Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 2003"

Mind and Illusion

Abstract: Much of the contemporary debate in the philosophy of mind is concerned with the clash between certain strongly held intuitions and what science tells us about the mind and its relation to the world. What science tells us about the mind points strongly towards some version or other of physicalism. The intuitions, in one way or another, suggest that there is something seriously incomplete about any purely physical story about the mind.

The significance of recalcitrant emotion (or, anti-quasijudgmentalism)

Abstract: Sentimentalist theories in ethics treat evaluative judgments as somehow dependent on human emotional capacities. While the precise nature of this dependence varies, the general idea is that evaluative concepts are to be understood by way of more basic emotional reactions. Part of the task of distinguishing between the concepts that sentimentalism proposes to explicate, then, is to identify a suitably wide range of associated emotions. In this paper, we attempt to deal with an important obstacle to such views, which arises from the dominant tradition in the philosophy of emotion. We will be attempting to steer a middle course between the traditional view and some recent, empirically-minded criticism.

Basic Emotions, Complex Emotions, Machiavellian Emotions

Abstract: The current state of knowledge in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral ecology allows a fairly robust characterization of at least some, so-called basic emotions - short-lived emotional responses with homologues in other vertebrates. Philosophers, however are understandably more focused on the complex emotion episodes that figure in folk-psychological narratives about mental life, episodes such as the evolving jealousy and anger of a person in an unraveling sexual relationship. One of the most pressing issues for the philosophy of emotion is the relationship between basic emotions and these complex emotion episodes. In this paper, I add to the list of existing, not necessarily incompatible, proposals concerning the relationship between basic emotions and complex emotions. I analyze the writings of transactional psychologists of emotion, particularly those who see their work as a contribution to behavioral ecology, and offer a view of the basic emotion that focuses as much on their interpersonal functions as on their intrapersonal functions. Locating basic emotions and their evolutionary development in a context of processes of social interaction, I suggest, provides a way to integrate our knowledge of basic emotions into an understanding of the larger emotional episodes that have more obvious implications for philosophical disciplines such as moral psychology.

Moderately Massive Modularity

Abstract: This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind's structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.

Emotion, Weakness of Will, and the Normative Conception of Agency

Abstract: Empirical work on and common observation of the emotions tells us that our emotions sometimes key us to the presence of real and important reason-giving considerations without necessarily presenting that information to us in a way susceptible of conscious articulation and, sometimes, even despite our consciously held and internally justified judgment that the situation contains no such reasons. In this paper, I want to explore the implications of the fact that emotions show varying degrees of integration with our conscious agency—from none at all to quite substantial—for our understanding of our rationality, and in particular for the traditional assumption that weakness of the will is necessarily irrational. The paper has two targets: the proximal target is the claim that in choosing the incontinent action rather than the continent one, the agent necessarily does something irrational; the distal target is the dominant naturalistic conception of how to justify norms of rationality. I'm taking aim at the latter through the former. The naturalist project aims to articulate and defend norms of rationality that are norms for the kind creatures we are—that is, for finite, embodied, social beings, with a specific cognitive architecture, functioning in particular environments. On the standard way of developing that project, norms of rationality are not a priori knowable and none can be viewed as privileged. Even norms as wellentrenched as norms prohibiting incontinence must await empirical support and recent work on the emotions raises the possibility that they might fail to get it.

A Theory of Phenomenal Concepts

Abstract: 1. There is widespread agreement that consciousness must be a physical phenomenon, even if it is one that we do not yet understand and perhaps may never do so fully. There is also widespread agreement that the way to defend physicalism about consciousness against a variety of well known objections is by appeal to phenomenal concepts (Loar, 1990; Lycan, 1996; Papineau, 1993; Sturgeon, 1994; Tye, 1995, 2000; Perry, 2001). There is, alas, no agreement on the nature of phenomenal concepts. 2. Concepts are mental representations of worldly entities—things, events, states, properties etc. They are exercised whenever we under-go cognitive mental states. One cannot notice something, recognize it, make a judgment about it without conceptualizing it in some way, without bringing it under a concept. A child who is unable to count may see four pieces of candy but he/she cannot notice that four pieces are present. A dog may hear a Beethoven symphony, but it cannot recognize the sounds as being a Beethoven symphony. 3. Phenomenal concepts are the concepts we exercise when (but not only when) we notice or become aware of the phenomenal character of our experiences and feelings via introspection. Our experiences have phenomenal character whether or not we attend to them, but when we notice how an experience feels, what it is like, in doing so we are bringing it beneath a phenomenal concept. Without phenomenal concepts, we would be ‘blind’ to our phenomenal feels (Dretske, 1995; Tye, 1995), just as the child who cannot count is ‘blind’ to the fact that there are four pieces of candy in front of her.

