Books by Matthew Crippen
Book Abstract from Columbia University Press:
Pragmatism, a pluralistic philosophy with kinships... more Book Abstract from Columbia University Press:
Pragmatism, a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology and embodied cognitive science, is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists rejected as far too narrow.
Matthew Crippen, a biologically orientated philosopher of mind, and Jay Schulkin, a pioneer in neuroscience, offer an innovative interdisciplinary theory of mind. They argue that pragmatism in combination with phenomenology is not only able to give an unusually persuasive rendering of how we think, feel, experience, and act in the world but also the account most consistent with evidence from cognitive science and neurobiology. Crippen and Schulkin contend that cognition, emotion, and perception are incomplete without action, and in action they fuse together. Not only are we embodied subjects whose thoughts, emotions, and capacities comprise one integrated system; we are living ecologies inseparable from our surroundings, our cultures, and our world. Ranging from social coordination to the role of gut bacteria and visceral organs in mental activity, and touching upon fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and plant cognition, Crippen and Schulkin stress the role of aesthetics, emotions, interests, and moods in the ongoing enactment of experience. Synthesizing philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, and the history of science, Mind Ecologies offers a broad and deep exploration of evidence for the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of mind.
Self-Illness Ambiguity." Philosophic Explorations (accepted pending minor revisions). 56. "Select... more Self-Illness Ambiguity." Philosophic Explorations (accepted pending minor revisions). 56. "Selective Permeability and Situated Cognitive Harm in Multicultural Classrooms." Topoi (in press). 55. "Enactivism: A Newish Name for Mostly Old Ideas?" Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (published online, 2024). 54. "Selective Permeability, Multiculturalism and Affordances in Education." (Dag Munk Lindemann as second author).
Papers by Matthew Crippen
This article examines multicultural classrooms through the selective permeability model, which po... more This article examines multicultural classrooms through the selective permeability model, which posits that individuals encounter different action possibilities or affordances in the same setting. The goal is to illuminate how educational environments may support some students while disadvantaging others, thereby causing situated cognitive harm. The article proceeds in several parts. First, it explores selective permeability in relation to what Gibson describes as "positive" and "negative" affordances, articulating how these polarities can change depending on a person's cultural background. Second, it integrates insights from cultural psychology, such as the influence of regional geography and city design on behavior-constraining cultural norms. These norms can productively funnel actions and learning. Yet when a student's cultural norms clash with tacit classroom prescriptions, the situation can be analogous to arriving at a rink with rollerblades only to be placed on ice: the learner confronts action limiting negative affordances and undergoes situated cognitive harm. Third, the article presents qualitative and quantitative data that clarify how culture moderates what students find helpful or hindering. Notably, incongruent norms are not always detrimental; under certain circumstances, they can serve as a catalyst for growth.
This article argues that Dewey expresses what seems to be a core enactive commitment to constru... more This article argues that Dewey expresses what seems to be a core enactive commitment to constructivism: that creatures do not encounter pre-existing realities but bring them out by altering their surroundings. He adds that constructivism does not obviate realism because changes, once introduced, really are there in relation to a creature’s capacities. This poses a dilemma. If enaction primarily entails altering the external milieu, then the movement repeats pragmatism, also collapsing a basis upon which many of its authors differentiate their outlooks from ecological psychology’s realism. Yet if constructive activity is largely interior, as enactivists’ language sometimes suggests, then critics may be right in saying that the movement backslides into early Modern solipsism. A broader argument is that enactivists sometimes perpetuate what James characterizes as monistic halfway empiricism. Here, the risk is that researchers hold positions not because of evidence but regardless of it, or stipulate terminological definitions that exclude opposing views ahead of time. Even physics remains ununified, and there may be room for combining antagonistic accounts of mind. Or maybe normally hostile positions like enactivism and functionalism are, with some terminological reframing, reconcilable. The article also touches on historical points, such as the fact that American philosophy and enactivism have Asian and evolutionary influences, or that they react against common schools. The purpose is to clarify the movements in question and identify where enactivists engage in something like halfway empiricism by orienting themselves against enemies based more in fiction than fact.
