Draft. Do not cite without permission. SENTIMENTS Hichem Naar 1. Introduction Consider the following sentences: (1) “John has been in love with Jane for the past ten years.” (2) “Miriam spent her entire life with a deep hatred for injustice.” (3) “Matt cares deeply about his mother.” (4) “Akio has been deeply jealous about Tim since he was a teenager.” In these sentences, the speaker seems to be predicating a certain kind of affective state of a subject. This affective state, moreover, is predicated for a significant period of time. John’s love for Jane is a matter of years rather than seconds or minutes. The same is true of Miriam’s hatred and Akio’s jealousy. The predications involved in (1)-(4) seem to contrast with the predication of what philosophers and psychologists typically call ‘emotions’. Here are some examples of attributions of emotion: (5) “When he finally meets Jane, John feels very joyful.” (6) “Miriam is angry that Tom hasn’t called her.” (7) “Upon seeing his sick mother, Matt is overwhelmed by sadness.” (8) “Akio is feeling a pang of jealousy towards Tim.” If we take (5)-(8) at face value, emotions are a matter of seconds or minutes rather than months or years. A cursory look at the literature, indeed, indicates that a common assumption is that the nature of an emotion is such that its typical temporal extension is rather limited. Emotions have been thought to be judgments (Solomon, 1988, Nussbaum, 2001), perceptual experiences (De Sousa, 1987, Döring, 2003, Tappolet, 2000, forthcoming), and processes involving relatively short-lived mental states/events (such as physiological arousal, appraisal, etc.) (Robinson, 2005, this 1 volume). If any of these views is right, then it is unsurprising that emotions are generally predicated for short periods of time. Assuming the major ontological treatments of the emotions are on the right track, emotions lasting ten years should be as puzzling and exceptional as perceptual experiences or judgments lasting ten years. Let’s call ‘emotions’ the kind of seemingly short-lived mental state predicated in (5)(8) and ‘sentiments’ the kind of seemingly long-lasting mental state predicated in (1)(4). Facing the linguistic contrast between attributions of emotions and attributions of sentiments – that emotions and sentiments are typically predicated for different periods of time – we can ask how sentiments fit into a general ontology of the affective, and in particular how they are related to emotions. Are sentiments sui generis affective states, or do they reduce to some other affective phenomenon such as emotions? Adopting the first option by maintaining that sentiments are sui generis affective states – call this the distinctness view – is a way of maintaining that the linguistic appearances should be taken at face value. Sentiments are predicated for significant periods of time because they are the sorts of things that can last a long time, whereas emotions are predicated for much shorter periods of time because they are the sorts of things that exist only for a short time. Observe that an implication of this view is that when the same term – ‘jealous’, ‘angry’, etc. – is used both for short-term and longterm predication, it is ambiguous (Goldie, 2010, p. 63). When I utter the sentence “I have been angry with him for the past ten years”, therefore, I do not refer to the same kind of mental state as when I utter the sentence “His remark made me angry”; in the first sentence, I refer to a sentiment, while in the second I refer to an emotion. The distinctness view should be resisted, however, if a view reducing sentiments to emotions can be made to work. For such a view would provide at once a more parsimonious ontology of the affective and a unifying account of our attributions of sentiments and emotions, avoiding thereby the consequence that terms such as ‘jealous’ and ‘angry’ are ambiguous. In doing so, a reductive view would to a large extent avoid the task of providing an account of the relationship between sentiments and emotions, unlike the distinctness view. In Section 2, I introduce and motivate a natural way to pursue this reductive project. I argue that the resulting view either fails to be extensionally adequate – it does not 2 deliver the intuitively right verdicts on various cases – or else is subject to problems which motivate its rejection. In Section 3, I argue that, absent some alternative reductive view, the distinctness view should be accepted as the best – or at least default – account of the distinction between sentiments and emotions. In Section 4, I fill out the details of the distinctness view in order to answer an objection to it. I conclude in Section 5. 2. Reducing sentiments: The pattern view Consider our attribution of a state of jealousy to Akio. On what basis are we justified in attributing it to him? One simple answer is that we have noticed that Akio’s behavior changes when he is around Tim or when he is talking about Tim; he looks at him, talks to him and talks about him in certain ways, and so on. Presumably, we take Akio’s behavior to indicate something about the way he feels about Tim. And, after further investigation into Akio’s behavior, we conclude that he is jealous about Tim. At this stage, we might wonder whether, in attributing a state of jealousy to Akio, we are really attributing to him a psychological state. One way the story could indeed be filled out is by saying that our attributions of sentiments (love, jealousy, etc.) are made true by certain patterns of behavior. Perhaps Akio’s jealousy towards Tim just is his looking at Tim in a certain way, talking to him in a certain way, and so on and forth. It should be clear that the resulting view, thinking of sentiments as constructed out of behavioral patterns as it does, has not much going for it. Surely, Akio could behave exactly the way he does without being jealous about Tim; he might for some reason or other decide to pretend being jealous of Tim. And he could be jealous about Tim without behaving as he does; he might constantly succeed in hiding his true feelings. Furthermore, by reducing sentiments to behavioral patterns, the view does not accommodate the conceptual link between sentiments and emotions. Clearly, Akio’s jealousy about Tim has something to do with the discrete episodes of jealousy he might experience at various times. 3 The sensible move here for the advocate of a reductive account is to reduce sentiments, not to behavioral patterns, but to patterns of emotions. 1 By constructing sentiments out of collections of emotions, the view provides a parsimonious account of affective states that accommodates the seemingly necessary link between sentiments and emotions. The view of sentiments at issue – call it the Pattern View – appears to be a bit of a default view in the literature on emotions, both in philosophy and psychology (see Ekman, 1994, Helm, 2001, Shoemaker, 2003; see also Deonna & Teroni, 2009). According to Paul Ekman, (what I call) a sentiment is nothing more than a summation of emotions; he says: “I believe those who claim emotions endure for much longer time periods are summating what is actually a series of briefer emotion episodes” (1994, 16, quoted in Goldie, 2000, 104). David Shoemaker argues that an appeal to sentiments makes intelligible distinct emotions by placing them in a broader context. Speaking about caring, he writes: caring is a kind of conceptual-linguistic structural framework we overlay upon emotional reactions to render them intelligible. (…) Talk of caring is simply a way of referring to the range of emotional reactions one is expected to have with respect to the fortunes of the cared-for object. (2003, 94) A similar proposal has been put forward by Bennett Helm (2001). 