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I begin by outlining some of the ways that philosophers have conceived of the place of emotions in the topography of the mind, particularly in their relation to bodily states, to motivation, and to beliefs and desires, as well as some of the ways in which they have envisaged the relation between different emotions. Most emotions have an intentional structure: we shall need to say something about what that means. Psychology and more recently evolutionary biology have offered a number of theories of emotions, stressing their function in the conduct of life. Philosophers have been especially partial to cognitivist theories, emphasizing analogies either with propositional judgments or with perception. But different theories implicitly posit different ontologies of emotion, and there has been some dispute about what emotions really are, and indeed whether they are any kind of thing at all. Emotions also raise normative questions: about the extent to which they can be said to be rational, or can contribute to rationality. In that regard the question of our knowledge of our own emotions is especially problematic, as it seems they are both the object of our most immediate awareness and the most powerful source of our capacity for self-deception. This results in a particularly ambivalent relation between emotions and morality. I will conclude with a recapitulation of the main positions defended by some three dozen philosophers of emotion in the past half century.
To date cognitive science does not seem to have provided any crucial tests to decide between competing models of the mind. An eclectic approach therefore seems warranted. What does seem well established in the light of cross-cultural research is that a number of emotions have inter-translatable names and universally recognizable expressions. According to Ekman and Friesen (1989) these are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (the last two of which, however, some researchers consider too simple to be called emotions) (Panksepp 1998). Other emotions are not so easily recognizable cross-culturally, and some expressions are almost as local as dialects. But then this is an issue on which cognitive science alone should not, perhaps, be accorded the last word: what to a neurologist might be classed as two tokens of the same emotion type might seem to have little in common under the magnifying lens of a Proust.
Another range of models propose mutually conflicting ways of locating emotion within the general economy of the mind. Some treat emotion as one of many separate faculties. For Plato in the Republic, there seemed to have been three basic components of the human mind: the reasoning, the desiring, and the emotive parts. For Aristotle, the emotions are not represented as constituting a separate agency or module, but they had even greater importance, particularly in the moral life, our capacity for which Aristotle regarded as largely a result of leaning to feel the right emotions in the right circumstances. Hume's notorious dictum that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions also placed the emotions at the very center of character and agency. For Spinoza, emotions are not lodged in a separate body in conflict with the soul, since soul and body are aspects of a single reality; but emotions, as affections of the soul, make the difference between the best and the worst lives, as they either increase the soul's power to act, or diminish that power. In other models, emotions as a category are apt to be sucked into either of two other faculties of mind. They are then treated as a mere composite or offshoot of those other faculties: a peculiar kind of belief, or a vague kind of desire or will. The Stoics made emotions into judgments about the value of things incidental to an agent's virtue. Hobbes assimilated "passions" to specific appetites or aversions. Kant too saw emotions as essentially conative phenomena, but grouped them with inclinations enticing the will to act on motives other than that of duty.
Twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy and psychology have also tended to incorporate emotions into other, better understood mental categories. Under the influence of a "tough-minded" ideology committed to behaviorism, theories of action or will, and theories of belief or knowledge, had seemed more readily achievable than theories of emotion. Economic models of rational decision and agency inspired by Bayesian theory are essentially assimilative models, viewing emotion either as a species of belief, or as a species of desire.
That enviably resilient Bayesian model has been cracked, in the eyes of many philosophers, by such refractory phenomena as akrasia or "weakness of will." In cases of akrasia, traditional descriptive rationality seems to be violated, insofar as the "strongest" desire does not win, even when paired with the appropriate belief (Davidson 1980). Emotion is ready to pick up the slack--if only we had a coherent theory of how it does it.
It is one thing, however, to recognize the need for a theory of mind that finds a place for the unique role of emotions, and quite another to construct one. Emotions vary so much in a number of dimensions--transparency, intensity, behavioral expression, object-directedness, and susceptibility to rational assessment--as to cast doubt on the assumption that they have anything in common. However, while this variation may have led philosophers to steer clear of emotions in the past, emotions are no longer being studiously avoided in the way that they once were. The explanatory inadequacy of theories that shortchange emotion is becoming increasingly apparent, and philosophy is gradually bringing emotion back into its purview. It is no longer the case, as Peter Goldie (2000) observes, that emotion is treated as a poor relation in the philosophy of mind.
One problem with this theory is that it is unable to give an adequate account of the differences between emotions. This objection was first voiced by Walter Cannon (1929). According to James, what distinguishes emotions is the fact that each involves the perception of a unique set of bodily changes. Cannon claimed, however, that the visceral reactions characteristic of distinct emotions such as fear and anger are identical, and so these reactions cannot be what allow us to tell emotions apart. The same conclusion is usually drawn from an oft-cited experiment performed by Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer (1962). Subjects in their study were injected with epinephrine, a stimulant of the sympathetic system. Schacter and Singer found that these subjects tended to interpret the arousal they experienced either as anger or as euphoria, depending on the type of situation they found themselves in. Some were placed in a room where an actor was being angry; others were placed in a room where an actor was being silly and euphoric. In both cases the subjects' mood tended to follow that of the actor. The conclusion most frequently drawn is that, although some forms of general arousal are easily labeled in terms of some emotional state, there is no hope of finding in physiological states any principle of distinction between specific emotions. The differentiae of specific emotions are not physiological, but cognitive or something else.
Subsequent research has shown that a limited number of emotions do, in fact, have significantly different bodily profiles. (LeDoux 1996; Panksepp 1998) However, bodily changes and the feelings accompanying these changes get us only part way towards an adequate taxonomy. To account for the differences between guilt, embarrassment, and shame, for example, a plausible theory will have to look beyond physiology and common-sense phenomenology.
Another problem with feeling theories is that they tempt one to treat emotions as brute facts, no doubt susceptible of biological or psychological explanation but not otherwise capable of being rationalized. Emotions, however, are capable of being not only explained, but also justified--they are closely related to the reasons that give rise to them. 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).