The Domain of Folk Psychology

Abstract: My topic in this paper is social understanding. By this I mean the cognitive skills underlying social behaviour and social coordination. Normal, encultured, non-autistic and non-brain-damaged human beings are capable of an impressive degree of social coordination. We navigate the social world with a level of skill and dexterity fully comparable to that which we manifest in navigating the physical world. In neither sphere, one might think, would it be a trivial matter to identify the various competences which underly this impressive level of performance. Nonetheless, at least as far as interpersonal interactions are concerned, philosophers show a rare degree of unanimity. What grounds our success in these interactions is supposed to be our common mastery of (more or less similar versions of) folk psychology.

Emotion, Psychosemantics, and Embodied Appraisals

Abstract: There seem to be two kinds of emotion the rists in the world. Some work very hard to show that emotions are essentially cognitive states. Others resist this suggestion and insist that emotions are noncognitive. The debate has appeared in many forms in philosophy and psychology. It never seems to go away. The reason for this is simple. Emotions have properties that push in both directions, properties that make them seem quite smart and properties that make them seem quite dumb. They exemplify the base impulses of our animal nature while simultaneously branching out into the most human and humane reaches of our mental repertoires. Depending on where one looks, emotions can emerge as our simplest instincts or our subtlest achievements. This double nature makes emotions captivating, but also confounding. Researchers find themselves picking one side at the expense of the other, or packaging seemingly disparate components into unstable unions. I will defend a more integrative approach. For a more thorough treatment, see Prinz (forthcoming).

Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is a ‘Cognitive Theory’ of the Emotions and Does it Neglect Affectivity?

Abstract: I have been arguing, for almost thirty years now, that emotions have been unduly neglected in philosophy. Back in the seventies, it was an argument that attracted little sympathy. I have also been arguing that emotions are a ripe for philosophical analysis, a view that, as evidenced by the Manchester 2001 conference and a large number of excellent publications, has now become mainstream. My own analysis of emotion, first published in 1973, challenged the sharp divide between emotions and rationality, insisted that we reject the established notion that the emotions are involuntary, and argued, in a brief slogan, that ‘emotions are judgments.’ Since then, although the specific term ‘judgment’ has come under considerable fire and my voluntarist thesis continues to attract incredulousness the general approach I took to emotions has been widely accepted in both philosophy and the social sciences. When Paul Griffiths took on what he misleadingly characterized as ‘propositional attitude’ theories of emotion as the enemy of all that was true and scientifically worthy, I knew that we had made it. Such ferocious abuse is surely a sign that we had shifted, in Kuhnian terms, from being revolutionary to becoming the ‘normal’ paradigm. The current counter-revolution of affect programmes and neuro-reductionism says a lot about who we are and how far we have come. (Progress in philosophy is moved more by this drama of one outrageous thesis after another—once called ‘dialectic’—than by cautious, careful argument.)

Free will and the burden of proof

Abstract: Here are some things that are widely believed about free will and determinism. (1) Free will is prima facie incompatible with determinism. (2) The incompatibility is logical or at least conceptual or a priori. (3) A compatibilist needs to explain how free will can co-exist with determinism, paradigmatically by offering an analysis of ‘free’ action that is demonstrably compatible with determinism. (Here is the late Roderick Chisholm, in defence of irreducible or libertarian agent-causation: ‘Now if you can analyse such statements as “Jones killed his uncle” into eventcausation statements, then you may have earned the right to make jokes about the agent as cause. But if you haven't done this, and if all the same you do believe such things as that I raised my arm and that Jolns [sic] killed his uncle, and if moreover you still think it's a joke to talk about the agent as cause, then, I'm afraid, the joke is entirely on you.’) (4) Free will is not impugned by quantum indeterminism, at least not in the same decisive way that it is impugned by determinism. To reconcile free will with quantum indeterminism takes work, but the work comes under the heading of metaphysical business-as-usual; to reconcile free will with determinism requires a conceptual breakthrough. And listen to Laura Waddell Ekstrom on the burden of proof.