This article examines epistemic impacts of social media, merging Gibson’s affordance theory with ... more This article examines epistemic impacts of social media, merging Gibson’s affordance theory with the notion of selective permeability, which holds people encounter objective differences in a setting because of their distinct capacities, only here applying the idea to online spaces. I start by circumscribing my deployment of “affordances,” taking care not to totally divorce the term from Gibson’s intent, as often happens in information technologies research. I next detail ways that selective permeability characterizes online epistemic landscapes, focusing on how factors (like culture) moderate normative standards for sharing information. This leads to a discussion about selective receptivity and blindness to information in the context of social media—a situation that amplifies political divides and renders antagonists mutually incomprehensible. This segues into my final topic: an exposition of how social media can make the offline world more selectively hostile to some. An additional proposition is that practical habits cultivated on networking apps can modulate what affordances are present in offline arenas, as opposed to just affecting which ones get noticed. Throughout, I suggest that selective permeability answers an increasingly recognized challenge: the difficulty of generalizing conclusions about one app to others and across cultures, ages, etc. Ultimately, my aim is not only to explicate how social media fragments common social knowledge but to defend selective permeability as an epistemic template for comprehending social media.
U1 Uncorrected dra,!!! Global Indigenous Philosophy: Remembering the "Us" Matthew Crippen HBO's T... more U1 Uncorrected dra,!!! Global Indigenous Philosophy: Remembering the "Us" Matthew Crippen HBO's The Last of Us begins with Dr. Neuman speculating that some zombie-ant fungus could evolve and spread to humans. The fungus makes ants climb trees where they sprout spores that rain onto new victims. If transmitted to people, Dr. Neuman frets the result would be "billions of puppets with poisoned minds permanently fixed on one unifying goal: to spread the infection..." Now, we have fungal yeast and bacteria in us that affects our brains, and there's a pathogen that leads rodents (and humans) to behave riskily, making them easier prey for felines, inside of which the parasite reproduces. 1 But The Last of Us isn't solely about fungus-driven zombification. It also explores the contagion of ideas. Whether it's the fanaticism of FEDRA, the Fireflies, or David's cult, people become mindlessly obedient to the agendas of larger groups. Does The Last of Us infect the viewer and gamer with a populist American ideology that elevates individuals over communities? With the complicated exception of the Jackson Community, the other collectives are mind-numbingly authoritarian. Despite occasional moralizing about Joel's or Henry's past misdeeds, we root for their survival, even if it means killing members of collectives. And let's not forget the main antagonist is the fungus, which dehumanizes the Infected by pulling them into a violent hive mind. Collective existence isn't inherently dehumanizing though. Communities form the basis for importantly human traits like language, cooking, political reasoning, advanced tools, and religion. 2 In fact, Indigenous traditions from around the globe suggest that the individual "I" originates in the collective "us," and these perspectives shaped founding American philosophies. 3 Because The Last of Us celebrates popular American values, which are rooted not just in traditions stressing individual
![Research paper thumbnail of "Anticipating and Enacting Worlds: [A challenge to Predictive Processing Theories of Mental Illness]" Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/118272759/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemicall... more Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is some- times so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can go in the opposite direction too, as when depression coincides with energy-depletion, and hence objectively strenuous situations in which things look farther away because they are (accurately anticipated to be) harder to reach. These examples partly encapsulate what predictive processing theorists call “active inference,” yet with differences. In the first case, actions fruitfully obviate predictions rather than fulfilling them. In the second, mental models do not dysregulate bodily processes, making coping harder. Instead, problems (e.g., personal obstacles, gastric illness) deplete energy, eliciting a depressive and adaptive slow-down. Some predictive proponents apply correspondence criteria when alleging mismatches between internal models and the world, while incongruously asserting that the brain did not evolve to see things veridically, but to execute actions. An alternative is to adopt pluralistic, pragmatic epistemologies suited to the complexity of mind. The upshot is that mental outlooks can depart from the norm without epistemically being distorted and that mismatches between anticipatory worries and outcomes, when they actually exist, can be a measure of adaptive and epistemic success.
