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© Roger M Tagg 2012
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
The chapters in this book are based on presentations at a conference that took place at the University of Manchester in 2001. Emotions had then only recently become considered as a serious topic in philosophy.
I have included here, above the table of highlights, the following diagram, which is my interpretation of Richard Wollheim's mental map, which he describes, but does not draw, on pages 20 and 21 of Chapter II. But beware - not all the authors of chapters in this book would go along with this structure.
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| Chapter | Page | Highlight | ||||||||||
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| I | 1 | Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is a 'Cognitive Theory' of the Emotions and Does it Neglect Affectivity? by ROBERT C. SOLOMON. | ||||||||||
| Back in 1973 he had written a paper saying that "emotions are judgments'. This caused a lot of criticism. | ||||||||||||
| "Progress in philosophy is moved more by the drama of one outrageous thesis after another - than by cautious, careful argument." | ||||||||||||
| 7 | Thoughts are 'conjured up', 'invited' (e.g. think about it, stop and do something else, then an idea hits) or 'uninvited'. | |||||||||||
| Peter Goldie (see Ch XII) regards thoughts as voluntary, whereas our imagination "runs away with us". | ||||||||||||
| 8 | 'Perception' may trigger 'immediate' emotion, but not ongoing emotion. | |||||||||||
| 10 | "Other people are 'co-conspirators' in the cultivation of our emotions." | |||||||||||
| " 'Judgment' is not necessarily articulate, or for that matter conscious." [RT: like a rugby player deciding whether to pass, kick or run?] Animals make judgments. | ||||||||||||
| If emotion are to be seen as judgments, an emotion is "a complex of judgments" - not usually a 'one-liner'. | ||||||||||||
| 11 | Emotions are too heterogeneous to be discussed as a single category. | |||||||||||
| 13 | Anger involves taking up a 'defensive' posture. | |||||||||||
| 15 | We have a much smaller store of 'knowing thats' than of 'knowing hows' (Gilbert Ryle's terms). | |||||||||||
| "The emotion (of anger) must be further directed by way of some sort of blame, which in turn involves feelings of oppression and hostility." | ||||||||||||
| II | 19 | The Emotions and their Philosophy of Mind by RICHARD WOLLHEIM | ||||||||||
| 20-22 | Wollheim created the map above early in his career, based on his reading of Gilbert Ryle's 'The Concept of Mind' (1949). However he says that he definitely doesn't follow Ryle's interpretation. | |||||||||||
| We always maintain a 'toolkit' of emotions, but the contents of this toolkit grows and recedes according to events. | ||||||||||||
| In his view, in regard to the map, Functionalism 'homogenizes' states and dispositions; Constructivism drops dispositions, and treats everything as 'mental states'; Reductionism (e.g. Behaviorism = 'we are what we do', Narrativism = 'we are what can be told') is over-simplification. | ||||||||||||
| 28 | What about 'attitudes'? [RT: Are they states, like feelings? Or dispositions?] | |||||||||||
| 29 | Beliefs can be falsified, desires can be satisfied, but emotions can't be 'finished off'. They have 'history'. [RT: and hang around?] | |||||||||||
| 31 | "Deep down, the mind is prey to irrational forces." | |||||||||||
| III | 39 | Basic Emotions, Complex Emotions, Machiavellian Emotions by PAUL GRIFFITHS | ||||||||||
| 42 | 'Basic' emotions are culture-independent. These include fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy and surprise. Darwin carried out studies, including with Australian Aborigines and New Guineans. | |||||||||||
| 45 | From neuroscientific experiments, Le Doux described a 'twin pathway' effect. Studies showed that both a 'quick and dirty' low road and a slower 'high road' both happen in the brain's response to stimuli. | |||||||||||
| 47 | More complex emotions include things like existential dread, or sexual jealousy. | |||||||||||
| 48 | Paul Ekman proposed additional 'basic' emotions: amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride in achievemnet, relief, distress (goes with sadness), satisfaction, sensory pleasure, shame. | |||||||||||
| 49 | Our 'primary' emotions come from evolution, 'secondary' ones come from our development. | |||||||||||
