Abstract
Jesse Prinz (2004, Gut reactions: a perceptual theory of emotion) argues that emotional feelings (“state emotions”) can by themselves perceptually represent significant organism-environment relations. I object to this view mainly on the grounds that (1) it does not rule out the at least equally plausible view that emotional feelings are non-representational sensory registrations rather than perceptions, as Tyler Burge (2010, The origins of objectivity) draws the distinction, and (2) perception of a relation requires perception of at least one of the relation’s relata, but an emotional feeling by itself perceives neither the subject’s environment, nor in many cases, the relevant subject. I then explore two ways in which emotional feelings as non-perceptual sensory registrations might still contribute to significant relation representation when associated with representations of the subject and/or its environment. After briefly discussing some difficulties presented by a multimodal, sensory-perceptual view of such representation, I argue in favor of a “cognitive recognition theory” that holds that significant relation instances are represented during emotion occurrences via applications of emotion-type concepts to “incoming” emotional feelings and their associated mental states.
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Notes
In what follows, “emotional feeling” is at least roughly synonymous with Prinz’s use of “state emotion.”
For instance, one’s feeling ashamed of one’s feeling of fear may amount to the representation of a significant relation as holding between oneself and a state of oneself, rather than one’s environment. Of course, this still allows that the most ontogenetically and phylogenetically fundamental significant relations may be those that hold between an organism and its environment.
I refer to this below simply as “Burge’s distinction”, and explicate it in section 2.
Prinz (2004, Chapter 8). I state that my analysis only “closely resembles” Prinz’s because I do not share his presupposition that to say that an emotion is about something is to say that thing caused the emotion (2004, p. 62). That is, I do not accept the view that, necessarily, what an emotion is about is what caused it. Cf. Herzberg (2009).
The only exception would be an emotional feeling that is about another emotional feeling.
For an overview of the somatosensory system, see http://nba.uth.tmc.edu/neuroscience/s2/chapter02.html.
Prinz (2004, p. 225).
Cf. Ekman (1993).
Coping can be either “problem-focused” (aimed at either modifying or maintaining the relevant situation) or “emotion-focused” (aimed at modifying one’s emotional dispositions), to borrow from Lazarus (1991).
All further page number references to Burge’s work are to (2010).
As should become clearer below, claiming that an emotional feeling by itself has a mind-to-world direction of fit, and hence accuracy conditions, may be such a merely figurative use of “accuracy.”
See, for instance, Prinz (2004, pp. 29–30).
This summary is derived mainly from Prinz (2004, Chapters 1–3).
Cf. Damasio’s (1994) discussion of the “as-if” loop.
Lazarus (1991, p. 122) lists the core relational themes of fifteen emotion types. Left out of these summaries is any mention of the relata, which must be “filled in” for any particular occurrence: a subject (usually but not always the one experiencing the emotion) and the object, event, or situation that stand in the significant relation.
All subsequent references to Prinz are to (Prinz 2004), unless otherwise noted.
Of course, if ‘transduction’ is defined as having representational output, the issue becomes whether the information is transduced at all, rather than merely being transformed in some other way—for instance, from kinetic energy into electro-chemical impulses.
The argument begins in Prinz (2004), but is greatly elaborated in (2012).
Cf. Kolb, B., Whishaw, I. Q. (2014).
Prinz (2006, p. 436) writes that a condition of an organism’s perceiving an object as X (in the sense of recognizing it as X) is that the incoming percept is “matched against stored representations that represent X.” However, such stored representations are concepts (by Prinz’s own definition), rendering the type-recognition process conceptual rather than perceptual. This issue is not merely terminological, since – as Prinz would surely agree – a creature lacking certain concepts might perceive an object (as an object, via a system that incorporates perceptual constancies) without recognizing it to be of any particular (conceptually represented) type.
I do not mean to suggest that objectification is a necessary condition of all recognition; only that it is required for the recognition of a type of object. As I point out below, sensory registration types might be recognized by their qualitative properties, prior to (or independently of) any perceptual objectification.
