Are emotions bodily feelings or evaluative cognitions? What is happiness, pain, or “being moved”? Are there basic emotions? In this chapter, I review extant empirical work concerning these and related questions in the philosophy of emotion. This will include both (1) studies investigating people’s emotional experiences and (2) studies investigating people’s use of emotion concepts in hypothetical cases. Overall, this review will show the potential of using empirical research methods to inform philosophical questions regarding emotion.

A foundational assumption of contemporary cognitive science is that perceptual processing involves inferential transitions between representational states. However, it remains controversial whether accounts of this kind extend to modalities whose perceptual status is a matter of debate. In particular, it remains controversial whether we should attribute inferential mechanisms to the sensory processing underpinning (human) pain experiences. This paper argues that, contrary to recent proposals in the philosophy and science of pain, pain processing is not mediated by inferential transitions. To this (...) end, I show that standard motivations for inferentialism—including appeal to underdetermination, illusion, cue combination, cognitive penetration, perceptual constancy, and invariance—do not carry over to pain. Instead, I suggest that pain’s sensory processing may be better characterised as an idiosyncratic form of transduction, distinguishing it both from paradigmatic perceptual modalities and canonical transducers. (shrink)

Representationalism about consciousness is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on the content of that experience. Much of the literature on representationalism concerns putative objections and replies, rather than clarifying the details of the view itself. Defenders of representationalism face a question which has thus far been largely overlooked: what, precisely, is the relationship between phenomenal character and content? The representationalist has three options: mere supervenience, building or metaphysical dependence, or identity. After examining a number of (...) versions of the first two views, I conclude that they all face serious metaphysical difficulties. I argue instead that this relationship is identity, despite the fact that identifying content and phenomenal character requires revising our view of the content of experiences. Identifying content and phenomenal character strengthens the dialectical position of representationalists by providing them with better responses to anti-representationalist objections. In closing, I show how we can accept the implications of this revisionary view of perceptual content. (shrink)

What is the function of pain? A popular view in contemporary philosophy is that the pain system is a bodily disturbance detector: pain states track/detect and represent bodily disturbances and the phenomenal character of the (sensory dimension of) pain supervenes on this representational content. The view can accommodate paradigmatic pain cases, e.g., when pain follows from stepping on a nail. Once we consider more complex pain phenomena, however, it has seemingly little to offer. In this paper, I discuss dissociation between (...) pains and bodily disturbances, variation in pain thresholds, the effects of repeated stimulation on experienced pain intensity, and the modulation of pain experience by cognitive and emotional states. I argue that these phenomena suggest that the pain system is not a bodily disturbance detector, but a sophisticated security system. (shrink)

Discussions concerning the modularity of the pain system have been focused on questions regarding the cognitive penetrability of pain mechanisms. It has been claimed that phenomena such as placebo analgesia demonstrate that the pain system is cognitively penetrated; therefore, it is not encapsulated from central cognition. However, important arguments have been formulated which aim to show that cognitive penetrability does not in fact entail a lack of modularity of the pain system. This paper offers an alternative way to reject the (...) modularity of the pain system, which is independent from, but consistent with, the presence of cognitive penetration. It is proposed that, given the current knowledge regarding the functioning and the structure of the pain system, there are good reasons to accept that certain central cognitive mechanisms are part of the pain system. It is argued that such a ‘cognitive constitution’ of the pain system entails that the pain system is not modular. (shrink)