| Machiavellian emotions are those we 'turn on' for a purpose or to achieve a goal, e.g. sulking. | ||||||||||||
| 50-1 | Is a lot of this that we observe 'social interaction'? Or 'cultural display rules'? | |||||||||||
| 51 | There's certainly a difference between US and Japanese rules. But Ekman could detect the "momentary onset of negative facial expressions" before the mask appeared. | |||||||||||
| 52-3 | Some people employ 'deliberate leakage' as above on occasions. In this case the 'expression' is what is Machiavellian. | |||||||||||
| 60 | 'Emotional intelligence' includes "re-interpretation of the situation to motivate oneself". | |||||||||||
| IV | 69 | Emotion, Psychosemantics, and Embodied Appraisals by JESSE PRINZ | ||||||||||
| Extreme non-cognitive theories of emotions are typified by a "pure feeling theory of twinges and pangs"; also concepts like 'buzz' or unlocated pain. | ||||||||||||
| 70 | William James said "Emotions are 'feelings of the body' "; But Damasio said that some emotions can "bypass the body". | |||||||||||
| 73 | In Lazarus's cognitive theory, he suggested 6 questions: 1) Has something relevant to my goals occurred? 2) Is it congruent with my goals? 3) How is my ego involved? 4) Who deserves credit or blame? 5) What coping plans are available? 6) What can I expect for the future? | |||||||||||
| 77 | Some pathways which are non-cognitive will work faster than is possible using Lazarus's appraisal. | |||||||||||
| "Non-cognitive themes fail to capture the fact that emotions are meaningful." [RT: i.e., they are directed towards something of interest to us.] | ||||||||||||
| 78 | "A mental state refers to what it is set up to be set off by." [RT: !!!] This is part of an 'informational theory' approach, e.g. Fred Dretske's. | |||||||||||
| 80-1 | Prinz's preference is for what he calls "embodied appraisal theory", trying to bridge the gap between cognitive and non-cognitive approaches. See this page for his more recent work. | |||||||||||
| [RT: See also this web page, which covers the range of theories about emotion; it gives some useful background to the next 2 chapters as well.] | ||||||||||||
| V | 87 | Emotions and the Problem of Other Minds by HANNA PICKARD | ||||||||||
| 93 | 'Nostalgia' doesn't have an 'affect programme'. | |||||||||||
| 99 | The answer to the 'other minds' problem may lie in the bodily changes that go with emotions. | |||||||||||
| 102 | 'Pretence' may still be a problem. | |||||||||||
| VI | 105 | Emotional Feelings and Intentionalism by ANTHONY HATZIMOYSIS | ||||||||||
| AH wants to re-examine the boundary between 'inside' and 'outside', i.e. the relation of mental states to the world. | ||||||||||||
| 106 | He starts with 'emotional intentionality' - using Husserl's meaning of 'intentionality' as 'what's it all about'? | |||||||||||
| 109 | The question is, do 'emotions' and 'emotional feelings' have the same 'intentional' object? [RT: Like, can we have vague feelings of disquiet about 'we know not what'? What about 'existential dread' or 'angst' in general? | |||||||||||
| 111 | "Those who support the view that emotions are perceptual states have to show both that the world is inhabited by value properties and that we are well equipped for such properties to be revealed to us." AH thinks intentionalism in its current form doesn't cut the mustard. But see this page for a defence. | |||||||||||
| VII | 113 | Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body by PATRICIA GREENSPAN | ||||||||||
| Damasio argued that "some sort of emotional 'marking', of memories of the outcomes our choices with anxiety, is needed to support learning from experience". | ||||||||||||
| 114 | The above idea is opposed to the view of "the mind as software program". | |||||||||||
| 117 | More recently, there is a vogue to treat "emotional states as physiological or bodily reactions or 'reaction-clusters' ('affect programs') capable of causal connection with rational thought and action, but not themselves capable of rationality". | |||||||||||
| But, emotions "may sometimes embody more accurate perceptions of the value-laden world than we allow to affect our detached judgments". [RT: Like once when my wife had a hunch that a particular horse would win a race. But then she argued herself into backing a different horse. I didn't think about it, but bet on her original selection, and it won.] | ||||||||||||