2 According to him, patterns of emotions are distinctive in that they have members which entertain rational connections. When one feels a given emotion, Helm claims, one incurs two sorts of commitments. First, we have ‘transitional commitments’, whereby undergoing an emotion of a given type at a time commits oneself to undergoing an emotion of a different type at a later time. For instance, my hoping that it will not rain tomorrow commits me to being relieved if it finally doesn’t rain. Second, we have ‘tonal commitments’, whereby the having of a positive emotion in a certain situation 1 I am here setting aside the view that sentiments are instances of emotions experienced for a very long time, for I am assuming here that the major theories of emotions are on the right track in identifying emotions with mental states that typically exist for a relatively short time (perceptions, judgments, etc.). 2 Followed by Jaworska (2007). 4 commits one to feeling the corresponding negative emotion in relevant counterfactual situations. For instance, if one feels joy because it doesn’t rain, one is thereby committed to feeling sadness or disappointment in a counterfactual situation where it does. As a result, an appeal to sentiments makes distinct emotions intelligible by revealing their being connected in some way. Although there are differences between these accounts in how sentiments are supposed to be related to emotions, all seem to agree that emotions are ontologically basic and that sentiments are somehow derivative of emotions. The reductive strategy here, indeed, is to have first in hand an account of emotions, and then understand sentiments in terms of that account. One’s account of emotions 3 will therefore determine one’s account of sentiments. For instance, if one follows Helm is thinking that emotions may entertain certain relations, one is free to adopt a view on which sentiments are complexes of emotions entertaining such relations. If one, by contrast, has a simpler account of emotions – construing, for instance, emotions as primitive reactions to external events – one can hold a ‘summary’ view of sentiments according to which a sentiment is a mere collection of emotions. Despite the different ways one might pursue the reductive project, we can extract a view common to all such accounts: Priority Thesis (PT): A subject possesses a given sentiment over a particular period of time if and only if, and because, subject experiences a certain pattern of emotions over that period of time. According to PT, if a subject undergoes a certain pattern of emotions with respect to an object O, she thereby cares about, loves, is angry with, etc. O. This is the sufficiency claim. And in order to care about, love, or be angry with O, she must undergo a pattern of that sort. This is the necessity claim. At least two questions may be raised with respect to these claims. First, what kind of pattern must one undergo in order to be in love rather than angry? In order to be able to distinguish between different kinds of sentiments, presumably, we must provide a story about the sorts of emotions one must feel over time in order to have a given sentiment; one must, in other words, tell what the components of that sentiment are. 3 Plus some further assumptions about sentiments, such as their typical temporal lifespan. 5 This question, of course, is not the hardest we can ask a pattern theorist. For we seem to have a good grasp of the sorts of emotions a person in love typically undergoes over time – she feels joy in the presence of the beloved, worried when she is in danger, proud when she succeeds in life, angry when someone has insulted her, missing her when she is gone, and so on. A similar, but simpler story holds for anger (in the sentiment sense): a person angry with someone else should be angry at various times. Although the details must be filled in here, I will assume that the pattern theorist has available to her a principled way to distinguish between the various sentiments. A more difficult question concerns the intentionality of sentiments. What does undergoing a pattern of emotions with respect to an object O involve? Sentiments, it seems, have intentional objects just as emotions do. But if sentiments just are patterns of emotions, does this mean that, in order for a sentiment to be about O, then all the emotions composing it must be about O? If this is the case, then this is problematic. For sentiments clearly need not have the same object as all the associated emotions. I may be angry with John for hurting someone I care about. In this case, the object of my anger is John, not the person I care about. But it is clear that my anger is the sort of emotions a caring person would experience in this case; we might say it would be in this case an expression of care. A pattern theorist, therefore, should claim that the anger is part of the pattern constituting my care, even though it is not directed at the same person. Sensitive to considerations of this kind, Helm distinguishes between the intentional object of an emotion and its focus. While the intentional object of an emotion is the object towards which it is directed, its focus is the object an appeal to which renders the emotion intelligible. For instance, it is because an individual has insulted my mother that I am angry with him. Here, although the individual is the object of my anger, reference to my attitude towards my mother is needed to explain why I feel the way I do – why I am angry rather than joyful or indifferent. The question now is how a given emotional episode gets to have the focus it has. A natural thought is that my anger has my mother as focus in virtue of the fact that I love her. In other words, the focus of my anger is the intentional object of my love. Had I not loved her, I may not have felt angry at all. Given that sentiments seem necessary to ground facts about the intentional structure of emotions, it seems, the pattern theorist 6 should tell us how they can do so if they are at bottom nothing over and above patterns of emotions. 