Both of these problems -- that of differentiating individual emotions, and that of accounting for emotions' various ties to rationality -- can be traced, at least in part, to a more fundamental oversight. Feeling theories, by assimilating emotions to sensations, fail to take account of the fact that emotions are typically directed at intentional objects. This defect is to some extent mitigated in what might be regarded as a more sophisticated "feeling theory" elaborated by Antonio Damasio (1999). On Damasio's view the capacity for emotions involves a capacity for the brain to monitor the body's past and hypothetical responses, both in the autonomic and the voluntary systems, in terms of "somatic markers". The association of characteristic bodily states with past and hypothetical experiences and responses establishes some connection between the emotion and the absent world, but falls short of fully explicating the intentional nature of emotioon.
This variety has led to a good deal of confusion. A long-standing debate, for example, concerns the extent to which the objects of emotions are to be identified with their causes. This identification seems plausible; yet it is easy to construct examples in which being the cause of an emotion is intuitively neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for its being its object: if A gets annoyed at B for some entirely trivial matter, drunkenness may have caused A's annoyance, yet it is in no sense its object. Its object may be some innocent remark of B's, which occasioned the annoyance but which it would be misleading to regard as its cause. In fact the object of the annoyance may be a certain insulting quality in B's remark which is, as a matter of fact, entirely imaginary and therefore could not possibly be its true cause.
The right way to deal with these complexities is to embrace them. We need a taxonomy of the different sorts of possible emotional objects. We might then distinguish different types of emotions, not on the basis of their qualitative feel, but -- at least in part -- according to the different complex structures of their object relations. Many emotions, such as love, necessarily involve a target, or actual particular at which they are directed. Others, such as sadness, do not. On the other hand, although a number of aspects of the loved one may motivate attentional focus, efforts to find a propositional object for love have been unconvincing. (Kraut 1986, Rorty 1988). Sadness may or may not focus on a propositional object; regret, by contrast, cannot be described without specifying such an object. Depression or elation can lack all three kinds of object. Objectless emotions share many properties with other emotions, especially in their physiological and motivational aspects, but they might more properly be classified as moods rather than full-fledged emotions. Moods typically facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart.
Finally, while different emotions may or may not have these various sorts of objects, every emotion has a formal object if it has any object. A formal object is a property implicitly ascribed by the emotion to its target, focus or propositional object, in virtue of which the emotion can be seen as intelligible. My fear of a dog, for example, construes a number of the dog's features (its salivating maw, its ferocious bark) as being frightening, and it is my perception of the dog as frightening that makes my emotion fear, rather than some other emotion. The formal object associated with a given emotion is essential to the definition of that particular emotion. It is also, in part, what allows us to speak of emotions being appropriate or inappropriate. If the dog obstructing my path is a shitzu, my fear is mistaken: the target of my fear fails to fit fear's formal object. As we shall see below, appropriateness in this sense does not entail moral correctness; but it makes the emotion intelligible even when it is abhorrent. Thus racist disgust, while obviously morally inappropriate, is nevertheless intelligible in terms of its link to paradigm cases of disgust.
Other theories consider the function of emotions more broadly, and ask, not why we should have particular emotions on specific occasions, but rather why we should have particular emotions at all. This question is often given an evolutionary answer: emotions (or at least many of them) are adaptations whose purpose is to solve basic ecological problems facing organisms (Plutchik 1980; Frank 1988). Darwin (1998[1896]) himself was concerned not so much with the question of how our emotions might have evolved, but rather why they should have the forms of expression that they do. Emotional expressions, he thought, once served particular functions (e.g. baring teeth in anger to prepare for attack), but now accompany particular emotions because of their usefulness in communicating these emotions to others. Paul Ekman (1972), inspired by Darwin's approach, takes emotional expressions to be important parts of "affect programs"--complex responses found in all human populations, which are controlled by mechanisms operating below the level of consciousness. Much research has been done on this group of emotions (usually listed as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust) and scientifically-minded philosophers often restrict their discussions of emotion to the affect programs, since these are those most well understood of all emotional phenomena (Griffiths 1997; DeLancey 2001). However, the affect program model leaves out a good deal. In particular, it ignores those emotions which involve higher cognitive processes, such as jealousy, envy, and Schadenfreude. It is these sorts of emotions which many philosophers have made the focus of their own theories of emotion. The research program of evolutionary psychology (Cosmides et al. 2000) goes some way to filling this lacuna, and emphasizes the modularity that is likely to result on the plausible speculation that different social and psychological emotional functions have been shaped relatively independently by natural selection. The mechanisms elaborated by natural selection in the context of competitive survival, dominance, mating and affiliation are not necessarily harmonious. Philosophers, for their part, have devoted a good deal of attention to the analysis of more subtle differences between "higher" emotions. (Ben-Ze'ev 2000). This has led many philosophers to stress cognitive aspects of emotions.
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. My anger at someone simply is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person. Other cognitivist theories introduce further elements into their analyses. Emotions have been described as sets of beliefs and desires (Marks 1982), affect-laden judgments (Broad 1971; Lyons 1980), and as complexes of beliefs, desires, and feelings (Oakley 1992).
Cognitivist theories have faced criticism along a number of fronts. Deigh (1994) has objected that the view of emotions as propositional attitudes has the effect of excluding animals and infants lacking language. Others have argued that if emotions always involve the standard propositional attitudes, namely belief and desire, then an account of the rationality of emotions will collapse into an account of what it is for those standard propositional attitudes to be rational: but emotional rationality is not reducible to the rationality of beliefs or desires (de Sousa 1987; Ben-Ze'ev 2000; Goldie 2000; Elster 2003). Another criticism, stressed by Wollheim (1999) draws upon a difference between transient mental states and mental dispositions. Emotions, like beliefs and desires, can exist either as occurrent events (jealousy of a rival at a party) or as persisting modifications of the mind (a tendency to feel jealousy). However, dispositional beliefs have a straightforward connection with their occurrent manifestations: if I have a standing belief that the world is round, for example, then I will assent to this proposition on particular occasions (sincere avowal of desires also counts as evidence for underlying dispositions, though the connection is not as tight). Dispositional emotions, on the other hand, do not have tailor-made forms of expression, but can be manifested in a whole diverse range of behavior.