Philosophical Psychology, 2023
Selective permeability holds that people's distinct capacities allow them to do different things ... more Selective permeability holds that people's distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from "within" students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. Second, affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways to reach a goal, analogously to how people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, so restrictive problem-solving methods are often counterproductive. Third, our approach illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate action possibilities, so that cultural groups may encounter objectively different affordances in the same classroom. But fourth, while fit with environment allows for skill refinement, non-fit can contribute to growth situations, which suggests a degree of selective closure can be desirable. Throughout, we argue social constructs-including educational ones-are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments in the same way that affordances do.
Synthese, 2023
Everyday (mis)uses of deepfakes define prevailing conceptualizations of what they are and the m... more Everyday (mis)uses of deepfakes define prevailing conceptualizations of what they are and the moral stakes in their deployment. But one complication in understanding deepfakes is that they are not photographic yet nonetheless manipulate lens-based recordings with the intent of mimicking photographs. The harmfulness of deepfakes, moreover, significantly depends on their potential to be mistaken for photographs and on the belief that photographs capture actual events, a tenet known as the transparency thesis, which scholars have somewhat ironically attacked by citing digital imaging techniques as counterexamples. Combining these positions, this paper sets out two core points: (1) that conceptions about the nature of photography introduce imperatives about its uses; and (2) that popular cultural understandings of photography imply normative ideas that infuse our encounters with deepfakes. Within this, I further raise the question of what moral ground deepfakes occupy that allows them to have such a potentially devastating effect. I show that answering this question involves reinstating the notion that photographs are popularly conceived of as transparent. The rejoinder to this argument, however, is that to take the sting out of deepfakes we must, once again, become skeptical of the veracity of all images, including photoreal ones. This kind of critical mindedness was warranted before the invention of photography for both pictorial imprints and written accounts from various media sources. Given this, along with the fact that photographic trickery is nothing new, deepfakes need not push us into a post-truth epistemic abyss, for they imply a decidedly old turn.
Religions, 2023
My central claim is that resonances between Transcendentalist and Chinese philosophies are so str... more My central claim is that resonances between Transcendentalist and Chinese philosophies are so strong that the former cannot be adequately appreciated without the latter. I give attention to the Analects, the Mengzi and the Tiantai Lotus Sutra, which Transcendentalists read. Because there was conceptual sharing across Chinese traditions, plus evidence suggesting Transcendentalists explored other texts, my analysis includes discussions of Daoism and Weishi, Huayan and Chan Buddhism. To name just some similarities between the targeted outlooks, Transcendentalists adopt something close to wu-wei or effortless action; though hostile to hierarchy, they echo the Confucian stress on rituals or habits; Thoreau’s individualistic libertarianism is moderated by a radical causal holism found in many Chinese philosophies; and variants of Chinese Buddhism get close to Transcendentalist metaphysics and epistemologies, which anticipate radical embodied cognitive science. A specific argument is that Transcendentalists followed some of their Chinese counterparts by conserving the past and converting it into radicalism. A meta-argument is that ideas were exchanged via trade from Europe through North Africa to Western Asia and India into the Far East, and contact with Indigenous Americans led to the same. This involved degrees of misrepresentation, but it nonetheless calls upon scholars to adopt more global approaches.
The built environment implicitly regulates bodily movement, whether through decorative curbs mark... more The built environment implicitly regulates bodily movement, whether through decorative curbs marking areas as private or lighting accentuating pimples to drive youths away. Drawing on my own observational research and empirical studies, I argue tacit boundaries such as these are harsher for people under the weather in the threefold sense of suffering from inclement conditions, ill-health and oppressive social climates. Inasmuch as design filters people in these ways, space is “selectively permeable.” I pursue these lines through Shusterman’s somaesthetics and Gibson’s affordance theory. A tenet in somaesthetics is that culture, mind, body and values are codependent. Gibson’s framework likewise holds that body, values and environment are codefined. An icy stairway, for example, may afford falling to the infirmed and look threatening to them more than it does to the healthy, who therefore value it differently. The same pattern occurs in cultural-political environments: a woman may see an urban setting as more threatening than a man because it places her at greater bodily risk, just as citizens in an authoritarian society may face more danger than tourists, experiencing things accordingly. That agents face objectively different obstacles in the same environment allows for selectively permeable design and it makes affordances political.