4 We will see in Section 3 that the distinctness view has a straightforward answer to this question. But for now, let’s assume that the pattern theorist has available to her a story of the relevant sort. There are problems with the pattern view, however, which will motivate the alternative account of sentiments I called the distinctness view. In particular, there seem to be counterexamples to both the sufficiency and the necessity claims involved in PT. The pattern view, it seems, fails to deliver the intuitively right results in a variety of cases. And even if these counterexamples only constitute defeasible evidence against the pattern view, they each point to significant worries about its viability. It turns out that the pattern theorist faces the burden of showing us that her view can adequately address these worries. The pattern view, therefore, is a view for which one needs to argue and cannot simply be taken as the default account of the distinction between sentiments and emotions. I’ll present apparent counterexamples to the sufficiency and the necessity claims, and explain what I take each of them to reveal about the pattern view. Consider a scenario presented by David Pugmire: Suppose there are two people of contrary character. There is Nick, who is ill at ease with others and over-anxious to please. He can’t abide silence and has to maintain a barrage of constant, random banter. Rick, on the other hand, is ruminative, laconic and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. When their professional 4 A possibility open to the pattern theorist is to appeal to ‘non-emotional’ elements that may be part of the pattern and which would explain my reaction. Perhaps it is because I have a long-term desire that my mother be respected that I get angry when someone insults her. An appeal to this desire clearly makes my anger intelligible. Two points may be raised in response, however. First, it seems that we can still ask why I desire that my mother be respected, and an appeal to my love for her would be adequate, but non-obvious answer to this question (it is one possibility among others). Second, even though the appeal to the desire reaches rock bottom when it comes to the psychological explanation of my anger, we still need an account of how whole patterns get to be intentionally directed at one thing as opposed to another. Appealing to an element of the pattern that is directed at it does not tell us how and in what sense the whole pattern is directed at it. Thanks to Fabrice Teroni for pressing me on this issue. 7 circumstances force them together Nick finds Rick perversely unforthcoming and even hostile—thankless company and, frankly, intimidating. For his part, Rick finds Nick an irritating twit. Not surprisingly, they bring out the worst in each other: insistent nervous chatter confronts bristling silence. Their working relationship suffers. However, their Company has a resourceful Personnel Department. Without their knowledge the Department medicates both men with a new psychotropic drug called Amity. Their perceptions of one another remain, but their mutual responses are wonderfully transformed. Thus, despite Nick’s admittedly pathetic foibles, Rick warms to him. Irritation and disdain yield to bemused indulgence. On the other hand, Rick’s ominous silences no longer prevent Nick from dubbing him somehow likable. As if by grace, an unaccountable fondness arises on both sides, and the working relationship prospers. (Pugmire, 1994, 106) The question we should ask ourselves is, do Nick and Rick really care for each other? In the scenario, we have, it seems, a pattern of emotions which, if it wasn’t for the pill, would give us a strong reason to attribute a state of mutual care to the characters. Yet, given that we know about the pill’s presence, we may be reluctant to say that they genuinely care. The pattern theorist may object that, given that it is unclear what work the pill is doing here, we should not trust our judgment. The pill, after all, must be able to track certain relevant facts in order to be activated at all. In order to avoid this sort of mystery, let’s imagine that, instead of the pill, a high-tech device is implanted into the characters’ heads that triggers the relevant emotions whenever the relevant cognitive states are present. For instance, whenever it detects a belief that the other is in the vicinity and that he is in a state of distress, it triggers friendly compassion for him. We can assume that the device is so sophisticated that it triggers not only the right sort of emotions, but does so in a way that feels natural to the protagonists. I think that there is at the very least ground for saying that it is an open question whether Nick and Rick 8 genuinely care for each other, suggesting in turn that the instantiation of a pattern of emotions is not sufficient for caring. We have here an apparent counterexample to the claim that a pattern of emotions is sufficient for having a certain sentiment. The case is about caring, but I take it that we can construct cases involving a pattern associated with any kind of sentiment. It seems as though any pattern of emotions can in principle be induced in the way described in the case. And for each of these cases, it is not clear that we are in the presence of the relevant sentiment. If this is right, patterns of emotions are not sufficient for the presence of sentiments. Although cases of emotional inducement constitute clear evidence against simple forms of the pattern view, they may not be as devastating against more sophisticated ones. Recall what PT says. It says that a certain pattern is sufficient for the presence of a sentiment, not that any pattern is sufficient. The pattern theorist is free to supply details about the kind of pattern sufficient for the presence of a sentiment. It should be noted, though, that this is not an easy task. In order for the pattern view to be acceptable, it should provide an adequate story about the relationship between the various emotions that are part of a given pattern that is needed for this pattern to count as a sentiment at all. In particular, she must tell us what prevents the pattern instantiated by Nick and Rick from being a genuine instance of caring. Cases like the one introduced above put pressure on the pattern theorist to lay down certain restrictions on the sort of pattern that constitute a given sentiment, restrictions that are not satisfied in the Nick and Rick case. One possibility is that the emotions composing the pattern should be rationally connected in the way described by Helm, or at the very least the pattern should be internally coherent in a fairly broad sense. But it is far from clear that the emotions induced in the case fail to be rational or coherent in way Helm has in mind. Of course, there is something fishy about a pattern of such emotions – and the challenge is to say exactly what that is – but it doesn’t appear that being internally incoherent is what explains this fishiness. What explains why there is something fishy about the pattern arguably has more to do with the source of the emotions than any other relation they might entertain to one another. 9 After all, the case involves people whose emotions are directly produced by a drug. 5 The challenge for the pattern theorist, then, is to say why the source of a certain pattern of emotions matters when it comes to the composition of a given sentiment if – as the pattern view claims – a sentiment is nothing over and above that pattern. Why can’t Nick and Rick be said to genuinely care for each other, if they manage to experience all the emotions characteristic of an attitude of caring? Call this the wrong kind of origin problem. 