A frequent objection made to cognitivist theories is the "fear of flying" objection: propositional attitudes are neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of an emotion, since I may be well aware that flying is the safest means of transport and yet suffer fear of flying. (Stocker 1992). I may feel a twinge of suspicion towards my butler, and yet believe him to be utterly trustworthy; conversely, I may judge that he is up to no good, and yet feel nothing in the way of emotion. These examples suggest an analogy with perceptual illusions, which a correct belief sometimes quite fails to dispel. A cognitivist might reply that this objection merely establishes that the propositional content of emotion (like the propositional content of perception) differs from the propositional content of belief, not that emotions have no propositional content at all. It remains that even if perceptions necessarily have propositional content, they cannot be assimilated to belief: so it seems to be with emotion. Furthermore, it is not obvious that the content of perceptions or emotions are exhausted by their propositional content (Peacocke 2001). Similarly several theorists insist that experiences of emotion have content beyond any propositional content. (Goldie 2000; Wollheim 2000; Charland 2002; Tappolet forthcoming).
A view ascribing to emotions a true mind-to-world direction of fit, inspired by the model of perception, would involve a criterion of success that depended on correctness with respect to some objective property. To take this approach is to give a particular answer to a question posed long ago in Plato's Euthyphro (the question, as originally put forward, concerned the nature of piety, but it extends to values in general): Do we love X -- mutatis mutandis for the other emotions -- because X is lovable, or do we declare X to be lovable merely because we love it? The first alternative is the objectivist one, encouraged by the analogy of perception. It requires that we define clearly the relevant sense of ‘objectivity’. Specifically it promises a valid analogy between some of the ways in which we can speak of perception as aspiring to objectivity and ways in which we can say the same of emotion.
Emotions are sometimes said to be subjective in this sense: that they merely reflect something that belongs exclusively and contingently to the mind of the subject of experience, and therefore do not co-vary with any property that could be independently identified. This charge presupposes a sense of "objective" that contrasts with "projective," in something like the psychoanalytic sense. In terms of the analogy of perception, to say that emotions are universally subjective in this sense would be to claim that they resemble hallucinations more than veridical perceptions. The perceptual system is capable of the sort of functioning-in-a-vacuum that leads to perceptual mistakes. Similarly, emotions may mislead us into "hasty" or "emotional" judgments (Solomon 1984). On the other hand, the lack of perceptual capacities can be a crippling handicap in one's attempt to negotiate the world: similarly a lack of adequate emotional responses can hinder our attempts to view the world correctly and act correctly in it (Nussbaum 1990, Thomas 1989). This explains why we are so often tempted to take seriously ascription of reasonableness or unreasonableness, fittingness or inappropriateness, for common emotions. Unfortunately it is unclear how the alleged objective properties identified by emotions might be identified independently.
Closely related to the question of the cognitive aspect of emotions is the question of their passivity. Passivity has an ambiguous relation to subjectivity. In one vein, impressed by the bad reputation of the "passions" as taking over our consciousness against our will, philosophers have been tempted to take the passivity of emotions as evidence of their subjectivity. In another vein, however, it has been noted that the passivity of emotions is sometimes precisely analogous to the passivity of perception. How the world is, is not in our power. So it is only to be expected that our emotions, if they actually represent something genuinely and objectively in the world, should not be in our power either: we can no more arbitrarily choose to experience an emotion than we can adopt a belief at will. (Gordon 1987).
If the view that emotions are a kind of perception can be sustained, then the connection between emotion and cognition will have been secured. But there is yet another way of establishing this connection, compatible with the perceptual model. This is to draw attention to the role of emotions as providing the framework for cognitions of the more conventional kind. de Sousa (1987) and Amélie Rorty (1980) propose this sort of account, according to which emotions are not so much perceptions as they are ways of seeing--species of determinate patterns of salience among objects of attention, lines of inquiry, and inferential strategies. (See also Roberts 1988) Emotions make certain features of situations or arguments more prominent, giving them a weight in our experience that they would have lacked in the absence of emotion. Consider how Iago proceeds to make Othello jealous. He directs Othello's attention, suggests questions to ask, and insinuates that there are inferences to be drawn without specifying them himself. Once Othello's attention turns to his wife's friendship with Cassio and the lost handkerchief, inferences which on the same evidence would not even have been thought of before are now experienced as compelling: "Farewell, the tranquil mind…."
This account does not identify emotions with judgments or desires, but it does explain why cognitivist theorists have been tempted to make this identification. Emotions set the agenda for beliefs and desires: one might say that they ask the questions that judgment answers with beliefs and evaluate the prospects to which desire may or may not respond. As every committee chairperson knows, questions have much to do with the determination of answers: the rest can be left up to the facts. In this way emotions could be said to be judgments, in the sense that they are what we see the world "in terms of." But they need not consist in articulated propositions. Much the same reasons motivate their assimilation to desire. As long as we presuppose some basic or preexisting desires, the directive power of "motivation" belongs to what controls attention, salience, and inference strategies preferred.
Some philosophers suggest that the directive power which emotions exert over perception is partly a function of their essentially dramatic or narrative structure (Rorty 1988). 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. de Sousa (1987) has suggested that the stories characteristic of different emotions are learned by association with "paradigm scenarios." These are drawn first from a 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. Paradigm scenarios involve two aspects: first, a situation type providing the characteristic objects of the specific emotion-type (where objects can be of the various sorts mentioned above), and second, a set of characteristic or "normal" responses to the situation, where normality is first a biological matter and then very quickly becomes a cultural one. Once our emotional repertoire is established, we interpret various situations we are faced with 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.
A problem with this idea is that each emotion is appropriate to its paradigm scenario by definition, since it is the paradigm scenario which in effect calibrates the emotional repertoire. It is not clear whether this places unreasonable limitations on the range of possible criticism to which emotions give rise. What is certain is that 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. In that sense at least, then, emotions can be assessed for rationality.
This brings up normative issues about emotions, which will be addressed in sections 8-10 below. First, however, I consider what one might conclude about the nature or "ontology" of emotions.
