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The logic, intentionality, and phenomenology of emotion

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Abstract

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach.

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Notes

  1. The standard argument that this is not so appeals to such things as undirected or ‘free-floating’ anxiety or depression or fear, but seems no less viable in the case of happiness. However, I am inclined to believe these cases are examples of moods rather than emotions, and that emotions are always intentional.

  2. This allows me to pass over a number of distinctions that are not relevant in the first part of the paper: between the belief/feeling type of reductionism favored by Lyons (1980) and Green (1992), the evaluative judgment view favored by Solomon (1977) and Nussbaum (1990), and the thought/feeling type favored by Greenspan (a thought being the conscious entertaining of a proposition).

  3. Even those who deny the fact that all actual emotions are conscious experiences, allowing a dispositional use of the notion, have to grant that vast numbers of emotions are conscious experiences.

  4. See e.g. Goldie (2000) and Wollheim (1999) for views that do not reduce the intentionality of emotions to cognition or desires. Note that ‘desire’ is to be understood in the natural way, not as a merely dispositional term, but also and equally as a term for something consciously felt.

  5. See e.g. Solomon (1976), Nussbaum (1990, 1994), Oakley (1992), Green (1992) for examples of what I am calling reductionist views. I am going to use ‘intentional attitude’ throughout, where many would be inclined to use the more specific term ‘propositional attitude’, because I do not think that all intentional attitudes are propositional attitudes (see Montague (2007a); see Goldie (2000), Charland (2002), and Tappolet (2000) for theorists who claim that not all emotional content is propositional content). It may be said that since I am considering the inferential sensitivities of emotions, and since inferences are usually understood as relations between propositions, I am committing myself to propositionalism about the emotions. This is a large issue, but it’s not central to the argument of this paper, in which I will take it that emotions can be relations to propositions and restrict my attention to those that are. For the record, though, I reject the idea that all inferences are relations between propositions or proposition-like entities, both in general and in the particular case of emotions. (For an example of an intensional logic that can capture entailments between propositional and non-propositional objects see Tichy 1988.)

  6. Solomon (1977, pp. 45–46).

  7. I am using ‘context’ in the philosophical-logical sense.

  8. See e.g. McGinn (1997) and Davies (1992).

  9. McGinn (1997, p. 50).

  10. Some ‘strong representationalist’ philosophers, pursuing the old eliminativist dream, have tried to reduce what-it’s-likeness to thin content, but I am going to take it that the project is hopeless.

  11. I will discuss cognitive phenomenology, and in particular the cognitive phenomenology of cognitions, in more detail in Sect. 10. Whether there can be a kind of cognitive phenomenology that does not involve the deployment of concepts is a further question. For example, it is plausible that animals and babies have some kind of cognitive phenomenology, that is, they take objects as unities, although their conceptual capacities are quite limited.

  12. Philosophers sometimes discuss Frege puzzles as showing the need for what they call ‘fine-grained content’—a kind of content that is something over and above purely extensional entities such as physical objects, sets with only actual-world members, and relations in extension. In short, Frege puzzles show that something more than what I have called thin content is required, and I will sometimes use the expression ‘fine-grained content’ with this definition in mind. What I am calling Fregean content will also be more fine-grained than a possible worlds account of propositions, properties, and individual concepts. This will become clear in Sect. 4.

  13. See Oakley (1992) for a discussion of this view.

  14. For each account of propositions, a different style of Fregean puzzle seems to arise. For Russellians (e.g. Soames 1987), Cicero/Tully cases are problematic; for ‘interpreted logical form’ views (see e.g. Ludlow and Larson 1993; Larson and Segal 1995; Ludlow 2000; Larson 2002), Paderweski cases are problematic; for a neo-Fregean view such as Bealer’s 1993, necessary co-extensive properties create a problem; and for Sententialists (e.g. Davidson 1968), certain indexical cases prove difficult. I have chosen the possible worlds account of propositions as one way of illustrating the need for Fregean content.

  15. On a possible worlds account, a proposition, in effect, is the state of affairs that obtains at each world where that proposition is true. For example, the proposition that Bob is funny is the set of all the worlds where Bob is funny. Some, however, distinguish states of affairs from propositions, e.g. Armstrong (1997).

  16. Of course this is the same point that Frege (1892) made in using the morning star/evening star example. However, if one interprets Fregean modes of presentation functionally (or set theoretically), as a possible worlds account does, modes of presentation will not be fine-grained enough to account for the equiangular/equilateral example.