6 Although patterns of emotions might not be sufficient for sentiments, they might still be necessary. Perhaps, indeed, sentiments are patterns of emotions which have a source of a certain kind. 7 However, there are reasons to deny even this claim. I’ll provide a counterexample involving love, but I believe similar counterexamples can be given for other kinds of sentiments. The counterexample involves a subject who, although loving deeply a particular thing, fails on certain occasions to feel the relevant 5 Notice that it is not the fact that the emotions in question are induced artificially that is of concern here, only the fact that the drug directly produces the emotions. Indeed, it is open to an advocate of the distinctness view defended in the next section to admit the possibility of cases where a sentiment is induced artificially, sentiments being here conceived of as distinct from the relevant patterns. In these cases, the sentiment, rather than the drug, would still be the direct cause of the emotions. 6 One might suggest that the problem is not that the emotions have the wrong origin, but that they are not appropriately related to the subject’s reflective perspective. Indeed, it may be the case that, in order for a pattern to be an instance of caring (say), the subject must endorse, or identity with, such pattern. The problem with such a view, however, is that it implies that creatures incapable of reflective endorsement are incapable of caring. See Jaworska, 2007. 7 One possibility would be to claim that the emotions constituting a pattern are subject, not simply to norms of internal coherence, but to more substantial norms, such as epistemic norms. How should we understand such a claim? Suppose emotions are subject to world-involving norms. We might then understand the claim as saying that, in order for a pattern to constitute an instance of caring, there must be a pattern of emotions which are subject to these norms. The problem is that, just as the beliefs that are induced artificially are still subject to epistemic norms, emotions induced artificially are still subject to whatever norm they are subject to. Alternatively, we might understand the claim as saying that the relevant emotions must comply to these norms, such that a pattern of emotions constituting love (say) comprise emotions which are appropriate responses to certain features of the object. Making love depend on such appropriate emotions is implausible, however, for the simple reason that the fact that all our emotions towards a person do not adequately respond to features he or she actually has might make our love inappropriate or ‘blind’, but certainly not disingenuous. Just as inappropriate fear is still fear, inappropriate love is still love. 10 emotions such that no pattern of emotions can be attributed to her. Of course, the pattern theorist can allow occasional gaps in patterns (Helm, 2001); the subject can be said to love as long as gaps are only occasional, that is, as long as they do not falsify the claim that there is a pattern. But it should be kept in mind that the pattern theorist is committed to the impossibility of love (or any other sentiment) without patterns. Consider the following case. John loves his dog, Mindy, very much. She is his best friend. He experiences all the emotions someone loving their dog would feel – joy when she is around, sadness when she is sick, anger when someone attempts to kick her, and so on. Knowing this about John, his worst enemy who happens to be a gifted hypnotist, Tim, somehow manages to make John emotionally indifferent to Mindy. Thus, every time he sees or thinks about her, John experiences no emotion whatsoever. If it wasn’t for the hypnosis, John would feel again all the emotions he used to feel towards Mindy. In fact, with one word, Tim has the power to make the hypnosis go away. Unfortunately for John, Tim doesn’t want to make it go away. Suppose that the hypnosis is sufficiently strong that John fails to instantiate a pattern characteristic of love over a significant period of time. Does this mean that John does not love Mindy anymore? The pattern theorist is committed to answering this question positively, for on her account a pattern of emotions is necessary for the presence of a sentiment and John fails to instantiate any such pattern. Notice, however, that it doesn’t follow from John’s failure to experience emotions towards Mindy that she stopped loving her. If the pattern view provided an adequate account of at least the concept of love, then we shouldn’t think it an open question whether John still loves Mindy while under hypnosis for such a long time. We should think instead that the absence of a pattern is sufficient to falsify the claim the John loves Mindy. This point can be made stronger if we reflect on the role the hypnosis is supposed to play in the case. In what way does the hypnosis manage to make John indifferent? One hypothesis – the one, it seems, the pattern theorist is committed to – is that the hypnosis does so by destroying the love John used to have for Mindy. Given that, by hypothesis, the pattern of emotions he used to instantiate does not exist anymore, his love doesn’t exist anymore either. But there is an alternative hypothesis we would be able to give if we rejected the pattern view. Rather than destroying John’s love for Mindy, the hypnosis makes John emotionally indifferent to Mindy by blocking his 11 love for her. Just as a state of sleep may prevent one from manifesting certain lastlasting psychological states, a state of hypnosis of the sort involved in the case may prevent John from manifesting his love. I think that the hypothesis involving prevention should appear more plausible than the one involving destruction once we look at how the hypnosis is supposed to work in the case. As stated in the scenario, the uttering of a simple word is sufficient for the state of hypnosis to be over and for everything to be back to normal. For this to be the case, it seems, hypnosis should not have too big of an impact on the subject’s psychology. It should not damage his brain, for instance. Had Tim hit John hard on the head instead, damaging various areas associated with emotions, it would have been very hard to maintain that he still loves his dog. The hypothesis involving destruction would thereby have appeared very plausible. We are less tempted by this hypothesis, however, when it comes to the original case. There does seem to be an intuitive difference between the impact the hypnosis has on John’s love and the impact the head banging may have on it. While it seems to us that the hypnosis – even when persistent – may have no impact on his love even though it has an impact on the pattern of emotions he undergoes, the head banging may clearly have an impact on it. This difference in impact, it seems, cannot be accounted for by the pattern view. Furthermore, the prevention hypothesis should appear better than the destruction hypothesis if we consider a variation of the case where, rather than being in state of hypnosis all the time, John is somehow hooked up to