Note that Damasio uses the term “representations” here at least as liberally as Prinz, without regard to any distinction like Burge’s. On my view, “first-order body representations” should denote mere sensory registrations, while “second-order body representations” could, given their integrating function, denote somatosensory percepts. The issue is empirical.
They may also be conceptualized in terms of their representational properties, if emotional feelings are perceptually representational. But of course an argument for the perceptual claim cannot assume what it is trying to prove.
Prinz elaborates his “neo-empiricist” theory of cognition and conceptual representation in (2002), and a full discussion of it is beyond the scope of this paper. However, in (2004) he writes: “Cognitive states and processes are those that exploit representations that are under the control of an organism rather than under the control of the environment. A representation is under organismic control if the organism has activated it or maintains it in working memory. A cognitive state is one that contains such a representation. And again, “percepts can be stored in memory and used as concepts on future occasions. The perceptual state is not under organismic control, but the state drawn from memory [for recognitional purposes] is.” (pp. 45–46)
This is roughly Damasio’s (1994) “somatic marker hypothesis.”
Wittgenstein’s (1953) argument against the possibility of a “private” sensation-language aside.
Chalmers writes: “The clearest cases of direct phenomenal concepts arise when a subject attends to the quality of an experience, and forms a concept wholly based on the attention to the quality, “taking up” the quality into the concept.” (2003, p. 235) For a related account of how qualia could be directly “embedded” in a phenomenal concept, see Gertler (2001). While admitting to being a “phenomenal realist”, Prinz (2007, pp. 207-208) flatly rejects Chalmer’s notion of a pure phenomenal concept. His objection to it here relies on the following scenario: “Suppose I know nothing about brain or colour vocabulary. Now I have a colour experience. I can imagine thinking about the experience by attending to it. But, when I hold this colour in mind, the only identity claim I could come up with would be the trivial one expressed by 'that is that'. I would have only one way of thinking about this colour: namely pointing to it in my mind.” (26) I disagree. I see no reason why the qualitative aspect of a present color experience could not activate a memory (stored qualia) of a previous such experience. And in such a case, I see no reason to believe that an identity statement employing two demonstratives (“this is that”), or a mental comparison involving two simultaneous acts of attention (in which qualitative similarity or dissimilarity is noticed), would not be informative.
See, for instance, Deonna and Teroni (2012, pp. 71–74).
Prinz (2004, p. 68) distinguishes two types of detectors (“appearance tracking” and “essence tracking”) from mere “indicators,” and identifies emotional feelings as appearance-tracking detectors. Given that the main difference between an indicator and a detector is that only the latter has structured parts representing the parts of what it detects, it is not clear to me how bodily feelings are supposed to qualify as detectors rather than indicators, but for present purposes that issue can be set aside.
Cf. Kripke (1991).
My concern here is related to the objection that significant relations are unobservable, to which Prinz replies in part by arguing that “If somatosensory systems contain states that represent core relational themes, then it follows that core relational themes are observable properties. To deny this without argument would beg the question” (p. 226). Fair enough. But I am not denying that somatosensory systems contain states that perceptually represent core relational themes; I am merely pointing out that Prinz has not convincingly argued that they do.
Prinz might here fall back on his notion of “semantic markers” (2006, p. 442)—signs of the way a given representation is used—to argue that emotional feelings represent significant relations rather than bodily conditions. However, sensory registrations can be used as effectively as perceptions. The question of whether a sensory state is perceptual hinges not on what it is being used to do, but rather on how it is being used to do it.
As far as I am aware, Prinz does not discuss perceptual constancy in relation to the emotional system anywhere in his writings, although he does discuss visual color constancy and the vestibular-visual vertical constancy in (2012, pp. 74–76).
However, when one pitch is heard while the other is merely recalled (for example), it seems to me that their difference (the relation between them) is not heard. Perhaps it can be multimodally imagined/heard or inferred from beliefs about the two pitches.