Post-Apocalyptic Prognostications in The Witcher Matthew Crippen Catastrophes are cross-cultural ... more Post-Apocalyptic Prognostications in The Witcher Matthew Crippen Catastrophes are cross-cultural themes in ancient stories. 1 Similar motifs can be found in the off-balance mythical past of The Witcher. The narrative is set in a continent undergoing a climate crisis known as the Great Frost, which started after the Conjunction of the Spheres, an event that opened a cosmic gateway that allowed humans to leave a dying world and enter a new one. In a way, this development parallels that of the paleolithic Sahara desert, which had wet spells. These allowed our ancestors northward passage through this normally impenetrable barrier, letting them branch out of Africa. 2 Lurking in the background of all of this and imprinted in humanity's genes is an ache in people to perpetuate themselves and their communities, a desire molded further through cultural experiences of contending with apocalyptic situations. In The Witcher too, this desire drives many individuals. There's also a figurative sense in which apocalyptic impulses are in our DNA. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) claimed that all people "by nature desire to know," and the word "apocalypse" has meanings that relate to truth-seeking. 3 The term is a compound of the Greek "apo-'un-' + kaluptein 'to cover'." 4 So "apocalypse" literally means uncovering or revealing. In the hands of Greeks like Plato (c. 429-347), knowledge seeking takes on deathly tones because the sought-after truths are perfect, unchanging, and immaterialin short, the opposite of messy, ever changing, and material biological ways of living. We see this deathly Greek ideal personified in Yennefer: because her nearly ageless beauty and otherworldly wisdom are achieved at the cost of her ability to have children.
Though past commentators have attacked cities as corrupt, dirty places, it is almost too obvious ... more Though past commentators have attacked cities as corrupt, dirty places, it is almost too obvious to need stating that a sustainable future depends on them. This is because most people live in cities and because the streamlined use of urban space brings a wide range of efficiencies. Simultaneously, urban living and associated technologies may impact psychology such that people see humans and their cities as outside of nature, which has been shown to reduce concern for the wellbeing of the planet. Exploring these points in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we speculate on psychologically fueled environmental consequences of remote technologies. One possibility is that they may diminish contact with what we colloquially call “nature,” thereby reducing concern for it. Another possibility is that remote technologies may promote personalized work rhythms, allowing people more time in the outdoors, amplifying concern for the environment. Recognizing that vulnerable segments of the population are currently excluded from this second option, we optimistically sketch scenarios in which technologies may—somewhat ironically—help humankind escape technological entrapment, freeing people from a variety of backgrounds to reconnect in caring ways with nature.
Post-Apocalyptic Prognostications in The Witcher Matthew Crippen Catastrophes are cross-cultural ... more Post-Apocalyptic Prognostications in The Witcher Matthew Crippen Catastrophes are cross-cultural themes in ancient stories. 1 Similar motifs can be found in the off-balance mythical past of The Witcher. The narrative is set in a continent undergoing a climate crisis known as the Great Frost, which started after the Conjunction of the Spheres, an event that opened a cosmic gateway that allowed humans to leave a dying world and enter a new one. In a way, this development parallels that of the paleolithic Sahara desert, which had wet spells. These allowed our ancestors northward passage through this normally impenetrable barrier, letting them branch out of Africa. 2 Lurking in the background of all of this and imprinted in humanity's genes is an ache in people to perpetuate themselves and their communities, a desire molded further through cultural experiences of contending with apocalyptic situations. In The Witcher too, this desire drives many individuals. There's also a figurative sense in which apocalyptic impulses are in our DNA. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) claimed that all people "by nature desire to know," and the word "apocalypse" has meanings that relate to truth-seeking. 3 The term is a compound of the Greek "apo-'un-' + kaluptein 'to cover'." 4 So "apocalypse" literally means uncovering or revealing. In the hands of Greeks like Plato (c. 429-347), knowledge seeking takes on deathly tones because the sought-after truths are perfect, unchanging, and immaterialin short, the opposite of messy, ever changing, and material biological ways of living. We see this deathly Greek ideal personified in Yennefer: because her nearly ageless beauty and otherworldly wisdom are achieved at the cost of her ability to have children.