a device which triggers the activation word every time it senses that John is about to experience an emotion for his dog. Facing this case, the pattern theorist is forced to say that, because John fails to feel any emotion towards his dog, he doesn’t love her in the first place. This claim is dubious, however, since if John didn’t love his dog, there would be no point in hooking him up to the device. The device’s point is precisely to prevent John’s love from manifesting itself. If that’s right, then the pattern view fails to allow a kind of explanation we might naturally give of cases like this one. Suppose now that, in the original case, Tim decides to use the magic word on some occasion, but then decides a moment later to use another word restoring the state of hypnosis. During the time John is no longer under Tim’s influence, he feels joy upon seeing Mindy. What explains the appearance of this lonely state of joy? As there is no 12 pattern, the pattern theorist is unable to say that the joy is an expression of John’s love, for on her account John no longer loves Mindy. One thing she can do in order to explain the joy is to appeal to some underlying neurophysiological facts about John that obtained upon the removal of the hypnosis. Since there is no pattern of emotions of which the joy would be a part, there seems to be no other way than furnishing a subpersonal explanation of this sort in order to make its appearance less chancy. (I take it that even the pattern theorist would not find John’s reaction very surprising.) She has to admit that, as a matter of psychology, the appearance of John’s emotion is a brute fact about him. 8 We might think, though, that it is because John loves Mindy that he is happy – even for just a moment – to see her. This is, I think, a natural and perfectly acceptable psychological explanation of his reaction. Of course, the pattern theorist may be right in claiming that the appearance of the lonely state is explained by some facts about John’s brain. Yet, this kind of explanation is typically not what we are looking for when we attempt to make sense of other people’s seemingly idiosyncratic reactions. What we are looking for, in these cases, are details about the subject’s psychology that would make the reactions look less idiosyncratic. I think that a case like John’s is of this kind, and that the way we would make sense of it (assuming the hypnosis 8 One might wonder whether, in addition to providing a mere subpersonal explanation that would render the lonely emotion intelligible, we could provide some sort of rationalizing explanation whereby we describe the reason why John feels the way he does. If he reacts a certain way, indeed, this is presumably because he is responsive to some feature of the situation which might make his response appropriate. Citing this feature, furthermore, may allow the pattern theorist to appeal to something other than subpersonal states of the subject in order to make sense of the lonely emotion. If that’s right, then the pattern theorist could help herself with a species of personal explanation after all. One worry with this response, however, is that, since the pattern theorist cannot appeal to the presence of love, she cannot appeal to features of the situation whose status as reasons would only make sense if love was indeed present. For instance, she cannot appeal to facts such as My best friend is here or Mindy – my beloved dog – is in front of me. At best, she could only appeal to facts that connect to other cares and concerns of the subject, such as the subject’s liking of dogs. In this case, she would still able be to give a rationalizing – and even a full-blown psychological – explanation, but, it seems, not the one we would intuitively give, namely one that preserves the appearance that the lonely joy at play in the case is an expression of love rather than some other sentiment and that, as a result, it is responsive to features of the situation whose status as reasons can only be made sense of by appealing to this love. Thanks to Mauro Rossi for pressing me on this point. 13 works the way I pictured it and we know how John used to react in front of Mindy) is by appealing to some underlying state of attachment towards Mindy which was there all along. If a sentiment is appealed to in order to explain isolated emotions, then there is no reason to think that it cannot be appealed to in order to explain entire patterns of emotions. Indeed, it seems perfectly adequate to explain a certain sequence of emotions by saying that the subject is in love, an explanation that would not be open to us if the sequence were identical with the love. In fact, it isn’t even clear that the ‘intelligibility’ story the pattern theorist gives of individual emotions – placing them in a broader context – preserves the thought that sentiments can be explanatory. The strategy is to subsume an emotion under a series of emotions the subject has felt or is likely to feel, and which might be related in certain ways (by satisfying Helm’s rational requirements, for instance). It might thereby look explanatory “only in the limited sense that it takes away the oddity that the single happening might otherwise have.” (Wollheim, 1999, 5) This falls short of the kind of explanation we might wish to give of the occurrence of our emotions. By appealing to sentiments in order to explain individual emotions, it seems, we do more than claim that such episodes are things we can expect, or that they entertain certain relations (such as rational relations). Rather, it is tempting to say, we explain them. 9 The pattern view plausibly fails to do justice to some aspects of our explanatory practices with respect to our affective lives. Call this the explanatory problem. First, the view rules out explanations of massive disruption in patterns of emotions couched in terms of blocking or masking, admitting only explanations couched in terms of destruction. Second, it rules out explanations of lonely emotions couched in 9 If the sort of explanation we find missing in the pattern view is causal explanation, then it may seem that the pattern theorist can allow the possibility that the emotions forming a pattern are causally – and not just rationally – connected to each other, for it is clear that emotions can cause other emotions. We might worry though that this sort of explanation can explain the occurrence of every emotion that is part of a given pattern, for the temporal gap between two successive emotions may be too significant for the first emotion to be said to cause the second. It would be odd to claim, indeed, that the joy one feels towards one’s beloved before work at 9AM causes the joy one’s feel towards him or her after work at 6PM, assuming no emotion of the relevant sort has occurred in between. 14 psychological terms, admitting only explanations couched in subpersonal terms. 10 Third, it rules out explanations of entire patterns of emotions couched in terms of sentiments, admitting only quasi-explanatory stories about their members. 