| 118 | An emotion could "be warranted by a significant subset of the evidence" - this would be more 'perception' than 'rational judgment'. | |||||||||||
| 119 | One may have options, e.g. to show anger or to 'let it go' - e.g. if one is a customer with a complaint. | |||||||||||
| 120 | What emotions 'are' is probably too difficult to agree or settle on. What's more interesting is what they do. | |||||||||||
| VIII | 127 | The significance of recalcitrant emotion (or, anti-quasijudgmentalism) by JUSTIN D'ARMS, AND DANIEL JACOBSON | ||||||||||
| 128 | 'Sentimentalism' seems incompatible with 'Judgmentalism', where in the latter "an emotional state is a combination with some cognitive component with an affect". According to the Wikipedia page on Sentimentalism, these authors, and also Prinz, are advocates of it. | |||||||||||
| 129 | Emotions are 'recalcitrant' when they persist "despite the agent's making a judgment that is in tension with it". [RT: Like, "I know I have no reason to fear X, but I still do"?] Judgmentalism has to allow for this fact. Greenspan (previous chapter) attempts to do this, hence the authors' term 'quasi-judgmentalism'. | |||||||||||
| 138 | 'Natural' emotions "evolved for their adaptive value in dealing with 'fundamental life tasks'. The authors would like to exclude these from quasi-judgmentalism; so would John Deigh (see a recent book by him) and Griffiths (see Ch 3). | |||||||||||
| 144 | "Although we have argued against the central claim of judgmentalism, we want to suggest that its critics have gone too far in repudiating this philosophical tradition." | |||||||||||
| 145 | "To judge an emotion as fitting is not to think of it as adaptive but to endorse its evaluation as correct." | |||||||||||
| IX | 147 | The Logic of Emotions by AARON BEN-ZE'EV | ||||||||||
| ABZ proposes 3 'general nodes' of the mental system: emotional, perceptual and intellectual. Emotion isn't a " 'mental state' and it's not a 'mere disposition', as are beliefs and desires". | ||||||||||||
| 151 | 'Normative rationality' might mean what's best if we can't judge intellectually (because, for example, time is too limited, or we panic). | |||||||||||
| 152 | 'Cause' is a synthetic [RT: i.e., we humans have invented it as a concept] rule, as opposed to analytical logic based on consistent rules. | |||||||||||
| 153-4 | ABZ divides the logical principles underlying the emotional and intellectual modes into three groups, each concerned with a different type of information: (a) the nature of reality, (b) the impact of the given event upon the agent, and (c) the background circumstances of the agent. | |||||||||||
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| 161 | Pascal: "The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand". | |||||||||||
| X | 163 | Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception by ALFRED R. MELE | ||||||||||
| 'Self-deception' isn't like deceiving someone else. | ||||||||||||
| 165 | Sources of biased belief: 1) Vividness of information: "Vivid data tend to have a disproportional influence on the formation and retention of beliefs; and 2) The confirmation bias: "People ... tend to search ... more often for confirming than for dis-confirming instances and to recognize the former more readily". | |||||||||||
| 166 | Regarding self-deception, James Friedrich said: "When there are few costs associated with errors of self-deception (incorrectly preserving or enhancing one's self-image), mistakenly representing one's self-image downward or failing to boost it appropriately should be the focal error". | |||||||||||
| 167 | Friedrich, Trope and Liberman (who he jointly refers to as 'FTL') talk about 'acceptance' and 'rejection' thresholds for 'lay hypothesis testing'. These are driven by the motivation to minimize costly errors. See also 'Theory of Mind Time'. | |||||||||||
| "Confidence thresholds are driven by the strength of desires to avoid specific costly errors together with information costs." | ||||||||||||
| 170 | An 'wanting to believe' emotion might be involved, e.g. believing your wife isn't having an affair. | |||||||||||
| XI | 181 | Emotion, Weakness of Will, and the Normative Conception of Agency by KAREN JONES | ||||||||||
| The question is, is 'weakness of the will' rational? | ||||||||||||
| 183 | We shouldn't always knock biases - they can be useful. | |||||||||||
| KJ is opposing a 'naturalistic' view. | ||||||||||||