Cf. Bischof (1974). The vestibular system is considered to be exteroceptive because it is bio-functionally sensitive to forces beyond the boundaries of the body. But, as should now be clear, that the vestibular system detects such forces does not entail that it perceives them (or that it allows the subject to perceive them). As far as I am aware, perceptual constancies play no role in the psychophysical explanation of how the vestibular system works. Also, the fact that the vestibular system sometimes malfunctions, causing dizzy feelings when the subject is stable, should not by itself encourage us to speak of unimodal vestibular illusions—as MacPherson (2011) does—or to conclude that vestibular sensations in such cases are inaccurate. Rather, it may be appropriate to speak of “vestibular illusions” only when the vestibular system contributes to multimodal percepts, as when the environment visually looks (or one’s body somatosensorially feels) to be spinning after bodily rotation has ceased.
Of course, as others have noted (e.g., Nussbaum 2001), an emotion occurrence at least typically causally depends on the values or “point of view” of the subject having the emotion. I would add, however, that there may be cases of empathy, or of theatrical acting, in which this is not so.
Damasio writes of such background states: “without them the very core of your representation of self would be broken” (1994, p. 150). This view seems to also be shared by Seth (2013), for whom selfhood includes (as a “central aspect”) “the experience of body ownership”—EBO for short—where “EBO is shaped by predictive multisensory integration of self-related signals across interoceptive and exteroceptive domains” (pp. 565–66). More fundamentally, Seth holds that “mental representations of selfhood are ultimately grounded in representations of the body, with the internal physiological milieu providing a primary reference...” (p. 567).
I set aside homunculus-related regress concerns here because the idea of somatosensory self-perception rests only on the possibility of one’s perceiving a part of oneself (perspectivally, as it were). Hume (1739) famously claimed that he could not introspectively perceive himself, but perhaps he was not attending to the right sorts of somatosensory states.
Perhaps the e-somatosensory system could modify the subject’s somatosensory self-percept in somewhat the same way as that in which the vestibular system contributes information to the visual system that allows it to modify the subject’s visual percept of a luminous line relative to the local gravitational field. However, even if such an effect could be confirmed, it would leave the connection between the modified self-percept and the multimodal perception of a significant relation mysterious.
I say “typically” here because in some cases, the representation that causes the bodily reaction is not identical to the representation of the emotion’s particular object. See Herzberg (2009) for non-dysfunctional examples.
The emotion-type concept’s “input slot” might, prior to activation, be associated with a “file” of typical input types or paradigm scenarios, against which the occurrent emotion’s particular object is checked for similarity. Prinz (2004, p. 100) suggests that such a “calibration file” plays a role in emotional feeling causation. I am suggesting that it also plays a role in the cognitive recognition of a significant relation during an attitudinal emotion occurrence.
This is a presupposition of most emotion research that regards first-person reports of emotion type as reliable data. Cf. Costall (2013) for discussion of this point.
See Herzberg (2016) for an epistemic analysis of how such awareness could lead to the formation of reliable beliefs about the type of one’s emotional state.
Perhaps the relevant registrations of bodily conditions are already integrated into a unified e-somatosensory percept (representing the bodily condition profile) via intermediate-level processing, but that is an empirical question.
Roberts (1988, p. 184) asserts that attitudinal emotions are “typically experienced as unified states of mind, rather than as sets of components”. I agree, although I think that the unity is phenomenological only, not psychological.
Note that the relation’s significance need not be explicitly represented in order for the relation in question to be significant. But perhaps the occurrence of the emotional feeling is at least an indicator of such significance, even if it does not perceptually represent it.
Cf. Lazarus (1991, p. 210).
It might be objected here that, by a different standard of explanatory power, the sensory-perceptual view should be judged superior, since it holds the promise of applying to the attitudinal emotions of conceptually limited animals and young children, in addition to conceptually privileged humans. Fair enough, but see the next paragraph.
This illusion might be phenomenologically reinforced by the conscious experience of attitudinal emotions, in which the feeling and the representation of the particular object are concurrently held in working memory, the former perhaps seeming to “color” the latter with its affective quality.
The other (more significant) source of inspiration was Burge’s passage on the taste of wine, excerpted in section 2.
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Herzberg, L.A. Can Emotional Feelings Represent Significant Relations?. Acta Anal 34, 215–234 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0368-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0368-1