3. The distinctness view It seems that the pattern view is not as plausible as we might have initially thought. Perhaps there are ways it can be pursued that avoid the problems raised against it. More generally, there might be alternative reductive views which could deliver everything we want from an account of the distinction between sentiments and emotions. 11 That said, it is important to realize how neatly a non-reductive view – which I called the distinctness view – avoids the problems facing the pattern view. Absent some plausible reductive view, indeed, I think we should accept the distinctness view as the best – or at least, the default – account of the distinction between sentiments and emotions. The distinctness view clearly avoids the counterexamples raised against the pattern view. Given that on this view sentiments and emotions are distinct existences, it is not surprising that dissociations are possible. Just as a chair can exist without a table, and vice versa, a sentiment can exist without a pattern of emotions, and vice versa. Of 10 Or, as seen in Note 8, couched in terms of sentiments other than the one we would intuitively appeal to. 11 One possibility is a view on which, in order for a sentiment to exist, a pattern must exist at least counterfactually. So even though John’s actual emotions do not form a pattern, they would if the hypnosis were not in place, and so John could still be said to love Mindy even under the influence of the hypnosis. Putting forward this sort of view would therefore allow the pattern theorist to avoid the John and Mindy counterexample. It might not so easily avoid the Nick and Rick counterexample, however, and the two problems raised earlier. In particular, although explanations by prevention (rather than destruction) are possible on this view, the kind of prevention explanation it would give of the relevant cases is a bit odd. In the John and Mindy case, the pattern theorist would account for the role of the hypnosis by saying that it prevents counterfactual states of affairs from being actual. Facing this story, we might naturally wonder by what means the hypnosis manages to do this. In other words, the story it gives might not be all we can give of the role of the hypnosis in the case. In this and the next sections, we will see that the distinctness view gives us what we want by way of explanations of this kind. Overall, it is unclear what could be the motivation (except the purported intuitive link between sentiments and emotions, a claim I show in Section 4 to be consistent with the distinctness view) of the modified pattern view over the more straightforward distinctness view. 15 course, we might wonder whether sentiments and emotions are as independent from each other as tables and chairs are (see next section), but we can note for now that this account of the distinction has a clear advantage over the pattern view in not being subject to the counterexamples introduced above. We have seen that each of these counterexamples reveals a difficulty which the pattern theorist must avoid in order for her view to be successful. The Nick and Rick case seems to show that the origin of one’s emotions matters as to whether they are genuinely indicative of a given sentiment. For instance, the fact that a pattern characteristic of love is directly produced by a drug appears to make a difference to the pattern’s identity. The John and Mindy case, by contrast, seems to show that the pattern view neglects some aspects of our explanatory practices. In particular, it seems to rule out certain kinds of explanations we might naturally give with respect to our affective lives: (i) explanations involving prevention rather than destruction of a given affective state, (ii) psychological explanations of seemingly idiosyncratic reactions rather than mere subpersonal ones, and (iii) explanations of whole patterns of emotions rather than ‘intelligibility’ stories about individual members of these patterns. It should be clear that the distinctness view avoids the wrong kind of origin problem. By positing an extra species of affective state – sentiments – the distinctness theorist is free to claim that what is wrong with Nick and Rick’s reactions is that – produced by the drug as they are – they do not really come from an attitude of care. 12 A sentiment being conceived of here as something distinct from the relevant patterns of emotions, it is something that can fail to exist while a pattern characteristic of it is at play. One straightforward thing this allows us to say is that, for a pattern to constitute a manifestation of a given sentiment, it must be produced by that sentiment. Problem avoided. The explanatory problem is avoided by the distinctness view as well. First, given that sentiments are distinct from patterns of emotions, the absence of a pattern doesn’t imply the absence of the associated sentiment. As a result, in cases where a pattern is removed, it still may be the case that the sentiment is not destroyed as well but merely 12 Again, nothing I say here commits me to the claim that caring (and other sentiments) could not be induced artificially. In fact, I don’t see why it could not. 16 masked. Second, given that sentiments are both distinct from emotions and properly psychological, we can appeal to them in order to provide psychological explanations of isolated emotions. Last, again given that they are distinct from emotions, sentiments can explain both individual emotions and patterns of emotions. Before moving on, recall a potential difficulty for the pattern view introduced earlier. After distinguishing between the intentional object of an emotion and the object the appeal to which makes the emotion intelligible – its ‘focus’ – we wondered how the emotion gets to have the focus it has. A natural answer was that the intentional object of the sentiment associated with it is the emotion’s focus. An appeal to sentiments, we concluded, seems necessary to ground certain facts about the intentional structure of emotions. It was not clear, however, whether a pattern theorist is really free to help herself with this account, given the role sentiments seem to play here over and above the relevant pattern of emotions. Although the pattern view may have the resources to avoid this difficulty (after all, the distinction between object and focus was initially introduced by Bennett Helm, an advocate of this view), notice how easily the distinctness view gets around it. On this view, indeed, love, anger, and other sentiments are distinct from any sort of pattern of emotions with which they might be associated. Love, anger, and these other sentiments, furthermore, are intentional states: we always love, are angry with, etc. some thing or other. The distinctness view thus claims there are states called ‘sentiments’ which are both distinct from emotions and intentional. Although the sort of story we have given of the intentional structure of emotions is not part of the distinctness view, it is certainly open to its advocate to accept it, for nothing on her account prevents her from claiming that sentiments not only explain the occurrence of various emotions but also account for some aspect of their intentionality. 