Abstract
Cognitivists (sometimes called ‘Judgementalists’) about the emotions minimally hold that it is a necessary condition for being in an emotional state that one make a certain judgement or have a certain belief. For example, if I am angry with Sam, then I must believe that Sam has wronged me. Perhaps I must also elicit a certainly bodily response or undergo some relevant experience, but crucial to the view is the belief or judgement. In the face of ‘recalcitrant emotions’, this once very popular view has come under heavy criticism that has led many theorists to either abandon the view or to offer more nuanced representational views of the emotions. Against what seems to now be received wisdom, I argue that cognitivists have tools at their disposal that allow them to alleviate the apparent conflicts presented by cases of recalcitrance. But I also believe that cognitivists are still in trouble. Although cognitivists have a range of underexplored resources, their use comes at a high cost. In particular, cognitivists must adopt a widespread and thoroughgoing inaccessibility to our own thoughts and judgements that should strike one as implausible. It is mental opacity rather than mental conflict that is the real problem posed by recalcitrance.
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Notes
Cognitivists usually hold a stronger view. For instance, that what it is to be in an emotional state is to make a certain kind of judgement or hold a certain belief or perhaps that it is partially constitutive of an emotional state that its subject is in a certain belief state or makes a certain judgement. See especially Solomon (1976), Neu (2000), and Nussbaum (2001). Even the weaker view is open to the attack on which this paper focuses.
Exactly how to understand ‘cognitive’ is discussed carefully in Debes (2009). In the present paper, I am taking cognitivist views to be committed to holding at least that a belief or judgement is necessary for being in an emotional state. See D’Arms and Jacobson (2003) for a discussion of what they call ‘Quasi-judgementalist’ views that depart from the belief/judgement commitment that this paper aims to defend against one now well-known objection. If the arguments in the present paper are successful, then the move to the ‘quasi’ views is less well motivated than usually supposed.
See Deigh (1994) for a detailed discussion of the emergence of cognitivism.
Her own positive view is a near variant of cognitivism, though in light of recalcitrance she gives up the view that belief or judgement is the correct cognitive state. Although I’m myself sympathetic to a view that looks to alternative representational states, I don’t believe that the problem of recalcitrance as set out by Greenspan provides a reason for seeking such alternatives.
Benbaji (wrongly I think) seems to take recalcitrant emotions to be a problem for cognitivists because the view would have it that subjects are aware that they are in the state of believing that p and not-p (see 2013, p. 3). There are two problems with this. First, it is not at all obvious that this is the right description of the average case. The subjects may be aware that they are fearing something and that they are believing that that thing isn’t dangerous, but it takes a theory to reveal that the fear is (or entails) a belief. Second, if we grant that the subjects are irrational, then I’m not sure what is supposed to be problematic about ascribing to such a subject a contradictory pair of beliefs. I think if cognitivists are in trouble, the rationality assumption really is needed. Both of these points are taken up in more detail in the main text.
See also Brady (2009).
Though see Doring (2014) who argues that recalcitrant emotions are not irrational but that we are tempted to think they are because they generate practical conflicts. That is, because of their emotions, subjects are poised to act against their reasoned goals.
Salmon offers the following: ‘The important thing is that, by definition, [modes of presentation] are such that if a fully rational believer adopts conflicting attitudes (such as belief and disbelief, or belief and suspension of judgement) toward propositions p and q, then the believer must take p and q in different ways, by means of different guises, in harboring the conflicting attitudes toward them—even if p and q are in fact the same proposition’ (1989: 246). Salmon (1989) offers a detailed discussion of the popular reply to Kripke’s puzzle that appeals to distinct ways of thinking, but see also Perry (1979) for an early discussion of the distinction between belief states and belief contents. See Fodor (1987) for a reply to the puzzle that appeals to concepts conceived of as terms in a language of thought.
Following Sainsbury and Tye, let us assume that the present is long enough in duration for an individual to have at least two present thoughts.
This isn’t to say that IKCC or something like it couldn’t be defended in light of slow-switching. The modest proposal is that cognitivists certainly needn’t give the point away easily and have a good claim to giving up IKCC. For a recent discussion of slow-switching that would be less favorable for cognitivists, see Recanati (2012), especially chapter 10.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was supported by funding from The John Templeton Foundation in connection with New Directions in the Study of the Mind. Thanks are due to helpful comments and feedback from John Bengson, Jeremy Schwartz, Jonathan Vanderhoek, and Eric Vogelstein as well as to audiences at Texas Tech University and at the meeting of Wisconsin Philosophical Association.
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Grzankowski, A. The Real Trouble with Recalcitrant Emotions. Erkenn 82, 641–651 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9836-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9836-4