Thinking about Feeling
Philosophers on emotions
0. If one wants to know how music, or any art form, expresses emotion, it cannot hurt to know what emotions are. Is that a hard question?
1. There is Jones, crying because he has been dumped. That is good evidence that he is sad. Could it be more than evidence? Maybe crying because he’s been dumped is what Jones’ sadness consists in. Generalizing this idea and giving it a label, we arrive at
Theory X: to be [sad, happy, embarrassed, lonely,...] is to be undergoing [such-and-such bodily changes] because you believe [thus-and-so conditions obtain].
The shift to “because you believe” is justified: if Jones is crying because he has been dumped, then he believes he has been dumped; and, moreover, even if that belief were false, he would still be sad.
As written, Theory X, with all those blanks to be filled in, is not much of a theory, but we are doing philosophy: the psychologists can tell us which bodily changes, and which conditions, go with which emotions, though we should not be surprised if they say that crying typically goes with sadness, and that conditions like “something good has happened” go with happiness. The list of bodily changes that go with sadness, of course, will extend well beyond crying, and the theory should not require sad people to exhibit all of them, or the same ones every time. Jenefer Robinson’s essay in Thinking about Feeling attributes Theory X to William Lyons: “an emotional response is a physiological response caused by an evaluative judgment.” Lyons published his defense of this theory 1980. If he’s right, what was there, in 2004—the publication date of this collection—for a whole philosophy book on emotions to do?
2. Dispute the belief condition, for one thing. Must you really believe that that spider is dangerous, for you to be afraid of it? You might, after all, say out loud for all to hear that you know daddy long-legs are completely harmless. Maybe you just need to have the thought that the spider is dangerous, or have a perception that the spider is dangerous, or maybe you, or some part of your mind, needs only to have appraised the spider as dangerous. Thoughts and perceptions and appraisals are in the same ballpark as beliefs, it is alleged, but nevertheless are distinct things. But this is a boring intramural squabble. Let’s stick with belief.
3. Before getting on with the philosophy, it is worth developing the theory a little more. When filling in its blanks, armchair thinking about evolution is useful. Presumably the belief condition for fear is something about danger: if you fear Z, you must believe that Z is a danger to you. But then natural selection likely ensured that the bodily changes that go with fear include changes that improve your chance of victory over, or escape from, Z: a quickened pulse, providing more oxygen to one’s muscles, for example.
4. A more advanced understanding of evolution may also help. Anger, in humans, is mostly directed at other humans, and functions partly as a warning: not one more step! It therefore meets Dr Strangelove’s condition on the Doomsday device: “the whole point of [anger] is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world!?” Natural selection, therefore, likely ensured a coordination whereby some bodily changes that go with anger are innately known by all humans to signal anger. It follows that those changes, like the furrowing of one’s brow or the baring of one’s teeth, must be easily perceptible.
5. Some rejections of the belief condition are more serious. William James asserted in 1884 that emotions are (simply) bodily changes; if so, it seems that no belief—or thought or perception or whatever—about any external condition is necessary, and Theory X is false. Jesse Prinz announces in essay three that he will defend a version of this “somatic” theory of the emotions:
The core idea I will defend is that emotions are perceptions (conscious or unconscious) of patterned changes in the body.
But wait: is the thesis that (i) emotions are (certain) bodily changes, or that (ii) emotions are perceptions of bodily changes? Those aren’t the same: if I’m crying but not aware of it, then (i) but not (ii) says I’m sad; if I’m hallucinating that I’m crying, it’s the other way around. The Jamesians seem to prefer (ii), but (i) is better. Being sad is one thing, knowing you are sad is another, and (i) well-explains the difference: the bodily changes are the sadness, and perception is the method by which it is known.
6. Prinz’s somatic theory appears to cut Theory X off at the waist. If X says: you’re sad if you’re crying because you’ve been dumped, Prinz seems to assert that the crying is enough.
This is a bit unfair; again, being sad involves lots of changes, throughout much of your body, and not always the same changes each time. Still: can’t you undergo those changes, without being sad? In a beloved form of thought experiment, what if you were injected with a drug that caused those changes—the crying, the slack muscles, the metallic taste in your mouth? Surely you wouldn’t be sad. It turns out that psychologists have thought of this, and tried it:
[In a famous study, Schachter and Singer (1962), the authors] argue that bodily changes qualify as emotions only when coupled with judgments that attribute those changes to emotionally relevant objects or events...they injected subjects with adrenaline, which causes autonomic arousal...some subjects were seated in a room with a stooge who engaged in silly behavior, such as playing with hula hoops and making paper airplanes. Other subjects were given an offensive questionnaire to fill out and seated with a stooge who feigned being irate about the questions....subjects with the silly stooge behaved as if they were happy, and subjects with the irate stooge behaved as if they were angry...The experiments conclude that bodily change is indeed necessary for emotion, but cognitive interpretation is needed to determine what emotion a bodily change amounts to.