4. Explaining the necessary link: Sentiments as powers We have seen that a major motivation for the pattern view is the intuitive link between sentiments and emotions. There seems to be some sort of conceptual or necessary connection between the two kinds of mental states which make it plausible to think that there are not completely independent from each other. The pattern view does justice to this plausible thought by reducing sentiments to patterns of emotions. We have seen that the distinctness view claims that sentiments and emotions are 17 distinct, and that this claim is what enables it to avoid the problems raised previously against the pattern view. If we accept the existence of a necessary link between sentiments and emotions, this feature of the account – its claiming that sentiments and emotions are distinct – may nonetheless constitute the very reason we should reject it. For doesn’t it plainly imply that sentiments and emotions are related only contingently? If the distinctness view fails to accommodate the necessary connection between sentiments and emotions, then it seems that the pattern view – even though somewhat revisionary of commonsense – may have some traction after all. I do not think that the claim that sentiments and emotions are contingently related follows from the distinctness view. Let me offer two responses to the charge that the distinctness view has this implication. The first response starts by noticing that we haven’t been very precise in our description of the link between sentiments and emotions. The necessity relations at play in this connection may be of various forms, some of which might be so weak that it is uncontroversial that they can obtain between distinct entities. For instance, it might be a platitude surrounding our concept of love that a person in love is likely – at least in normal circumstances – to experience a range of emotions in various situations over time. The fact that this conceptual relation obtains between sentiments and emotions, it seems, does not give us any reason one way or the other to accept a particular account of the distinction. Another way sentiments and emotions might be related that might explain their seemingly intuitive link has to do with Shoemaker’s claim that the function of attributions of sentiments such as caring is to refer “to the range of emotional reactions one is expected to have with respect to the fortunes of the cared-for object.” (2003, 94) Although, as we have seen, talk of sentiments cannot be reduced to talk of emotions, it might still be the case that one function of this discourse – a reason why we tend to use it in the first place – is to express our predictions concerning the way we or other people will feel in the future. If talk of sentiments has this function, then this might explain our initial suspicion that sentiments and emotions are more than contingently related; in this case, the relevant necessary connection would be conceptual. But notice that this fact about the discourse is perfectly compatible with the distinctness view, just as the view that we attribute mental states to others in part 18 in order to predict their behavior is compatible with the view that mental states and behavior are distinct. The first response, then, was to show that there are ways of spelling out the intuitive link between sentiments and emotions that are easily shown to be consistent with the distinctness view. The second response is now to show that the distinctness view is compatible with more robust forms of necessity relations that might obtain between sentiments and emotions. Suppose that there exists a not merely conceptual/analytic connection between sentiments and emotions. Say the relation that obtains between them is of a robust metaphysical sort, having to do with the nature of these entities. Surely, one might say, that claim is inconsistent with the distinctness view. On a natural reading of it, indeed, it might simply be impossible for sentiments to exist without patterns. Indeed, how could two entities X and Y be necessarily connected in the relevant way if it is possible for one to exist without the other? There is a way to show that the distinctness view is compatible with relations of this sort obtaining between sentiments and emotions, however. By contrast with the first response, this response consists in filling out some details of the view in a way that removes this apparent tension. The strategy is to show that the relationship between sentiments and emotions is of a kind that allows us to posit robust necessary connections between them. In particular, sentiments’ ontological category is such that they might be necessarily, or essentially, related to other things. Although the proposal I will make is controversial, it is rooted in a metaphysical framework which has gained some traction in recent years. The basic idea of the view I favor is that sentiments are dispositions to experience various emotions. The relation that obtains between a sentiment and its associated emotions is therefore the relation that obtains between a disposition and its so-called manifestations: emotions are – at least in many cases – the manifestations of sentiments. Given that it is plausible that the relation between dispositions and their manifestations is necessary, it is thereby plausible that the relation between sentiments and emotions is necessary too. At this point, one might reasonably doubt that I have really offered an account of the distinction between sentiments and emotions which is a version of the distinctness view. For dispositions and manifestations might be necessarily connected because 19 they are not distinct in the first place. A view like this one is found in David Hume, who claims that the distinction between dispositions or powers and their manifestation or exercise is without foundation. He writes: “the distinction, which we sometimes make betwixt a power and the exercise of it, is entirely frivolous, and (…) neither man nor any other being ought ever to be thought possest of any ability, unless it be exerted and put in action.” (1739-40/1896, 311) Hume’s view on dispositions is in part premised on the suspicion that there cannot be necessary connections between distinct entities. If dispositions and their manifestations are essentially related, then they cannot be distinct, and if they are distinct, then they are – to use Hume’s phrase – completely “loose and separate” (Hume, 1748/1975, 74), hence only contingently related. It is not the place for a complete refutation of Hume’s ontology. It will suffice for my purposes that a plausible alternative to it be available for the advocate of the distinctness view. On a distinctively anti-Humean ontology (e.g., Heil, 2003, this volume, Molnar, 2003, Mumford, 1998, Shoemaker, 1980), some aspects of the world are essentially related to other aspects which are nonetheless distinct. This is the case of dispositions or – as they are called by ‘realists’ – powers. On a realist account, dispositions are irreducible entities whose identity is fixed by what they do. A disposition is the very disposition it is in virtue what it is a disposition for (see Heil, this volume), that is, in virtue of the range of events or occurrences it might produce in a range of circumstances. For instance, a glass is fragile in virtue of possessing a property which is essentially connected to a range of events or occurrences such as breaking, cracking, and so on; fragility is a property that has a certain causal role necessarily rather than contingently, even though there are things possessing it that never get the chance to manifest it. One might be suspicious of the view just introduced, and rightly so. No argument was provided to the effect that dispositions thus construed exist. And many subtle details of the relevant literature and important issues have been passed over for reasons of space. 