On the very idea of spiritual values

Abstract: It is unusual for an academic philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to discuss the subject of spirituality. Not so long ago this fact might have been attributed to a general view of philosophy as the practice of conceptual analysis and the theory of logic. However in a period when the discipline has developed to a point where almost every aspect of human life has been made the subject of some department of ‘applied philosophy’ it could hardly be said that the subject of spirituality, in so far as discussion of it may have normative implications, lies outside the sphere of reasonable philosohical enquiry. Yet it is almost entirely neglected.

Emotions and the Problem of Other Minds

Abstract: Can consideration of the emotions help to solve the problem of other minds? Intuitively, it should. We often think of emotions as public: as observable in the body, face, and voice of others. Perhaps you can simply see another's disgust or anger, say, in her demeanour and expression; or hear the sadness clearly in his voice. Publicity of mind, meanwhile, is just what is demanded by some solutions to the problem. But what does this demand amount to, and do emotions actually meet it? This paper has three parts. First, I consider the nature of the problem of other minds. Second, I consider the publicity of emotions. And third, I bring these together to show how emotions can help to solve the problem. Traditionally, there are two problems of other minds: one epistemological, one conceptual. The epistemological problem asks how you can know, or how you can be justified in believing, that another person has a mind at all: that there exist other subjects of experience. The conceptual problem asks how you can so much as understand that there could exist other minds or subjects of experience: how you can have the concept of another's mind or experience. But why suppose these problems exist? They both arise, in part, from the same idea. This is the idea of an ontological distinction between experience (mind) and behaviour (body): they are not the same type of thing. The idea is intuitive. Consider, for instance, the possibility of pretence. Another person may be carrying on as if in pain, say, grimacing and crying out, but not be in pain at all.

VII. Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body

Abstract: There are now quite a number of popular or semi-popular works urging rejection of the old opposition between rationality and emotion. They present evidence or theoretical arguments that favour a reconception of emotions as providing an indispensable basis for practical rationality. Perhaps the most influential is neuroanatomist Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which argues from cases of brain lesion and other neurological causes of emotional deficit that some sort of emotional ‘marking,’ of memories of the outcomes of our choices with anxiety, is needed to support learning from experience.

X. Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception

Abstract: According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceivers intentionally deceive others into believing something, p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe that p is false while their victims falsely believe that p is true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something, p, and there is a time at which they believe that p is false while also believing that p is true.

Don't Worry, Feel Guilty

Abstract: Introduction: the Worry One can feel guilty without thinking that one actually is guilty of moral wrongdoing. For example, one can feel guilty about eating an ice cream or skipping aerobics, even if one doesn't take a moralistic view of self-indulgence. And one can feel guilty about things that aren't one's doing at all, as in the case of survivor's guilt about being spared some catastrophe suffered by others. Guilt without perceived wrongdoing may of course be irrational, but I think it is sometimes rational, and I want to explore how it can be. If guilt were essentially a feeling about having done something morally wrong, then feeling guilty about self-indulgence or survival would of course be irrational. The only reason why I can conceive of guilt's being rational in these cases is that I think the emotion need not involve any judgment or perception of immorality. But I also think that the emotion of guilt must involve a judgment or perception whose content is normative in a more general sense. In particular, I believe that guilt requires a sense of normative vulnerability , which I would define as follows. At the bottom of normative vulnerability is the sense of being somehow unjustified, of having nothing to say for oneself. But feeling unjustified in some respect does not by itself amount to feeling guilty, since one doesn't feel guilty, for instance, about beliefs or assertions for which one is aware of having no justification.

VI. Emotional Feelings and Intentionalism

Abstract: Emotions are Janus-faced: their focus may switch from how a person is feeling deep inside her, to the busy world of actions, words, or gestures whose perception currently affects her. The intimate relation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ seems to call for a redrawing of the traditional distinction of mental states between those that can look out to the world, and those that are, supposedly, irredeemably blind.

II. The Emotions and their Philosophy of Mind

Abstract: When I was invited by Yale University to deliver the Cassirer lectures, I hesitated for a topic. I wanted something new. I proposed the emotions, and at that time my knowledge of the topic was so slight that I didn't know whether it was something that I had already written on or not.I mention this fact because one thing that I have since learnt about the emotions is that such ignorance is in order. For it is one of those topics where grasping the extension of the term is inseparable from having some theory of the matter, however primitive. One way to explain this fact is to invoke the novelty of the term, for, in the sense in which it is used in this lecture, it is only about 300 years old. Another way, probably related, is to point to the fact that, not only are there belief and particular beliefs, desire and particular desires, but, when we refer to particular beliefs and to particular desires, we call them ‘the belief that this’ or ‘the desire that that’. However there is no locution ‘the emotion that this’, or ‘the emotion that that’, which would indicate the presence of an emotion. It seems that ordinary language is an intermittent guide to the circumscription of the emotions.