This trichotomy has been reinterpreted in various ways, but it still serves. It is generally agreed that the simpler emotions, those whose expression and recognition Ekman (1972, 1989) has shown to be universal, are driven by the basic needs of organisms such as mating, defense or avoidance of predators, and social affiliation. All complex mammals require swift, relatively stereotyped responses to these challenges. These are the "affect programs" favored by Ekman (1972, 1989), DeLancey (2001) and particularly Griffiths (1997), to be "what emotions really are." Opinions divide as to whether the same sort of functional analysis can be applied to a wider range of what Griffiths has called the "cognitively penetrable" emotions. Placing severe constraints on what is to count as a "natural kind", Griffiths argued that Ekman's six basic affect programs, and only they, form natural kinds: the others, he claimed, are for the moment beyond the reach of useful scientific investigation. Each affect program comprises a coordinated syndrome of responses (which we attribute to the algorithmic level) implemented at the physiological (hormonal and neurological), muscular-skeletal, and expressive levels in ways that owe their uniformity to homology, that is to say their common ancestral origin. Other emotions, however, bear only relations of analogy with these and don't count as natural kinds either singly or as a class.
Against this Charland (2002) has argued that a sufficient level of homology can be found to unite at least the basic emotions as a class, and that we should regard emoters, and hence their emotions, as a natural kind. Relying on Panksepp (1998, 2000), Charland argues that the integrated mechanism of seven basic emotions (Panksepp's list differs slightly from Ekman's) are implemented by distinct circuits forming natural kinds not only in the human but more widely in the mammalian brain. Emoters form a distinct kind in view of their ancestral organization in terms of certain basic functions, the specific algorithms that contribute to those functions, and their implementation in terms of physiological, expressive, hormonal, and motivational processes. This is sufficient not only to justify treating the specific emotions as natural kinds, but to treat emotion in general as a natural kind. (Charland 1995, 1997). This view seems to require that we regard emotions as a set of processes distinguished at all three levels of explanation. Emotions in general should then be viewed as a genus of processes united by the organismic functions they serve, and individual emotions would owe their specific identity both to the subfunctions they are designed to serve and to their characteristic physiological implementation.
Another way of organizing the various approaches might appeal to the dominant theoretical models on which they rest. It has often been said that in the history of the philosophy of mind, every epoch has tended to redefine its subject matter in terms of the most fashionable technological metaphor. The notion of emotions as "springs of action" alludes to the once fashionable model of clockwork. The dominant metaphor in Freud's early work was hydraulic. (Freud 1895). What does this observation lead us to expect for emotions?
Modern conceptions of emotions, as we have seen, have been frequently couched in terms of other mental terms. In these cases, there is nothing sui generis that emotions are: any "ontological" question about their nature belongs derivatively to the ontology of desire and belief. (At a different, more remote level of explanation, theories favoured by cognitive science are likely also to appeal to evolutionary ideas.) This leaves three other dominant contemporary models which one could expect to lay claims on emotion theory: physiology, computation, and dynamical systems.
Physiological processes are conceded by all philosophers to be involved in clearly prototypical cases of emotion. But no philosopher, for fear perhaps of defining themselves out of relevant competence, has been willing to concede that emotions just are physiological processes. Instead they are held to be complexes in which physiology plays a part at the level of implementation of some higher-level process. The higher-level process in which an emotion consists owes its overall structure to functional needs, and typically comprises, in addition to physiological aspects, behavioural, expressive, and phenomenological, components.
Computational theories of emotion seem to have been particularly attractive to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. They were broached early by a couple of psychoanalysts turned hackers (Peterfreund 1971), (Shank and Colby 1973) and played an important role in the theoretical elaborations of John Bowlby's work on the mechanisms and psychological consequences of early separation and loss. (Bowlby 1969-1980). These works attempted to model Freudian concepts of the dynamics of conscious and unconscious mental life in computational terms. Colby even constructed a simulation of a paranoid patient, "Parry", which famously fooled some psychiatrists. The key idea was to set up second-order parameters that acted on the first-order modules of perception, belief and desire, thus regulating or disrupting the operation of perceptual and action programs. From the sidelines, de Sousa (1987) suggested that connectionist systems or analog models stand a better chance of modeling emotion than those based on classical von Neuman-type digital computation, but that suggestion hasn't gone anywhere. From the point of view of computational theory, the prevailing wind, backed by both evolutionary speculation and neurological findings on control systems and relatively independent affect-programs, has tended to favour modular conceptions of emotion rather than holistic ones. (Charland 1995, Robinson 2003).
Still, some philosophers and computer scientists have continued to be interested in integrating computing theory with emotions. Aaron Sloman has elaborated the sort of ideas that were embryonic in Shank and Colby into a more sophisticated computational theory of the mind in which emotions are virtual machines, playing a crucial role in a complex hierarchic architecture in which they control, monitor, schedule and sometimes disrupt other control modules. (Wright, Sloman & Beaudoin 1996). Rosalind Picard (1997) lays out the evidence for the view that computers will need emotions to be truly intelligent, and in particular to interact intelligently with humans. She also adverts to the role of emotions in evaluation and the pruning of search spaces. But she is as much or more concerned to provide an emotional theory of computation than to elaborate a computational theory of emotions. Lastly, a forthcoming book by Marvin Minsky bears the promising title of The emotion machine.
Dynamical systems theories have been relatively slow to emerge, despite their increasingly fashionable status in more central areas of cognitive science. One remarkable attempt to integrate the perspective of dynamical systems into understanding of emotional life is that of (Magai and Haviland-Jones 2002), who draw on dynamical systems theory to model the elusive combination of unpredictability and patterned coherence found in the life-long evolution of individuality. Like predecessors such as Bowlby (1969-1980), they are motivated by a goal of understanding at the level of conscious experience as well as of underlying mechanisms: dynamical systems theory is only one of their tools. It is therefore particularly pertinent to the preoccupations of those who are interested in the normative dimensions of emotions: their rationality and their irrationality, their capacity for enhancing or inhibiting self-knowledge, and their moral implications. I address these questions in the next three sections.