| 183-4 | The issue here is 'practical decision making'. We have to consider possible regret (see also the previous chapter). We probably can't satisfy all the considerations [RT: dimension of the problem], so the temptation is to concentrate on those that we rate as most weighty. But our methods and mechanisms have limits and liabilities. [RT: Sometimes, even if one addresses all the most weighty considerations, it might be the ones one rated as less weighty that cause the regret. An earthquake? An unexpected recession?] | |||||||||||
| 185 | Emotions "contribute to our being able to track our reasons". But they "display at most partial integration with our evaluative judgment". | |||||||||||
| 186 | "Often our gut feelings key us to the presence of reasons even though we cannot, at the time, articulate what those reasons are, and even though our conscious deliberative judgment tells us such reasons obtain (you're just silly, get a grip)." | |||||||||||
| 187 | If we take this line, 1) the 'incontinent' action may not be irrational; 2) the agent can't easily reflect whether the gut feelings are really pointing to reasons; 3) there may be a lot of variance in the reliability of the information and mechanisms involved; and 4) 'best judgment' may still rely on many other beliefs. This naturalist view isn't really satisfactory - all our beliefs aren't necessarily on a par value-wise. | |||||||||||
| 189 | We can "call agents who guide their actions via reasons understood as reasons 'reason-responders' ". | |||||||||||
| 190 | A second kind, 'reason-trackers', are capable of registering reasons, but don't need the concept of a reason - they display less 'robustness'. | |||||||||||
| 191 | A lot depends on "how I conceive of myself". | |||||||||||
| 198 | "Should we think of ourselves as being reason-responders, given that thinking of ourselves in this way brings with it a commitment to the cultivation and exercise of habits of reflective self-monitoring?" | |||||||||||
| XII | 201 | Narrative and Perspective; Values and Appropriate Emotions by PETER GOLDIE | ||||||||||
| The old Kirkegaard quote: "We live our lives forward, but understand them only backwards". | ||||||||||||
| 202 | PG takes the 'it's all narrative' viewpoint, but his additional concern is the 'perspective' of the author. | |||||||||||
| 203 | He says "In fiction, the question of truth and falsity does not arise; whereas factual narratives can be true or false ..." [RT: This seems a bit different to the Donald Spence or AP Kerby view of so-called 'narrative truth'. I'm reminded of a scandal in Austrralia at the time of writing this. An MP, Craig Thomson, has been accused in a report of misuse of union funds when he was General Secretary of the Health Services Union. He has made a 'narrative' statement saying it's all lies, and claimed that the committee that carried out the investigation were biased against him. He has also accused another former union official of 'destroying his political career', as (Thomson claimed) he had threatened to do years previously. Of course that official denies all of it, just as the report committee deny bias. So someone has to be telling a false narrative.] | |||||||||||
| 205 | PG talks about 'internal' and 'external' emotional perspectives; he instances what he calls 'agent-observer divergence', between what the narrator feels and what another person feels. As an example "I did X because that's how I felt (at the time)"; but "She did X because that's the sort of person she is" (i.e. implying her character is fixed). | |||||||||||
| 206 | We don't (accurately) re-create the same feeling and reasoning at the time of recollection as we did at the time that a certain event happened. | |||||||||||
| 207 | There is often an issue of "what wasn't known then". | |||||||||||
| 208 | When narrating, which character's 'state of mind at the time' does a narrator express? If he/she was involved, it's probably going to be his/her own. | |||||||||||
| 209 | The listener to (or reader of) a narrative can experience 'discordance of emotional response'. | |||||||||||
| 210 | "We tell stories with all sorts of motives in mind other than to communicate the content of the story: to curry favour, to amuse, to impress, to shock, to deceive, and so forth." | |||||||||||
| 211 | Narrative is usually 'idiographic' (i.e. pertaining to one particular situation), rather than 'nomothetic' (i.e. general or scientific laws). [RT: People do seem to have a temptation to generalize, to move from the particular to the general, too readily.] | |||||||||||
