on a previous draft of this entry from a number of colleagues
and friends, including Giovanna Colombetti, Phoebe Ellsworth, Rebekka
Hufendiek, Agnes Moors, Jesse Prinz, Jim Russell, Disa Sauter, Dan Shargel, Achim
Stephan, Christine Tappolet, Fabrice Teroni and an anonymous referee. Fabrice also gave us
very valuable comments on the previous version of this entry, for
which we are very grateful.
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Andrea Scarantino
ascarantino
gsu
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Ronald de Sousa
ronald
de
sousa
utoronto
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