That this is not as much of a problem for people as it is for machines may well be due to our capacity for emotions. As noted earlier, emotions constitute one of the chief mechanisms whereby attention is constrained and directed. (Matthews and Wells 1994). This allows them to frame our decisions in two important ways. First, they define the parameters taken into account in any particular deliberation. Second, in the process of rational deliberation itself, they render salient only a tiny proportion of the available alternatives and of the conceivably relevant facts. Thus they winnow down to manageable size the number of considerations relevant to deliberation, and help to provide, in any particular situation, the indispensable framework without which the question of rationality could not even be considered. This suggestion, relabeled the "Search hypothesis of emotion", has been criticized and elaborated by Evans (2002), who argues convincingly that it needs to be buttressed by a positive theory of what the emotional mechanisms actually are which are capable of effecting this task.
In a more pervasive and less easily definable way, the capacity to experience emotion seems to be indispensable to the conduct of a rational life over time. Antonio Damasio (1994) has amassed an impressive body of neurological evidence suggesting that emotions do, indeed, have this sort of function in everyday reasoning. Subjects in his studies who, because of injuries sustained to the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices of the brain, had a diminished capacity to experience emotion, were severely hindered in their ability to make intelligent practical decisions. In these ways, then, emotions would be all important to rationality even if they could not themselves be deemed rational or irrational.
But can emotions themselves be assessed for their rationality? There is a common prejudice that "feelings," a word now sometimes vulgarly used interchangeably with "emotions," neither owe nor can give any rational account of themselves. Yet we equally commonly blame others or ourselves for feeling "not wisely, but too well," or for targeting inappropriate objects. The norms appropriate to both these types of judgment are inseparable from social norms, whether or not these are endorsed. Ultimately they are inseparable from conceptions of normality and human nature. Judgments of reasonableness therefore tend to be endorsed or rejected in accordance with one's ideological commitments to this or that conception of human nature. It follows that whether these judgments can be viewed as objective or not will depend on whether there are objective facts to be sought about human nature. On this question I fortunately do not need to pronounce. It is enough to note that there is no logical reason why judgments of reasonableness or irrationality in relation to emotions need be regarded as any more subjective than any other judgments of rationality in human affairs.
Exactly how one conceives of the nature of emotional rationality will depend on one's theory of what the emotions are. Cognitivist and appraisal theories will say that a reasonable emotion is one whose constituent propositional attitudes or appraisals are reasonable. Theories which take emotions to be perceptions of objective values will claim that the target of an appropriate emotion possesses the value which the emotion presents it as having. Narrative theories will consider an emotion appropriate if its dramatic structure adequately resembles that of its eliciting situation.
Of course, these answers to the question of what it is for an emotion to be
reasonable suppose that the relevant notion of rationality is an epistemic one,
and that what appropriate emotions succeed in achieving is some sort of
representational adequacy. This assumes that emotions are states that we
passively undergo. However, the relation of the emotions to the will is not as
clear as the word "passion" might suggest. Certain philosophers have argued that
emotions are more like actions, for which we must bear responsibility (Sartre
1948; Solomon 1980). If this is true, and emotions are to some extent under our
voluntary control, then emotions will also be assessable for their strategic
rationality. However, while it may, on occasion, be possible to call up an
emotion, it is also possible that the emotion which actually materializes will
not be the one which was summoned. If a person is not aware that a substitution
has taken place, then she will be self-deceived about her emotions.
The first arises from the connection of emotion with bodily changes. There was something right in James's claim that the emotion follows on, rather than causing the voluntary and involuntary bodily changes which are held to express it. Because some of these changes are either directly or indirectly subject to our choices, we are able to pretend or dissimulate emotion. That implies that we can sometimes be caught in our own pretense. Sometimes we identify our emotions by what we feel: and if what we feel has been distorted by a project of deception, then we will misidentify our own emotions.
A second source of self-deception arises from the role of emotions in determining salience among potential objects of attention or concern. 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 faults. When my love turns to anger I still focus on him, but now attend to a very different set of properties. This suggests one way of controlling or dominating my emotion: think about something else, or think differently about this object (Greenspan 2000). But this carries a risk. It is easier to think of something than to avoid thinking about it; and to many cases of emotional distress only the latter could bring adequate relief. Besides, one is not always able to predict, and therefore to control, the effect that redirected attention might produce. This familiar observation alerts us to the role of the unconscious: if among the associations that are evoked by a given scene are some that I can react to without being aware of them, then I will not always be able to predict my own reactions, even if I have mastered the not altogether trivial task of attending to whatever I choose. Where the unconscious is, self-deception necessarily threatens.
This brings us to the third source of emotional self-deception: the involvement of social norms in the determination of our emotions. This possibility arises in two stages from the admission that there are unconscious motivations for emotions. First, if I am experiencing an emotion that seems altogether inappropriate to its occasion, I will naturally confabulate an explanation for it. A neurotic who is unreasonably angry with his wife because he unconsciously identifies her with his mother will not rest content with having no reason for his anger. Instead, he will make one up. Second, the reason he makes up will typically be one that is socially approved (Averill 1982).
If we are self-deceived in our emotional responses, or if some emotional state induces self-deception, this may not be merely a failure of self-knowledge. Many have thought that having certain emotions is an important part of what it is to be a virtuous moral agent. If this is true, then being systematically self-deceived about one's emotions will be a kind of moral failure as well.
The view that emotions are irrational was eloquently defended by the Epicureans and Stoics. For this reason, these Hellenistic schools pose a particularly interesting challenge for the rest of the Western tradition. The Stoics adapted and made their own the Socratic hypothesis that virtue is nothing else than knowledge, adding the idea that emotions are essentially irrational beliefs. All vice and all suffering is then irrational, and the good life requires the rooting out of all desires and attachments. (As for the third of the major Hellenistic schools, the Skeptics, their view was that it is beliefs as such that were responsible for pain. Hence they recommend the repudiation of opinions of any sort.) All three schools stressed the overarching value of "ataraxia", the absence of disturbance in the soul. Philosophy can then be viewed as therapy, the function of which is to purge emotions from the soul (Nussbaum 1994). In support of this, the Stoics advanced the plausible claim that it is psychologically impossible to keep only nice emotions and give up the nasty ones. For all attachment and all desire, however worthy their objects might seem, entail the capacity for wrenching and destructive negative emotions. Erotic love can bring with it the murderous jealousy of a Medea, and even a commitment to the idea of justice may foster a capacity for destructive anger which is nothing but "furor brevis"-- temporary insanity, in Seneca's arresting phrase. Moreover, the usual objects of our attachment are clearly unworthy of a free human being, since they diminish rather than enhance the autonomy those that endure them.
