An approach to the non-conceptual content of emotions

WIREs Cognitive Science, 2015

We start this overview by discussing the place of emotions within the broader affective domain – how different are emotions from moods, sensations and affective dispositions? Next, we examine the way emotions relate to their objects, emphasizing in the process their intimate relations to values. We move from this inquiry into the nature of emotion to an inquiry into their epistemology. Do they provide reasons for evaluative judgements and, more generally, do they contribute to our knowledge of values? We then address the question of the social dimension of emotions, explaining how the traditional nature vs. nurture contrast applies to the emotions. We finish by exploring the relations between emotions, motivation and action, concluding this overview with a more specific focus on how these relations bear on some central ethical issues.

2014

The Editor's invitation to contribute to this volume appeared to license telling more than I know. Accordingly this essay will move quickly from an all too brief survey of what I know to raise some of the increasingly speculative questions that currently preoccupy me. I. What I know On second thought, there's nothing I'm that sure of. II. What I'd like to think I know. 1. Reconstructing Cognitivism. There has been much made in recent decades of the idea that emotions are "cognitive". The term is used in a confusing diversity of senses. Sometimes by 'cognition ' one means merely to insist that emotions are not "merely subjective " phenomena. But that is hardly helpful, since there are by my count at least a dozen different things one can mean by 'subjective ' (de Sousa 2002a). A more contentful thesis is that emotions are genuine representations not just of the inside world of the body but through that of the external world ...

The Ontology of Emotions

Most of the prominent theories of emotion identify them with some kind of representational state: judgments, perceptions, desires, sui generis mental attitudes, or compounds of these states. These models emphasize the idea that emotions have meaning or content; they present the world as being a certain way. Embodied theories of emotion complicate this model. Facial expressions and accelerated heart rates do not, at least on first inspection, resemble judgments or perceptions. We believe embodied theories are right, though we won't review the evidence here (see Prinz, 2004). Instead, we want to consider how embodied theories should cope with the question of content. We will review some of the dominant strategies that defenders of embodiment have taken, and we will argue that each faces problems. We will then consider two more recent approaches: one that emphasizes affordances, and another that defines emotions as "enactive." Building on the former approach, we will develop a version of the latter: an enactivist theory of emotional content. Our theory makes a strong claim about the ontology of emotions: that emotions do not represent pre-given features of the world, but rather bring new properties into existence. Thus, emotions do not represent objective features of the world, nor do they represent response-dependent features. Indeed, we don't think it is accurate to say emotions represent at all. Rather, they bring a special class of properties into existence.

2019

Based on my earlier work on the conceptualization of emotions, I wish to emphasize a number of points in this paper. First, I suggest that emotion concepts are largely metaphorical and metonymic in nature. Second, I propose that several of the conceptual metaphors and metonymies are tightly connected. Third, in line with a large body of recent result, I maintain that many of our emotion concepts have a bodily basis, i.e., that they are embodied. Fourth, I concur with many others that our emotion concepts can be seen to have a frame-like structure, i.e., that they can be represented as cognitive-cultural models in the mind. Fifth, and on the methodology side, I claim that the description and analysis of emotion concepts requires both a qualitative and a quantitative methodology. Though most of these suggestions have been accepted and embraced by a number of scholars working on the emotions, several other scholars have challenged the suggestions. As a response to such challenges, I have revised and modified the ideas above in the past 25 years. The present paper is concerned with these more recent developments.

Consciousness & emotion, 2002

Despite their paradigmatic status in the modern philosophy of emotions, cognitive theories have been criticized for failing to provide a satisfactory account of affectivity in emotions. I agree with much of this criticism, but I argue that an amended cognitive theory can overcome the flaws of the two main theories, strong cognitivism and componential cognitivism. I argue that feeling cannot be reduced to the evaluative content of emotion and attitudinal mode of holding it as strong cognitivists suggest. Typical emotional feelings are induced by either propositionally explicable or biologically "hardwired" evaluations instead of being involved in the latter. We, then, face the challenge to explain why feeling and evaluative construal that figure in emotion are aspects of the same state, unlike occasional feelings and thoughts that happen to occur in me at the same time. I propose that evaluative content and feeling are different kind of representions of the formal property of emotional object. This is a second-order property that is ascribed to all individual objects of a particular emotion-type in virtue of its perceived first-order properties and that is experienced as a property of those objects in a state of emotion. Evaluative content involves a conceptual representation of the formal property while feeling represents its inherent affective quality.

The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, ed. L. Candiotto, 2019

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the relevance that emotions can play in our epistemic life considering the state of the art of the philosophical debate on emotions. The strategy is the one of focusing on the three main models on emotions as evaluative judgements, bodily feelings, and perceptions, following the fil rouge of emotion intentionality for rising questions about their epistemic functions. From this examination, a major challenge to mainstream epistemology arises, the one that asks to provide prominence to the epistemic agent and to her affects. This chapter discusses these implications, also providing an overview of the many alternatives available nowadays in epistemology, arguing for an open, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary approach to emotions in knowledge.

Philosophers like Amélie O. Rorty and Jesse J. Prinz have argued that emotions are not, strictly speaking, rational in-themselves. In this paper, I argue that emotions can be understood not only as being rational in-themselves, strictly speaking, but also as being instrumentally rational, epistemically rational, and evaluatively rational. I begin with a discussion of what it means for emotions to be rational or irrational in-themselves, which includes the derivation of a criterion for the ontological rationality of emotions (CORe): For every emotion or emotion-type there exists some normative standard, given by what emotions are or what an emotion-type is, against which our emotional responses can be judged or evaluated, in light of the fact that our emotions manifest our rationality. I then distinguish what it means for emotions to be rational in-themselves from what it means for emotions to be instrumentally rational, epistemically rational, and evaluatively rational. Finally, I bring my argument to a close by providing an account of what emotions are—emotions as superordinate inference rules—which fulfills the CORe, and I conclude that emotions can be understood as being rational in-themselves, qua emotions or qua an emotion-type.

2019

Emotions and epistemic rationality have been traditionally considered to be in opposition. In the last twenty years, the role of emotions in epistemology has been increasingly acknowledged, but there is no systematic argument for the rational assessability of emotions that is compatible with both cognitivist and non-cognitivist theories of emotions and fits with the epistemic rational assessability of mental states in general. This thesis aims to fill this gap. Using empirically informed philosophical methodology, I offer a novel account of the rational assessability of emotions that fits with the rational assessability of other mental states and that could in principle be accepted by cognitivist and some prominent non-cognitivist theories of emotions. The possibility to epistemically rationally assess emotions opens up a fresh set of questions that regards the nature of the evaluations involved in the emotions, the epistemic norms that apply to them and the extent to which we are e...