13 I will then content myself with the following conditional statement: if one 13 One such issue is how it is possible for a disposition to bear a necessary relation with something – its manifestation – that may not exist (for discussion, see Mumford, 2009, Section 3.2). Another issue 20 thinks that sentiments and emotions are necessarily connected to each other in a fairly robust way, and if one is attracted to the anti-Humean ontology alluded to (though not defended) above, then there is a view that both counts as a distinctness view and preserves the supposed necessary connection between sentiments and emotions. 14 5. Concluding remarks To sum up: There seems to be a distinction in ordinary language between affective states predicated for a relatively short time and affective states predicated for a relatively long time. Somewhat stipulatively, and not worrying too much about what precisely falls under these two categories, I called the former ‘emotions’ and the latter ‘sentiments’. The question was how we should understand this distinction. One way is to understand it as a mere conceptual distinction that does not really map onto a genuine ontological distinction. A natural version of this strategy, the pattern view, suggests that we understand sentiments as collections of emotions (which might be related in some way). Despite its initial plausibility, we have seen that the pattern view faces a number of counterexamples and difficulties which motivate its rejection and the acceptance of an alternative view, the distinctness view. The distinctness view takes the appearances at face value: the conceptual/linguistic distinction between sentiments and emotions corresponds to a genuine ontological distinction; sentiments and emotions are equally basic psychological states. The fact that sentiments and emotions are distinct allowed us to avoid both the counterexamples and the problems concerns the legitimacy of appealing to powers in the context of a discussion about non-fundamental aspects of the world, such as psychology (Bird, forthcoming). 14 Even though my view of sentiments is resolutely at odds with Hume’s metaphysical commitments, it might be seen as aiming at providing an account of a distinction which he himself makes in Book II of the Treatise between calm and violent passions (1739-40/1896, 276). However “vulgar and specious” (ibid.) this distinction might have appeared to Hume, an adequate account of it may render it acceptable for further inquiry into our affective lives. On one understanding of the distinction, violent passions possess, while calm passions lack or possess to a significantly lesser degree, some phenomenological content (Smith, 1987, 51). The epistemology of calm passions, Hume seems to hold, is thus more indirect than the epistemology of violent passions; the calm passions, indeed, “are more known by their effects than by their immediate sensation.” (1739-40/1896, 417, quoted in Smith, 1994, 52) This description appears to be true of sentiments as well, suggesting that sentiments are calm passions in Hume’s sense: if sentiments are dispositions to experience various emotions, then they are plausibly known by means of their manifestations, namely the emotions we experience. 21 raised against the pattern view. And in order to answer a worry one might have to the effect that sentiments and emotions are only contingently related on the distinctness view, I showed that there are various – more or less controversial – ways to accommodate the idea that there is a necessary connection between them. I conclude that the distinctness view should be accepted as the best – or at least, the default (until an adequate reductive alternative is put on the table) – account of the distinction between sentiments and emotions. Of course, this account leaves many questions unanswered. For one, which mental states fall under the category of sentiments? Although I have helped myself with an intuitive way of placing various affective states on one side or other of the distinction between sentiments and emotions, a principled way of individuating them should still be found. A principled way to distinguish between various sentiments – perhaps in part by means of their manifestations – should be found as well. Other questions we might ask concern the nature and epistemology of sentiments. If sentiments can be said to have strength, but their strength cannot be accounted for by an appeal to phenomenology, 15 what is the nature of this feature and how do we know about the strength of our sentiments? To take a concrete example, what is it for one’s love to be strong, and how does one know how strong it is? Furthermore, we have seen that sentiments might be necessarily connected to emotions in virtue of the fact that the latter are manifestations of the former. We might wonder though what events and occurrences other than emotions could count as the manifestation of a given sentiment. It is plausible, for instance, that certain desires, intentions, and actions could count as the manifestation of a sentiment. An adequate account of these other manifestations, and the way they might relate to each other and to emotions, is yet to be found. Finally, given that sentiments are distinct from emotions, though closely related to them, we can ask ourselves about the potential connections they might bear to normativity and value. Are sentiments things which can be supported by reasons? And what relationship could there be between sentiments and value? Are sentiments responses to value? And if so, is this responsiveness what makes them valuable? The distinctness view, then, not only is a very plausible account of the distinction between 15 For an attribution of this claim to Hume’s conception of calm passions, see Àrdal (1989, 98). 22 sentiments and emotions, but also, if suitably fleshed out, promises to answer deep questions about the nature, epistemology, and value of our affective lives. 16 Bibliography Àrdal, P.S. (1989). Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Bird, A. (forthcoming). “Overpowering (How the Powers Ontology has OverReached Itself)”, Mind Deonna, J.A. & Teroni, F. (2009). “Taking Affective Explanations to Heart”, Social Science Information 48, 3, pp. 359-377 De Sousa, R. (1987). The Rationality of Emotions. MIT Press Döring, S. 2003. “Explaining Action by Emotion”, Philosophical Quarterly, 53, 214230 Ekman, P. 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