The Hellenistic philosophers' observations about nasty emotions are not wholly compelling. Surely it is possible to see at least some emotions as having a positive contribution to make to our moral lives, and indeed we have seen that the verdict of cognitive science is that a capacity for normal emotion appears to be a sine qua non for the rational and moral conduct of life. Outside of this intimate but still somewhat mysterious link between the neurological capacity for emotion and rationality, the exact significance of emotions to the moral life will again depend on one's theory of the emotions. Inasmuch as emotions are partly constituted by desires, as some cognitivist theorists maintain, they will, as David Hume contended, help to motivate decent behavior and cement social life. If emotions are perceptions, and can be more or less epistemically adequate to their objects, then emotions may have a further contribution to make to the moral life, depending on what sort of adequacy and what sort of objects are involved. Max Scheler (1954) was the first to suggest that emotions are in effect perceptions of "tertiary qualities" that supervene in the (human) world on facts about social relations, pleasure and pain, and natural psychological facts, a suggestion recently elaborated by Tappolet (2000).
An important objection to that view that has been voiced by D'Arms and Jacobson (2000a) is that emotions may have intrinsic criteria of appropriateness that diverge from, and indeed may conflict with, ethical norms. Appropriate emotions are not necessarily moral. Despite that, some emotions, specifically guilt, resentment, shame and anger, may have a special role in the establishment of a range of "response-dependent" values and norms that lie at the heart of the moral life. (Gibbard 1990, D'Arms and Jacobson 1993). If any of those variant views is right, then emotions have a crucial role to play in ethics in revealing to us something like moral facts. A consequence of this view is that art and literature, in educating our emotions, will have a substantial role in our moral development (Nussbaum 2001). On the other hand, there remains something "natural" about the emotions concerned, so that moral emotions are sometimes precisely those that resist the principles inculcated by so-called moral education. Hence the view that emotions apprehend real moral properties can explain our approval of those, like Huckleberry Finn when he ignored his "duty" to turn in Jim the slave, whose emotions drive them to act against their own "rational" conscience (Bennett 1974; McIntyre 1990).
This suggestion about the relevance of emotion to ethics must be sharply distinguished from "Emotivism"--the claim that emotions can be used to elucidate the concept of evaluation itself. Such elucidation would only be plausible if we understood the explicans more clearly than the explicandum. But the variety and complexity of emotions makes them poor candidates for the role of explicans. The view in question must also be distinguished from the sociobiological hypothesis -- which had early precursors in Mencius and Hume -- that certain motives of benevolence are part of the genetic equipment which makes ethical behavior possible. That plausible view has attracted surprisingly energetic opposition in recent years. One objection against it is one directed against all forms of ethical naturalism: namely that the biological origins of a sentiment have no obvious bearing on its ethical value. Nevertheless, sociobiological naturalism does hold out a promise of explaining both the existence of some of our more benevolent emotions and attitudes, and the way in which their scope often seems so dangerously limited to the members of some restricted in-group.
The range of emotions to which the sociobiological hypothesis can be applied, however, is relatively narrow. That many complex emotions are to a certain extent socially constructed, is attested by the fact that what is considered normal emotion varies between epochs and cultures. Feminists have pointed out, in particular, that gender-specific norms on emotional experience and expression have been a standard means of maintaining inequality among the sexes in many cultures (de Beauvoir 1952). Viewed in this light, the emotions in general lack that property of universalizability which many philosophers have regarded as a sine qua non of the ethical (Blum 1980). On the other hand, the extent and significance of cultural differences are still a matter of considerable controversy (Pinker 2002). Any conclusions about the place of emotions in the moral life must therefore remain highly tentative.
The revival of philosophical interest in emotions from the middle of the twentieth century can be traced to an article by Erroll Bedford (1957), and a book by Anthony Kenny (1963) which argued against the assumption that emotions are feelings, impervious to either will or reason. Bedford stressed both the intentionality and the importance of contextual factors on the nature, arousal and expression of emotions. Kenny, reviving some medieval theories of intentionality, urged that emotions should be viewed as intentional states. He defined a notion of a formal object of an intentional state as that characteristic that must belong to something if it is to be possible for the state to relate to it. This implies an excessively strong logical link between the state and its object's actual possession of the characteristic in question. Nevertheless it points to an important condition on the appropriateness of an emotion to a given object, which has been incorporated in the account of formal objects set out above. These papers gave impetus to what became the cognitivist mainstream in philosophy of emotion, some fairly wide variations going from C.D. Broad (1971{1954])'s "affect-laden judgments" to the "strong desires" theory advocated by Joel Marks (1982)
Among other philosophers responsible for the revival of interest in emotions, Irving Thalberg (1977) took as given the cognitive dimension of emotion, and explored some of the subtleties of the different relations of emotions to their objects. The Wittgensteinian flavor of Bedford's second point, about the contextual dependency of emotions, was elaborated into a "social constructionist" view by the psychologist James Averill (1982). On this view, favored later by some feminist philosophers such as Naomi Scheman (1983) and Sue Campbell (1998), spurred also by the influential externalist perspective first advocated by (Burge 1979), emotions are not primarily viewed as individual characteristics of the persons to whom they are attributed, but emerge out of the dynamics of social interaction. The influence of Wittgenstein was also felt in a different respect--stemming from his remarks on "seeing-as" (Wittgenstein 1953)--in a paper by Robert Roberts (1988) which regarded emotions as "concern-based construals".
Gabriele Taylor (1975) was among the first to explore the ways in which the justification of emotion differs from the justification of its associated thought. She sought to establish the conditions under which a given emotion would be justified in that more specific sense, and pointed out, following Aristotle, that the absence of appropriate emotion can also be culpable. A later book explored these themes in greater detail (Taylor 1985), and pioneered the exploration of the importance of emotional guilt in the moral life, anticipating later work by Allan Gibbard (1990) and Patricia Greenspan (1995).