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Books by Matthew Crippen
Pragmatism, a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology and embodied cognitive science, is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists rejected as far too narrow.
Matthew Crippen, a biologically orientated philosopher of mind, and Jay Schulkin, a pioneer in neuroscience, offer an innovative interdisciplinary theory of mind. They argue that pragmatism in combination with phenomenology is not only able to give an unusually persuasive rendering of how we think, feel, experience, and act in the world but also the account most consistent with evidence from cognitive science and neurobiology. Crippen and Schulkin contend that cognition, emotion, and perception are incomplete without action, and in action they fuse together. Not only are we embodied subjects whose thoughts, emotions, and capacities comprise one integrated system; we are living ecologies inseparable from our surroundings, our cultures, and our world. Ranging from social coordination to the role of gut bacteria and visceral organs in mental activity, and touching upon fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and plant cognition, Crippen and Schulkin stress the role of aesthetics, emotions, interests, and moods in the ongoing enactment of experience. Synthesizing philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, and the history of science, Mind Ecologies offers a broad and deep exploration of evidence for the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of mind.
Papers by Matthew Crippen
Pragmatism, a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology and embodied cognitive science, is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists rejected as far too narrow.
Matthew Crippen, a biologically orientated philosopher of mind, and Jay Schulkin, a pioneer in neuroscience, offer an innovative interdisciplinary theory of mind. They argue that pragmatism in combination with phenomenology is not only able to give an unusually persuasive rendering of how we think, feel, experience, and act in the world but also the account most consistent with evidence from cognitive science and neurobiology. Crippen and Schulkin contend that cognition, emotion, and perception are incomplete without action, and in action they fuse together. Not only are we embodied subjects whose thoughts, emotions, and capacities comprise one integrated system; we are living ecologies inseparable from our surroundings, our cultures, and our world. Ranging from social coordination to the role of gut bacteria and visceral organs in mental activity, and touching upon fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and plant cognition, Crippen and Schulkin stress the role of aesthetics, emotions, interests, and moods in the ongoing enactment of experience. Synthesizing philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, and the history of science, Mind Ecologies offers a broad and deep exploration of evidence for the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of mind.
If people experience things similarly to the extent that they have similar bodies, then it follows that individuals will encounter a single locale differently when variations in their bodies circumscribe different actions. This line of thinking is key to our claim that gender-based selective permeability is not merely a consequence of subjective impressions. The phenomenon instead arises when a woman sees a setting as threatening and stays out of it because it poses more objective risk to her than it does to men, who are therefore more emotionally comfortable.
Our case is reinforced by interviews we carried out with an international population of women, plus observational research in cities. Unsurprisingly, men are most commonly cited as making environments threatening to women, yet certain design features exacerbate the problem, further shrinking openings for female movement. As fewer females occupy a space, it can be (and thus appear) more dangerous to women, as in male-dominated microbuses in Cairo. These self-feeding patterns may counterintuitively be amplified by features intended to enhance safety, such as emergency assistance buttons, that further push women from a space by signaling it is dangerous, more so if TV shows are already perpetuating a culture of fear. These consequences might collectively be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly segregate, not just because men and women are embodied differently, but because design and the social world make certain spaces selectively hostile to females.
In this paper, I will focus on how the aesthetics of architecture, parks and other built environments appeals to the pre-reflective mind. Drawing on the work of pragmatic philosophers, phenomenologists and psychologists, I will start by establishing that human experience is largely composed of pre-reflective doings and that these doings can legitimately be called “intelligent,” even though they involve little conscious thought. Next I will discuss aesthetic perception and how people’s movements within urban settings are almost unconsciously guided by it. Then, using the pioneering work of Jacobs (1961), Newman (1972) Whyte (1980) and Berleant (1988), I will examine how implicitly recognized public-private boundaries cultivate different patterns of social contact, affecting not only security, but also social inclusiveness.
I will conclude by talking about the breadth of the approaches advocated in this paper, but also the limitations. I will endeavor to show, for example, that aesthetic design on both a local and large scale can cultivate social arrangements that facilitate certain forms of political activism. At the same time, however, aesthetic theory can but poorly give formulaic prescriptions on how to better design urban spaces. What it can do is help designers and policy makers better understand the material with which they are working and therewith help them make more informed decisions.