  17. See Bealer (1982) for a fine-grained concept view; see Davidson (1968) for the lexical view; see Ludlow and Larson 1993 et. al. for an interpreted logical form (ILF) view, where ILFs are combinations of lexical items and referents.

  18. Throughout this discussion I am assuming that thinkers are in sufficiently adequate cognitive conditions to make these relatively simple inferences.

  19. For more on how emotions represent the world as having evaluative features see e.g. de Sousa (1987), Greenspan (1988), Roberts (2003), Solomon (1976). In Sect. 9, I will argue that emotions are more than just representations of a state of affair’s value or disvalue, they are also experiences of value and disvalue.

  20. We may take it that she does not accept Hobbes’s view that ‘Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others ...’ Leviathan.

  21. I will argue shortly that desires cannot explain the inferences in question.

  22. See e.g. Oakley (1992).

  23. See D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) for a similar account of the appropriateness of emotions.

  24. It is worth pointing out two further problems for reductionism. First, it seems possible for one to experience phobic fear without the relevant beliefs about immanent harm or to experience anger or guilt in the absence of any occurrent evaluative judgments. (See e.g. Greenspan 1988; Oakley 1992.) Second, as pointed out in footnote 4, reductionist views seem committed to an incorrect view about intentional attitudes—that is, that they are all relations to propositions or something proposition-like.

  25. It is an object in the literal sense of the German word for object, Gegenstand, i.e. something that stands over against the subject’s awareness as the object of that awareness. This is not meant to rule out the possibility that the object of the subject’s awareness may be the subject itself, or even indeed the subject’s awareness itself.

  26. For other views on treating awareness as relational see e.g. Kriegel (2006) and Williford (2006).

  27. Some philosophers disagree with the claim that all awareness is relational, and thus intentional. See e.g. Zahavi (2006) and Smith (1989). They argue for a kind of awareness, what is sometimes called ‘pre-reflective awareness’, that does not have this subject-object structure, and thus is not intentional. At present, however, clarifying what pre-reflective awareness is is somewhat elusive.

  28. Brentano (1874) also uses the terminology of ‘primary object’ and ‘secondary object’, albeit in a slightly different sense. For Brentano, the secondary object of an experience is the experience itself, whereas I mean part of the experience, and more particularly, part of its phenomenological character.

  29. In Montague (2007b) I defined the content of perceptual experience as ‘whatever is given to one in having a particular perceptual experience’. Although this is a slightly different way of putting things, the idea is the same.

  30. For a related view concerning the role of sensory phenomenology in perceptual experience see Horgan et al. (2006).

  31. This awareness does not require the possession of concepts. Animals and babies can see red, round balls.

  32. I should stress that I am not any sort of ‘representationalist’ about phenomenal properties in the sense of (e.g.) Tye (1995, 2000, 2002), Harman (1990), and Lycan (1990). I claim that all content is intentional content, and this may sound like the representationalist claim that the phenomenal properties of a perceptual experience are determined by the intentional properties of that experience, but the position is in fact completely different. Tye (2002, p. 448), for example, motivates representationalism with the following thought: When seeing the blue ocean yesterday, “I experienced blue as a property of the ocean not as a property of experience. What I was really delighting in, then, was a quality represented by the experience, not a quality of the experience.” My claim, by contrast, is that it is only in virtue of being aware of one’s experience of blueness—the what it’s likeness of that blue experience—that one represents blueness as a property of the ocean.

  33. I do address this issue in detail in my ‘Russell’s Principle and a Problem with Vision’ (in progress).

  34. One may wish to argue for the stronger claim that someone like Spock cannot have evaluative representations. If evaluative experiences were necessary for evaluative representations, then Spock could not have any evaluative representations because he would fail to have the requisite evaluative experiences.

  35. See also Brentano (1874), Meinong (1910/1983), and Marak (2003).

  36. See Horgan and Tienson (2002), Strawson (1994, 2005), Pitt (2004), and Smith (1989) for philosophers who argue for this view.

  37. See e.g. Charland (2002), de Sousa (1987, 2007), Griffiths (1997), and Prinz (2004) on whether emotions are a natural kind.

  38. I am not saddling the reductionist with the claim that one can always distinguish emotions from one another in terms of their feeling element.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the philosophy of mind reading group at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, the audiences at the 2006 Arizona Towards a Science of Consciousness conference and Durham University, and Rachel Singpurwalla.

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Montague, M. The logic, intentionality, and phenomenology of emotion. Philos Stud 145, 171–192 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9218-0

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