Amelie Rorty (1980) collected a number of seminal articles in a collection to which she contributed two influential papers of her own, on explaining emotions (Rorty 1980a) and on jealousy (Tov-Ruach 1980). Her articles, as well as the collection as a whole, which included early papers by several of the authors mentioned here, provided a strong stimulus for the revival of the field. Rorty urged a pluralistic, piecemeal approach, skeptical of theory and highly attentive to the multiple psychological, social, and even political dimensions of emotional scenarios. Her explorations, enriched with a rich phenomenology of narrative detail, are developed and amplified in some of her later work (Rorty 1988, 1998, 2003).
Robert Solomon (1980) spurred both interest and opposition with his provocative thesis that emotions are judgments, albeit judgments of a particular kind, characterized by their mode of haste and their evaluative content. Under the influence of (Sartre 1948), he also adopted the view that emotions could be understood as strategic choices, collectively driven by the goal of protecting and enhancing self-esteem (Solomon 1984). In his more recent work he has also written about the emotional dimension of justice, and advocated an enrichment of emotion theory through cross-cultural perspectives and the integration of scientific perspectives (Solomon 1999).
Jerome Neu (1977) is sympathetic to by psychoanalytic views of the mechanisms underlying the pathology of belief and desire frequently associated with emotion. But he remains among the staunchest defenders of a cognitivist view of the core of emotion, as attested by his book title borrowed from William Blake's line "A tear is an intellectual thing". (Neu 2000). Neu has repeatedly stressed, in particular, that what distinguishes one emotion from another is not how it feels, but what belief is embedded in the emotion about its target. Despite the unifying theoretical vision suggested by this doctrine, much of Neu's work explores the pervasively messy and multifarious ways in which emotions influence our lives.
William Lyons (1980), picking up a different strand of Bedford and Kenny's contributions, and also influenced by Wittgenstein, espoused a mitigated form of cognitivism, which he called a "causal-evaluative" theory. On this view, an emotion arises if and only if an abnormal physiological change is caused by an evaluation. This view sought to integrate the insights of James (1884) on the importance of our perception of inner physiological changes triggered by the perception of an object of attention. But it remains cognitivist, in that Lyons claimed that the emotions are differentiated entirely by the evaluations by which they are triggered.
Patricia Greenspan first turned her attention to problems of emotional ambivalence and more broadly to the nature of emotional rationality. (Greenspan 1988) She has been particularly persistent in seeking to balance the diverse and conflicting imperatives implicit in emotion theory. One is that we must account for emotions both as conscious mental processes and as involving an important bodily component; another is that emotions play an important role both in determining and in undermining rational thought and action. In later work Greenspan has turned increasingly to the practical, moral and social implications of emotional life, including especially the place of guilt among moral emotions. (Greenspan 1995). She has also returned, in a very different way inspired not by Sartre but by game theory and the influential work of the economist Robert Frank (1988) to the ways in which emotional manifestations can serve as strategies in social interaction. (Greenspan 2000).
Among Robert Gordon's distinctive contributions in (Gordon 1987) was the development of an idea first broached by (Thalberg 1977) that most ascriptions of emotions with propositional objects are "factive"--that is, that they presuppose the truth of their propositional objects. A minority (such as worry and hope) are "epistemic", in that they are precisely focused on an uncertainty. Although this proposal has been controversial, it has the virtue of drawing attention to the possibility that in human communication the default assumption is that of a common world. Gordon noted the analogy between the limited sense of passivity that is appropriately ascribed to perception and the passivity of emotions. He was also one of the first to suggest that the knowledge we have of the states of mind of others, and particularly of their emotional condition, is derived not from any psychological theory, but from an active simulation of that other's state. Again, there is suggestive neurological evidence that this might be on the right track from the discovery of "mirror neurons" that to be similarly activated both by a concrete action and by the sight of the same concrete action in another (Gallese and Goldman 1998), though I am not aware of any specific follow up implicating human emotions.
Ronald de Sousa (1987) argued that emotions are not reducible to beliefs, desires, or combinations of the two, but represent a logically and functionally separate category of capacities. They contribute essentially to the strategic choices of human rational deliberation, and they are themselves assessable as rational or irrational in accord with criteria which overlap but are not identical with those in terms of which we judge moral and esthetic value.
Michael Stocker has stressed the pervasiveness of emotion: emotions are not merely episodes, disruptive or otherwise, but include states and experiences that give color, meaning and motivation to the whole of the vast range of actions of which we are capable, including intellectual action. They are both sources of value in themselves, and sometimes constitute epistemic avenues to value. Stocker was one of the first philosophers to call for a moderation of the intellectualism implied by the dominant cognitivist orthodoxy, by drawing attention to such cases as fear of flying, where the attitude embodied in an emotion conflicts directly with the subject's avowed beliefs. (Stocker and Hegeman 1996).
Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions falls squarely within the "cognitive-evaluative" camp. (Nussbaum 1990, 1994, 2001). But it is one distinction of her approach that it may escape damage from much of the criticism leveled against the standard cognitivist line of thought. This results from her insistence that far from being simple propositional attitudes that can be exhausted by their expression in propositional form, the psychological and moral significance of the emotions can only be grasped through the medium of art, and particularly literature, in which the marriage of form and content alone makes possible an adequately complex message. The deep reason for this is that the kind of knowledge involved in moral appraisal is both affective and cognitive. In her emphasis on the complexity and moral importance of emotions, she is at one with Annette Baier (Baier 1995), whose work has included an exploration of the role of emotional trust in personal relations, a form of trust that cannot simply be described in terms of belief in the truth of promises and undertakings. Both these writers may owe something to the earlier work of Bernard Williams (1973), for its early recognition of the overlap between the vocabulary used in the expression of moral judgments with the vocabulary of emotion, in words such as outrage, indignation, shock or admiration.
Laurence Thomas (1989) built a persuasive argument that social life demands that altruistic motives be built into individual character as the foundation of the capacity to lead a moral life, and that this requires a psychological process rooted in the biologically normal relation between parent and infant. Parental love thus forms the basis of the emotional capacities that in turn subtend harmonious social relations.