John Dewey claimed that modern science has entailed “a generalized . . . adoption of the point of view of the useful arts”—combined, however, with a confused dissociation of science from art. He associated this with a latent allegiance to classical traditions that emphasize fixity, and this, in turn, with the persistence of certain sceptical trends.
Some, for example, designate the everyday world of change as merely apparent, equating reality to fixed laws and mathematical certainties. That we can know reality by discovering laws and suchlike is meant to bring consolation, but it does not lessen the invitation to mistrust firsthand experience. Others grant that reality is in transition. They add, however, that we cannot think coherently and build bodies of knowledge without fixing concepts to some extent, making knowledge a perversion of reality. According to Dewey, the first of these outlooks fails to recognize that laws do not express “any matter of fact existence.” Rather, “their ultimate implication is application; they are methods and when applied as methods they regulate the precarious flow of unique situations.” The second view similarly fails to recognize that concepts are not principally representations of reality, but instruments through which we cognitively and physically interact with reality, rearranging it in such ways that it becomes more intelligible.
This paper considers Dewey’s efforts to understand science in terms of both the practical and fine arts, and his attempts to alleviate sceptical trends by doing so. Dewey drew liberally from ancient Greek philosophy, and I also spend some time discussing how his philosophy of art and science suggest that Plato and Aristotle correctly identified conditions under which things become knowable, even though they did not satisfactorily answer how these conditions can be met.
Integrating examples from filmmaking, results from experimental psychology and phenomenological and pragmatic accounts of emotion and perception, I examine instances in which situations shape how we perceive emotional expression. I begin with illustrations of the “Kuleshov effect”—a cinematic phenomenon wherein audiences perceive different emotions on performers’ faces when identical shots of them are contextualized in different situations. I next consider insights that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1947 “Film and the New Psychology” drew from this phenomenon. Here I focus on how the Kuleshov effect reinforces two positions advanced in phenomenological and pragmatic literature: first, that we are ill-equipped to register isolated objects or events; and, second, that reducing emotions to purely internal, subjective happenings reduces them to almost nothing. Then, consolidating lessons from cinema and the aforementioned literature, along with more recent psychological and philosophical research, I develop a position hinted at by John Dewey nearly a century ago, and loosely echoed by more recent thinkers such as Herman Schmitz and Gernot Böhme, namely, that worldly situations, in a manner of speaking, have objective emotional qualities.
The notion that worlds, as opposed to isolated faces, can be primary determinants of emotional expression suggests a rethinking of the view, which has received increasing support since the 1960s, that basic emotions such as fear, anger, disgust and happiness have fairly specific, universal and involuntary corresponding facial expressions. It further suggests rethinking the thesis, popularized by Paul Ekman, that basic facial expressions cannot be easily faked, so that, for instance, security personnel can learn to detect non-genuine expressions. It is not so much the thesis itself that is problematic, however, but that professional and especially popular media promulgate it in ways that lead us to neglect frequent cases in which faces do not as much express as reflect emotional qualities of situations. Indeed, an interesting subset of cases exists in which emotions are reflected on the faces of performers literally wearing masks. Extending phenomenological and pragmatic theories that hold that the manner in which we register elements within a field is determined by our perception of the whole, and relating these ideas to 20th century physics and the position that properties are effects of interrelationships, I conclude that emotional expressions that appear as a consequence of people’s placement within situations need not be illusions. On the contrary, a speculative case can be made that they have the same ontological status as colour and other qualities of objects perceived in the world.
Jon Elster suggested that artists sometimes tell us more about emotions than scientific psychologists. I plan to discuss how Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey— who were recognized as psychologists—came to better understand emotions through art. I will focus on how Merleau-Ponty’s 1947 “Film and the New Psychology” drew insight from an experiment conducted by the filmmakers Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, and how his insight clarifies a thesis developed in Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience, namely, the thesis that worldly situations have objective emotional qualities.