| 213 | The reader could be "torn between two perspectives"; PG gives the example of a conscientious Auschwitz guard. | |||||||||||
| "Shared external emotional responses" are important to us, especially as children. | ||||||||||||
| 214 | "In real life ... a belief and a desire, which lead to an intention, which in turn can explain and putatively justify the action." | |||||||||||
| 215 | Hayden White regarded all historical narratives as verbal fictions. PG thinks that's an extreme view. Stanley Fish regarded all discourse (whether factual or fictional) as "on a par". [RT: Craig Thomson again!] Richard Rorty defined truth as "a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be 'paying their way' and that fit in with other sentences that are doing so". [RT: To me, that sounds like a definition of 'rings true', rather than of 'truth'.] | |||||||||||
| 216 | 'Factual' stories are 'referential' - they claim to refer to actual happenings. [RT: But is there (enough) evidence to prove truth or falsehood?] | |||||||||||
| A life can be 'narrated', but the narration is then 'about' that life. | ||||||||||||
| A hard-line postmodernist might claim that the evidence is just 'more texts'. | ||||||||||||
| XIII | 221 | Passion and Politics by SUSAN JAMES | ||||||||||
| 223 | "We cannot hope to change the underlying disposition that makes us partial." One example is that we favour the 'near' (geographically or conceptually) over the 'far'. | |||||||||||
| 225 | Some recent philosophers think "that one can do political philosophy without an account of our everyday emotional dispositions". [RT: very similar to Goldie's last point.] | |||||||||||
| 228 | "Our investment in our existing emotional dispositions is sometimes stronger than our attachment to rationality and more powerful than our ability to change; and when this is the case, our emotional attachments can generate reasons for our beliefs rather than the other way around." | |||||||||||
| "The recalcitrant emotions of groups are harder to discuss. ... They may shape what we are prepared to accept and what we are able to do, and may thus bear on the realizability of political theories. ... A realizable theory will have to answer to the emotional dispositions and capacities of a community, allowing for the fact that these may be out of line with their beliefs, or insusceptible to reasoning." SJ says the tendency of the theorists is to relegate such difficulties as 'implementation issues', which is probably a mistake. | ||||||||||||
| XIV | 235 | Don't Worry, Feel Guilty by J. DAVID VELLEMAN | ||||||||||
| 236 | Can 'self-indulgence guilt' and 'survivor guilt' emotions ever be rational? | |||||||||||
| 237 | Is it Freudian 'super-ego' that's bothering us, or remembered fear of parental punishment? | |||||||||||
| 240 | It might be fear of loss of trust, even in oneself. | |||||||||||
| 240-1 | There's 'attitudinal trust' (are we well-intentioned?) as well as practical trust. | |||||||||||
| 242 | DV proposes different levels of listening and hearing: 1) merely detecting sounds; 2) unserstanding sounds as words; 3) weighing a communication; 4) believing a communications; 5) taking the belief to heart. [RT: and maybe doing something about it?] | |||||||||||
| 243 | We can have 'shared intentions' ("I'm willing if you are"). [RT: I'd say that in practice we need a lot of these.] | |||||||||||
| 246 | Survivor guilt might be fear of being envied or even resented (possibly by friends and relatives of the non-survivors). | |||||||||||
| 248 | It may help to correctly interpret such emotions. | |||||||||||
Although I don't have a background in this area, I found most of it fairly easy to read, and it made sense. It did get hard going in a few places though - maybe this is why there are few highlights for some chapters.
Recognizing that this book followed a relatively early stage in the life of this special subject, it's likely that there have been quite a few developments in the 10 years since the Manchester conference. It's clear that some of the chapter authors have brought out full-length books of their own. A few, however have died.
'Emotional fitness' was one of my own topics in my 'Instant Wisdom' phase, and 'Emotional Intelligence' is now very definitely mainstream.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 25th May 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .
