The comment addresses central issues of a "theory theory" approach as exemplified in Gopnik' and Goldman's BBS-articles. Gopnik, on the one hand, tries to demonstrate that empirical evidence from developmental psychology supports the view of a "theory theory" in which common sense beliefs are constructed to explain ourselves and others. Focusing the informational processing routes possibly involved we would like to argue that his main thesis (e.g. idea of intentionality as a cognitive construct) lacks support at least for two reasons: (...) one methodological and one structural. On the other hand, Goldman raises an important question when he is asking how people ascribe mental states to themselves. Reasons why Goldman's attempt to understand common sense mental representations by using an analogy from visual perception is problematic are discussed. The role which is attributed to a phenomenology is evaluated. (shrink)

A definition of emotion common to the affective sciences is an urgent desideratum. Lack of such a definition is a constant source of numerous misunderstandings and a series of mostly fruitless debates. There is little hope that there ever will be agreement on a common definition of emotion, given the sacred traditions of the disciplines involved and the egos of the scholars working in these disciplines. Our aim here is more modest. We propose a list of elements for a working (...) definition of emotion and discuss the justification for the inclusion of elements from our respective perspectives (philosophy and psychology). This working partial definition may at least serve as a litmus test to examine theories of emotion, old and new, across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

Many cognitive accounts of emotional processing assume that emotions have representational content that can be influenced by beliefs and desires. It is generally thought that emotions also have non-cognitive, affective components, including valence and arousal. To clarify the impact of cognition on these affective components we asked participants to rate sentences along cognitive and affective dimensions. For the former case, participants rated the believability of the material. For the latter case, they provided valence and arousal ratings. Across two experiments, we (...) show that valence and arousal are differently influenced by beliefs, suggesting that these two largely independent affective components of emotion differ in their cognitive penetrability. While both components depended upon overall comprehension of sentence meaning, only valence was influenced by the consistency of the sentences with participants’ beliefs (i.e., whether it was believable or unbelievable). We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding cognition–emotion relationships. (shrink)

Taking our lead from Solomon’s emphasis on the importance of the intentional object of emotion, we review the history of repeated attempts to make this object disappear. We adduce evidence suggesting that in the case of James and Schachter, the intentional object got lost unintentionally. By contrast, modern constructivists seem quite determined to deny the centrality of the intentional object in accounting for the occurrence of emotions. Griffiths, however, downplays the role objects have in emotion noting that these do not (...) qualify as intentional. We argue that these disappearing acts, deliberate or not, generate fruitless debate and add little to the advancement of our understanding of emotion as an adaptive mechanism to cope with events that are relevant to an organism’s life. (shrink)

Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, LSD and DMT are known to induce powerful alterations in phenomenology. Perhaps of most philosophical and scientific interest is their capacity to disrupt and even “dissolve” one of the most primary features of normal experience: that of being a self. Such “peak” or “mystical” experiences are of increasing interest for their potentially transformative therapeutic value. While empirical research is underway, a theoretical conception of the mechanisms underpinning these experiences remains elusive. In the following paper, psychedelic-induced (...) ego-dissolution is accounted for within an active inference framework, as a collapse in the “temporal thickness” of an agent’s deep temporal model, as a result of lowered precision on high-level priors. The argument here is composed of three moves: first, a view of the self-model is proposed as arising within a temporally deep generative model of an embodied organism navigating an affordance landscape in the service of allostasis. Next, a view of the action of psychedelics as lowering the precision of high-level priors within the generative model is unpacked in terms of a high Bayesian learning rate. Finally, the relaxation of high-level priors is argued to cause a “collapse” in the temporal thickness of the generative model, resulting in a collapse in the self-model and a loss of the ordinary sense of being a self. This account has implications for our understanding of ordinary self-consciousness and disruptions in self-consciousness present in psychosis, autism, depression, and dissociative disorders. The philosophical, theoretical and therapeutic implications of this account are touched upon. (shrink)

There is a distinction between being afraid and being afraid that something is the case. Kathy may be afraid that it will rain without being afraid, and may be afraid without being afraid that it will rain. We shall say that the distinction is between experiential and propositional fear. To be afraid is to experience fear, to be in a state of fear. The state takes many forms, such as fright, terror, and dread. To be afraid that something is the (...) case is to have a certain propositional attitude. We may have reasons for fearing, or being fearful, that it is. My goal is to explain what it means to experience fear. I shall argue that experiential fear can be defined in terms of propositional fear. The basic idea is that fear is experienced when an occurrent propositional fear of harm causes involuntary arousal and unhappiness in a direct way. The degree of fear experienced is the extent of involuntary arousal attributable to the subject's propositional fear. We shall see how this definition accounts for the similarities and differences between fear and the related concepts of hope and anxiety. (shrink)

In this paper, I address an ignored topic in the literature on self-deception—instances in which one is self-deceived about their emotions. Most discussions of emotion and self-deception address either the contributory role of emotion to instances of self-deception involving beliefs or assume what I argue is an outdated view of emotion according to which emotions just are beliefs or some other type of propositional attitude. In order to construct an account of self-deception about emotion, I draw a distinction between two (...) variants of self-deception about emotion: cognitively motivated self-deception and phenomenologically motivated self-deception. After providing an account of each variant, I discuss the importance of the role that perception plays in cases of self-deception about emotion. I conclude with a comment on the relevance of this discussion for contemporary debates in moral theory. (shrink)

The discipline of affective neuroscience is concerned with the underlying neural substrates of emotion and mood. This review presents an historical overview of the pioneering work in affective neuroscience of James and Lange, Cannon and Bard, and Hess, Papez, and MacLean before summarizing the current state of research on the brain regions identified by these seminal researchers. We also discuss the more recent strides made in the field of affective neuroscience. A final section considers different hypothetical organizations of affective neuroanatomy (...) and highlights future directions for the discipline. (shrink)

Kupperman (1995) advances an anti-essentialist view of emotions in which he suggests that there can be emotion without feeling or affect, emotion without corresponding motivation, and emotion without an intentional relation to an object such that the emotion is about that object in some way. In this reply to Kupperman's essay, I suggest a number of problems with his rejection of the essentialist position. I argue that in his discussion of feelings Kupperman is crucially not clear about the distinction between (...) the ascription of emotions by others versus the experience of emotions by an individual. Furthermore, I also question his analysis of the role of linguistic empiricism in philosophy and psychology. With respect to Kupperman's analysis of intentionality, I argue that he confuses the ability to readily identify intentional objects with the issue of their actual existence. Finally, I suggest that Kupperman confuses the concepts of action and motivation in his discussion of motivation. (shrink)

Theories of intentionality need to account for non-cognitive states like emotions as well as cognitive states like beliefs. When certain non-cognitive states are included, one can formulate a feasible physicalist account of intentionality that highlights its evolutionary roots. I argue that recent experimental data support just such a move.

The state of the body is central to guiding motivational behaviours. Here we discuss how afferent information from face and viscera influence the processing and communication of emotional states. We highlight (a) the fine-grained impact that facial muscular and patterned visceral responses exert on emotional appraisal and communicative signals; (b) short-term changes in visceral state that bias brain responses to emotive stimuli; (c) the commonality of brain pathways and substrates mediating short- and long-term bodily effects on emotional processes; (d) how (...) topographically distinct representations of different bodily states are coupled to reported feelings associated with subtypes of disgust; and (e) how pupil signals contribute to affective exchange. Integrating these observations enriches our understanding of emotional processes and psychopathology. (shrink)

In Responsible Brains, Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan apply the language of cognitive neuroscience to dominant understandings of criminal responsibility in criminal law theory. The Authors make a compelling case that, under such dominant understandings, criminal responsibility eventually ‘translates’ into a minimal working set of executive functions that are primarily mediated by the frontal lobes of the brain. In so arguing, the Authors seem to unquestioningly accept the law’s view of the “responsible person” as a mixture of cognitive capacities and mechanisms—thereby (...) leaving aside other fundamental aspects of individuals’ human agency. This commentary article offers a critique of the Authors’ rationalist and individualist approach. The critique can be summarized through the following claim: We humans, as responsible beings, are more than our executive functions. This claim articulates through four main points of discussion: role of emotions in moral judgments and behavior; executive functions and normative criteria for legal insanity; impact of adverse situational factors on executive functions; Authors’ account of punishment and, especially, rehabilitation. (shrink)

The theory of autopoiesis is central to the enactive approach. Recent works emphasize that the theory of autopoiesis is a theory of sense-making in living systems, i.e. of how living systems produce and consume meaning. In this chapter I first illustrate (some aspects of) these recent works, and interpret their notion of sense-making as a bodily cognitive- emotional form of understanding. Then I turn to modern emotion science, and I illustrate its tendency to over-intellectualize our capacity to evaluate and understand. (...) I show that this overintellectualization goes hand in hand with the rejection of the idea that the body is a vehicle of meaning. I explain why I think that this over-intellectualization is problematic, and try to reconceptualize the notion of evaluation in emotion theory in a way that is consistent and continuous with the autopoietic notion of sense-making. (shrink)

Emotion theorists tend to separate “arousal” and other bodily events such as “actions” from the evaluative component of emotion known as “appraisal.” This separation, I argue, implies phenomenologically implausible accounts of emotion elicitation and personhood. As an alternative, I attempt a reconceptualization of the notion of appraisal within the so-called “enactive approach.” I argue that appraisal is constituted by arousal and action, and I show how this view relates to an embodied and affective notion of personhood.

Competing perspectives on the nature of emotion are illustrated with latent and emergent variable models. Latent variable models draw from classical test theory, assuming that the measured indicators of emotion covary by virtue of some common executive, organizing neural circuit or network in the brain. By contrast, emergent variable models draw from a theory-driven, operational definition tradition, positing that emotions do not cause, but rather are caused by, the measured indicators of emotion, assuming no executive neural circuit or network, and (...) requiring no covariation among indicators. I suggest that the emergent variable model may be more compatible with the extant literature on the nature of emotion, especially in the age of affective neuroscience. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how affect influences judgment and thought, but also how thought transforms affect. The general thesis is that the nature and impact of affective reactions depends largely on their objects. We view affect as a representation of value, and its consequences as dependent on its object or what it is about. Within a review of relevant literature and a discussion of the nature of emotion, we focus on the role of the object of affect in governing (...) both the nature of emotional reactions and the impact of affect and emotion on cognition and action. Although emotion is always about the here and now, the capacity for abstract thought means that the human here and now includes imagination as well as perception. Indeed, the hopes and fears that dominate human lives often involve things only imagined. (shrink)

In the aftermath of emotivism and behaviourism, cognitivist theories of emotion became current in both philosophy and psychology. These theories, though varied, have in common that emotions require propositional attitudes such as beliefs or evaluations. Accordingly, cognitivist theories characterize emotions themselves with features of such attitudes, including syntax, semantic meaning, and justifiability.

The target article sketched and explored a mechanism (action-oriented predictive processing) most plausibly associated with core forms of cortical processing. In assessing the attractions and pitfalls of the proposal we should keep that element distinct from larger, though interlocking, issues concerning the nature of adaptive organization in general.

We respond to Morris and Richardson 's claim that Pickering and Chater's arguments about the lack of a relation between cognitive science and folk psychology are flawed. We note that possible controversies about the appropriate uses for the two terms do not affect our arguments. We then address their claim that computational explanation of knowledge-rich processes has proved possible in the domains of problem solving, scientific discovery, and reasoning. We argue that, in all cases, computational explanation is only possible for (...) aspects of those processes that do not make reference to general knowledge. We conclude that consideration of the issues raised by Morris and Richardson reinforces our original claim that there are two fundamentally distinct projects for understanding the mind, one based on justification, and the other on computational explanation, and that these apply to non-overlapping aspects of mental life. (shrink)

In Section 5 of his interesting article, Goldman suggests that the consideration of imaginary cases can be valuable in the analysis of our psychological concepts. In particular, he argues that we can imagine a system that is isomorphic to us under any functional description, but which lacks qualitative mental states, such as pains and color sensations. Whether or not such a being is empirically possible, it certainly seems to be logically possible, or conceptually coherent. Goldman argues from this possibility to (...) the conclusion that our concepts of qualitative mental states cannot be analyzed entirely in functional terms. (shrink)

The distinction between cognitive and perceptual theories of emotion is entrenched in the literature on emotion and is openly used by individual emotion theorists when classifying their own theories and those of others. In this paper, I argue that the distinction between cognitive and perceptual theories of emotion is more pernicious than it is helpful, while at the same time insisting that there are nonetheless important perceptual and cognitive factors in emotion that need to be distinguished. A general representational metatheoretical (...) framework for reconciling cognitive and perceptual theories is proposed. This is the Representational Theory of Emotion (RTE). A detailed case study of Antonio Damasio's important new contribution to emotion theory is presented in defense of the RTE. The paper is intended for readers interested in the foundations of emotion theory and cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper I review some leading developments in the empirical theory of affect. I argue that (1) affect is a distinct perceptual representation governed system, and (2) that there are significant modular factors in affect. The paper concludes with the observation thatfeeler (affective perceptual system) may be a natural kind within cognitive science. The main purpose of the paper is to explore some hitherto unappreciated connections between the theory of affect and the computational theory of mind.

In this paper I link two hitherto disconnected sets of results in the philosophy of emotions and explore their implications for the computational theory of mind. The argument of the paper is that, for just the same reasons that some computationalists have thought that cognition may be a natural kind, so the same can plausibly be argued of emotion. The core of the argument is that emotions are a representation-governed phenomenon and that the explanation of how they figure in behaviour (...) must as such be undertaken in those terms. I conclude with some interdisciplinary reflections in defence of the hypothesis that emotions might be more fundamental in the organization of behaviour than cognition; that, in effect, we may be emoters before we are cognizers . The aim of the paper is: (1) to introduce a number of promising results in philosophical and empirical emotion theory to a wider audience; and (2) to begin the task of organizing those results into a computational theoretical framework. (shrink)

The idea that certain mental phenomena (e.g. emotions, depression, anxiety) can represent risk factors for certain somatic diseases runs through common thinking on the subject and through a large part of biomedical science. This idea still lies at the focus of the research tradition in psychosomatic medicine and in certain interdisciplinary approaches that followed it, such as psychoneuroimmunology. Nevertheless, the inclusion in the scientific literature of specifically mental phenomena in the list of risk factors pertaining to a specific pathological condition (...) would seem, to say the least, problematic when not completely absent, unlike what happens for certain behavioural factors, such as smoking, sedentary life, and alcohol abuse. It is also significant that insurance companies and health and welfare services do not pay for interventions and treatment for states of anxiety, disorders of mood and of the personality, alexithymia and stress reduction, as means of prevention or treatment of somatic diseases, as instead they do for the treatment of tobacco addiction. However, as I shall endeavour to argue here, there are numerous and well grounded reasons why this different consideration of psychic conditions compared with behaviours is valid and must be maintained in the evaluation of pathogenetic risk factors. (shrink)

The idea that certain mental phenomena (e.g. emotions, depression, anxiety) can represent risk factors for certain somatic diseases runs through common thinking on the subject and through a large part of biomedical science. This idea still lies at the focus of the research tradition in psychosomatic medicine and in certain interdisciplinary approaches that followed it, such as psychoneuroimmunology. Nevertheless, the inclusion in the scientific literature of specifically mental phenomena in the list of risk factors pertaining to a specific pathological condition (...) would seem, to say the least, problematic when not completely absent, unlike what happens for certain behavioural factors, such as smoking, sedentary life, and alcohol abuse. It is also significant that insurance companies and health and welfare services do not pay for interventions and treatment for states of anxiety, disorders of mood and of the personality, alexithymia and stress reduction, as means of prevention or treatment of somatic diseases, as instead they do for the treatment of tobacco addiction. However, as I shall endeavour to argue here, there are numerous and well grounded reasons why this different consideration of psychic conditions compared with behaviours is valid and must be maintained in the evaluation of pathogenetic risk factors. (shrink)

Many philosophers suggest (1) that our emotional engagement with fiction involves participation in a game of make-believe, and (2) that what distinguishes an emotional game from a dispassionate game is the fact that the former activity alone involves sensations of physiological and visceral disturbances caused by our participation in the game. In this paper I argue that philosophers who accept (1) should reject (2). I then illustrate how this conclusion illuminates various puzzles in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind.

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...) apply to cases where one communicate through spontaneous emotional expressions and how the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)