Allan Gibbard (1990) offered an influential twist on the role of emotions in the moral life. Rather than seeing them as perceptions or apprehensions of value, like Stocker and others, he proposed a different sort of "response-based theory" of value. On this view, it is not the traditional virtuous emotions of compassion and sympathy that are of paramount importance in morality, but rather those emotional attitudes that relate to the warrant, or endorsement, of norms, namely guilt and anger or resentment. These emotions are intrinsically social, and the endorsement of norms is therefore enforced both interpersonally, through resentment, and intrapersonally through emotional guilt. This position has been both criticized and expanded by Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson (1993, 2000b). Response-based theories of moral value have sparked much debate, notably from David Wiggins (1987), John McDowell (1985), and Simon Blackburn (1998).
Aaron Ben-Ze'ev (2000) advocates a view of emotions as "subtle" mode of mental actualization, not reducible to any of the components that commonly figure in any given episode of emotion. Emotions form a distinct mode or psychological system. They are prototypes concepts rather than names of natural kinds, and their subtlety derives from the fact that the emotional mode constitutes an exercise of all faculties together, particularly in response to change, at the level of perception, intellectual processes, and feeling.
Jon Elster (1999) is among those who are skeptical of the prospects for a unified theory of emotions. Instead he describes in some detail the variety of mechanisms associated with emotions which allows them to be used in the explanation of actions. These mechanisms are diverse and unpredictable, and their interactions often result in the "transmutation" of one emotion into another: thus love can turn to jealousy, jealousy to rage, rage to remorse, as the dynamics of the situation evolves. Elster has also added to the argument against assimilating emotions to desires and beliefs: whereas the standard Bayesian type decision theories assume that expected desirability grows with desirability and declines with probability, emotions, as second-order attitudes to probability, can actually increase the desirability of an option as its probability decreases, thus scrambling the standard computation (Elster 2003).
Richard Wollheim (2000) comes closer than most current writers to presenting a unified theory of emotions. He views them as dispositional attitudes, which need to be studied both through their history and in terms of their role in regulating or disrupting other psychological mechanisms of belief and desire. That history is understood in psychoanalytic terms (owed primarily to Freud and Melanie Klein): primitive experiences of frustration or satisfaction, stemming from desires that may not necessarily be conscious and may not necessary have propositional objects, give rise to attitudes towards precipitating factors in the outside world. These persisting attitudes are the dispositions that constitute the emotions. Most emotions target the outside world, but guilt and shame are exceptions, as they stem from introjected critical figures which target the self. In all cases emotions "color the world" and hence regulate beliefs and desires.
Peter Goldie (2000) is among those who have recently advocated a return to the close identification of emotions with feelings, on the ground that the divorce between them was decreed on false premises: feelings, too, can actually have intentional objects. He resists both reductive theories which regard emotions as mere compounds of belief and desire, and "add-on theories" that view them as beliefs and desires plus something else. Although some experiences plausibly labelled feelings are deprived of intentionality, most feelings are in fact intentional, and only if we understand the crucial component of feeling in emotion are we likely to understand the large nugget of truth in the traditional view of emotions as often irrational and disruptive. Furthermore, Goldie holds that certain primitive emotions, on the analogy of cognitively impenetrable perceptual illusions, influence action tendencies without the mediation of propositions or concepts. (Goldie Forthcoming 2003)
Paul Griffiths (1997) and Craig DeLancey (2002) are the most vigorous exponents of the view that philosophical work on the emotions must be re-oriented away from linguistic analysis and given first roots in science. Both argue that such roots will split off the simpler emotions of "affect programs" from more "cognitively penetrable" ones. Griffiths contends that only affect programs form natural kinds in virtue of common ancestral origins, or homologies. Citing a wide variety of psychological and neurological research, as well as artificial intelligence models, DeLancey argues for a view of emotions as playing a crucial role in a system of mental activity organized as a hierarchical system of modules.
Aaron Sloman has argued that the mind should be understood in terms of the architecture of the brain's information-processing devices (Wright, Sloman and Beaudoin 1996). The notion of architecture here adverts to the complex hierarchy of control of component modular mechanisms. In line with the three-level schema I have cited from Marr, (cf. also (Dennett 1971)) we should understand the approach elaborated in this work as pertaining both to the functional and to the algorithmic level. It explicitly eschews hypotheses about implementation. Joining the growing consensus that emotion phenomena reflect distinct, successively evolved behavioral control systems, Sloman distinguishes between a primitive or primary stream rooted in relatively fixed neuro-physiological response syndromes, a more elaborate control system bringing in cortical control, as well as a third level, probably exclusive to humans, which most closely corresponds to the layer of emotions that we are most concerned with when we think of the emotional charge of art and literature or of the complexity of social intercourse.
In the recent work just all too briefly outlined, one can discern two contrasting trends. We might call their exponents, with a apologies to Isaiah Berlin, the hedgehogs and the foxes of emotion theory. The foxes are all keen to emphasize the pervasiveness and diversity of what we call emotions. Emotions are multifarious in their causes, in their causes and effects, in their functions, in their roles both within and among social individuals. Prominent among the foxes are Ben-Ze'ev, Elster, Goldie, Neu, Nussbaum, Rorty, and Stocker. The hedgehogs, inspired by the preference of for leaner theory, are more interested in parcelling out domains in which reasonably well regimented neuro-psychological entities with clearly identifiable functions can be studied. Chief among this class of philosophers are Griffiths and DeLancey, who regard the psychological work of Ekman, Panksepp and others as providing a class of clearly identifiable emotions, and tend to the view that the rest are too messy to reward serious attention. In a different vein, Wollheim might be classed with the hedgehogs, in that he presents a unified theory of the origins and nature of emotional dispositions. In many of these authors, a consensus may be building, according to which the reaction against "feeling theories" of emotion was excessive, because it was too hastily assumed that feelings could not have intentionality.
Despite the contrast between these two trends, current views manifest a good deal of agreement. A broad consensus has emerged on what we might call adequacy conditions on any theory of emotion. An acceptable philosophical theory of emotions should be able to account at least for the following nine characteristics. All the recent and current accounts of emotion discussed here have something to say about most of them, and some have had something to say about all.
| Ronald de Sousa sousa@chass.utoronto.ca |
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