Does this refute the somatic theory? The replication crisis teaches us never to believe any conclusion drawn from a psychology experiment. Even if we play along, Prinz suggests that the conclusion here is consistent with the somatic theory, for the theory is free to assert that “the identity of an emotion depends in part on context. [Consider] the useful analogy between sunburns and windburns; these are physiologically indistinguishable, but they are different ailments, in virtue of having different causes.”
The somatic theory was supposed to say,
To be sad is to be undergoing such-and-such bodily changes (crying, for example),
but now turns out to say,
To be sad is to be undergoing such-and-such bodily changes because something bad has happened.
But the fact that something bad has happened cannot cause bodily changes without registering in your mind, in what you believe, or perceive, or think, or appraise. I love the sunburn analogy, but it takes us back to Theory X.1
7. Other people prefer the other half of Theory X, and advocate a “cognitive” theory of emotions: to be sad, angry, exuberant, and so on, just is to make a certain judgment (She dumped me!); no bodily changes are required, though they may sometimes happen. That may sound so absurd as to make your blood boil. The seasoned spidercatcher knows, and judges, of each spider he encounters that it poses a danger, but—contra the cognitive theory—he is not afraid.
The cognitive theorist will point to more favorable examples. After a long feud, you might say of your enemy that you have been angry at him for decades. Surely you could be right, even though your palms do not sweat and your brow does not furrow; your anger can be read in your thoughts, but not on your physique. Martha Nussbaum asserts that no bodily changes are necessary for feeling an emotion, in essay twelve:
There usually will be bodily sensations and changes involved in grieving, but if we discovered that my blood pressure was quite low during this whole episode, or that my pulse rate never went above sixty, there would not, I think, be the slightest reason to conclude that I was not grieving.
Robert Solomon, another cognitivist, makes a similar point in essay five.
8. The possibility of emotion without bodily changes is as much (maybe more) of a problem for the somatic theory. Prinz says, in that theory’s defense,
Long-standing emotions deserve to be called emotions only because they dispose us to enter into patterned bodily responses. We do not say that these emotions disappear when they are unfelt, because the disposition is there all the time.
This sounds like a revision of the somatic theory, not a defense of it: now to be angry is either to have a furrowed brow, or to be disposed to furrow one’s brow. And thus stated it sounds like a surrender to the cognitivist: for is it not the judgment that someone has been wronged that grounds this disposition to furrow one’s brow? And it has been conceded that the judgment (and therefore disposition) can be present without the bodily changes.
9. I think examples like long-term anger do refute Theory X. But they can be accommodated with a minor update. When you are angry, your belief that someone has been wronged may cause you to furrow your brow, or other bodily changes; but it may have other effects too, which are just as central to anger. It will likely, for example, make you more prone to fight—maybe with words instead of fists. And if it makes you more prone to fight, presumably that’s because it has strengthened your desire to fight. Such changes in desire, therefore, should accompany changes in you body, in the account of emotion:
Theory Y: to be [sad, happy, embarrassed, lonely,...] is to be undergoing some of [such-and-such bodily changes, and changes in desire] because you believe [thus-and-so conditions obtain].
These changes in desire can persist even in a cool moment, when your hands are not trembling and your frown is not frowning. The seasoned spidercatcher, whom the cognitive theory wrongly says is afraid of that spider, is by Theory Y rightly said not to be, because his judgment that the spider is dangerous not only fails to make his hands shake, it also fails to make him want to run away.
10. Is that the end? Two more points are worth making. First, maybe the kinds of changes that may constitute an emotion extend beyond even bodily changes and changes in desire. If a dangerous bear appears, and you become afraid, the bear may stand out more in the scene, as may the various paths of escape the scene affords. So maybe changes in what is perceptually salient belongs in the second bracket. Once desires are in, and so mental as well as bodily changes are on the list, it is in the spirit of the theory to include other mental changes. Second, it matters how the belief that you are in danger causes those changes. Suppose you are a cool-headed, seasoned spidercatcher, no longer capable of fearing spiders, but are the subject of an evil experiment: super-advanced scientists have secreted into your sock a device that will painlessly inject you with adrenaline, should it detect that you believe you are in danger. You come upon a black widow, you form the belief that it is dangerous, the adrenaline shot is in, and your hand start to shake. The belief has caused bodily changes characteristic of fear, but you are not afraid. The moral: fear requires the belief to cause the bodily changes “in the right way”—maybe by way of some dedicated mental module, in any regard not by way of an adrenaline injection.
There’s more to what Prinz says about the experiment. Also, Prinz’s final theory is different: he thinks that the bodily changes that are constitutive of sadness are also constitutive of the thought (or appraisal or whatever) that something bad has happened. Like Theory X, emotions involve thoughts; unlikely Theory X, the thoughts are identical to, and so do not cause, the bodily changes. This difference is too fine to discuss here.