Non-Personal Minds

Abstract: Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwin's Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able to construct their tunnels. Other creatures may be able to perceive that world as also accessible to other minds, and structure it by locality and temporal relation, without having many personal qualities. Non-personal mind, on both modern materialist and Plotinian grounds, may be the more usual, and the less deluded, sort of mind.

Language, belief and human beings

Abstract: We may think of the core of Cartesian dualism as being the thesis that each of us is essentially a non-material mind or soul: ‘non-material’ in the sense that it has no weight, cannot be seen or touched, and could in principle continue to exist independently of the existence of any material thing. That idea was, of course, of enormous importance to Descartes himself, and we may feel that having rejected it, as most philosophers now have, we have rejected what is of greatest philosophical significance in Descartes' conception of the self. That would, I believe, be a mistake. Something akin to the Cartesian mind-body contrast still has a pervasive grip on philosophical thought across a whole range of issues. The contrast is, I believe, reflected in common philosophical versions of the contrasts between mind and body, fact and value, reason and emotion, word and deed, reason and persuasion, and no doubt others. My central concern in this paper is, however, a familiar philosophical understanding of the relation between, on the one hand, belief and its articulation in words and, on the other, action or feeling.

Perceptual, reflective and affective consciousness as existence

Abstract: One criterion of an adequate analysis of the nature of consciousness has to do with its three parts, sides or elements. These are seeing and the like, thinking and the like, and desiring and the like. The seeming natures of the perceptual, reflective and affective parts or whatever of consciousness are different despite similarity. An adequate analysis of consciousness, even if general, will preserve the differences. It will pass the test of what you can call differential phenomenology.

XIV. Don't Worry, Feel Guilty

Abstract: One can feel guilty without thinking that one actually is guilty of moral wrongdoing. For example, one can feel guilty about eating an ice cream or skipping aerobics, even if one doesn't take a moralistic view of self-indulgence. And one can feel guilty about things that aren't one's doing at all, as in the case of survivor's guilt about being spared some catastrophe suffered by others. Guilt without perceived wrongdoing may of course be irrational, but I think it is sometimes rational, and I want to explore how it can be.

XIII. Passion and Politics

Abstract: The sudden resurgence of interest in the emotions that has recently overtaken analytical philosophy has raised a range of questions about the place of the passions in established explanatory schemes. How, for example, do the emotions fit into theories of action organized around beliefs and desires? How can they be included in analyses of the mind developed to account for other mental states and capacities? Questions of this general form also arise within political philosophy, and the wish to acknowledge their importance and find a space for them has led to some fruitful developments. Among these are a new sensitivity to ways in which attributions of emotion can create and sustain unequal power relations, an interest in the underlying emotional capacities that make politics possible, a concern with the kinds of emotional suffering that politics should aim to abolish, and analyses of the emotional traits it should foster. While these and comparable explorations have enormously enriched contemporary political philosophy, a great deal of mainstream work continues to ignore or marginalize the emotions, so that their place remains uncertain and obscure. There is no consensus as to what kind of attention should be paid to them, or indeed whether they deserve any systematic attention at all. This is a curious state of affairs, because it was until quite recently taken for granted that political philosophy and psychology are intimately connected, and that political philosophy needs to be grounded on an understanding of human passion. In this essay I shall first consider why political philosophers ever rejected this set of assumptions. I shall then return to the pressing issue of how we might take account of the emotions in our own political theorizing.

IX. The Logic Of Emotions

Abstract: The issue of whether emotions are rational (or intelligent) is at the centre of philosophical and psychological discussions. I believe that emotions are rational, but that they follow different principles to those of intellectual reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the unique logic of emotions. I begin by suggesting that we should conceive of emotions as a general mode of the mental system; other modes are the perceptual and intellectual modes. One feature distinguishing one mode from another is the logical principles underlying its information processing mechanism. Before describing these principles, I clarify the notion of ‘rationality,’ arguing that in an important sense emotions can be rational.