We say emotions are “internally” felt, yet also speak of “being in” moods. The merry-making at a Christmas party, for example, constitutes a public emotional atmosphere in the midst of which revelers find themselves. Some present may admittedly be gloomy. However, the point is not that everybody is merry, but that situations have a public emotional atmosphere. Dewey notes that we talk this way. “Situations are depressing, threatening, intolerable, triumphant,” we say (67).
Situations contain networks of active relations. If situations have emotional qualities, the latter might be conceived of as qualities or effects of relationships. Merleau- Ponty illustrated this by evoking a famous cinematic experiment:
"One day Pudovkin took a close-up of [the actor] Mosjoukin with a completely impassive expression and projected it after showing: first, a bowl of soup, then, a young woman lying dead in a coffin, and, last a child playing with a teddy bear. The first thing noticed was that Mosjoukin seemed to be looking at the bowl, the young woman, and the child, and next one noted that he was looking pensively at the dish, that he wore an expression of sorrow when looking at the woman, and that he had a glowing smile for the child" (54).
Psychologists have claimed that facial expressions cannot be faked, so that, for example, security agents might learn to detect forced expressions of friendliness. However, the cinematic experiment suggests something has been overlooked. It is true that Mosjoukin is not completely in charge of what he expresses, yet this is not because his facial muscles involuntarily move. Although this happens in everyday life, it does not happen here since the same shot is always used.
Some might dismiss the cinematic effect as an illusion, but the word “effect” suggests another interpretation, especially if we take seriously a pragmatic notion advanced by Dewey, Nietzsche, Peirce and others: that properties are effects of interrelationships, so that, for example, an object’s colour, length and mass are relative to the speed at which it is encountered. Different expressions appear on Mosjoukin’s face in consequence of his placement within objectively different situations or relationships. Such consequences, it is true, can only show up in the presence of observers, who, by virtue of being observers, participate in the network of relationships. However, this is also so with colour, length and mass, and most, excepting philosophers, do not dismiss the appearance of such properties as illusions.
By establishing these last points, I hope to reinforce Dewey’s claim that emotional receptivity is “a mode of sense” (30), and that much as colours are qualities of perceptible objects in the world, emotions are “to or from or about something objective” (67).
Given its thematic scope, this book is intended not only for a philosophical audience, but also for all scientists who have turned to the humanities in search of answers to their questions.
In my dissertation I show that classical pragmatists understood their philosophical projects to be broadly anti-sceptical in nature—a point recent literature sometimes obscures. I then extend their ideas and deploy them against subjectivistic strains in contemporary thought.
To unpack the claims of pragmatists, I use the exegetical approach R. G. Collingwood advocated when he noted that identically worded statements have different meanings when offered as answers to different questions. He accordingly warned that we cannot grasp the intended meaning of a philosophical text simply by reading the statements in it. We must also consider historically specific concerns that prompted the author to write it. I particularly consider how pragmatists were provoked by discoveries in biology, by debates between empiricistic and “a priorist” psychologists and by developments in scientific methodologies, especially those tied to late 19th and early 20th century physics.
By clarifying and then extending the pragmatic philosophy of Dewey, James and Peirce—and by drawing occasional support from others such as Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger—I challenge a range of sceptical and subjectivistic currents, especially those grounded in the tenet that knowledge consists of mental representations that correlate with the “outer world.” I use James’ critique of empiricistic epistemologies, for example, to engage with Richard Dawkins who assumes a correspondence theory of truth that is at odds with scientific practices and that would, if taken seriously, undermine our capacity to even affirm the validity of a heliocentric model of the solar system over a geocentric one. I enter into debates about whether “unconscious cognition,” as the psychologist A. G. Greenwald put it, is “smart or dumb.” I do so because the mistaken notion that intelligent activity is necessarily conscious activity perpetuates subjectivism by seriously exaggerating the mental side of knowing. When discussing Dewey, I focus on how his understanding of both the fine and practical arts informed his theories of perception, knowledge and meaning, and how these helped him refute the notion that experience consists of representations “in” the mind or brain. With Dewey and others such as Merleau-Ponty, I strive to show that interactions in the world achieve outcomes traditionally attributed to inner operations of mind or brain, and that the quandary about how we can get outside of our own experience to know the world is not as great a problem as we have supposed.