Emotion: More like Action than Perception

Abstract

Although some still advance reductive accounts of emotions—according to which they fall under a more familiar type of mental state—contemporary philosophers tend to agree that emotions probably constitute their own kind of mental state. Agreeing with this claim, however, is compatible with attempting to find commonalities between emotions and better understood things. According to the advocates of the so-called ‘perceptual analogy’, thinking of emotion in terms of perception can fruitfully advance our understanding even though emotion may not be reducible to ordinary perception. In this paper, I spell out and motivate a different analogy—that between emotion and action—an analogy which I think can do some important theoretical work. In particular, it constitutes a theoretically fruitful way to think about core aspects of emotions and might in fact be employed to provide a better account of certain aspects of emotions than the one based on the perceptual analogy. Emotions might not be a matter of seeing the world a certain way, but a matter of behaving internally in response to it. In a slogan form: Emotion is the inward counterpart of bodily movement.

The spontaneity of emotion

“…3 3 Recently, Naar (2020) has argued that emotions are analogous to actions in several respects. This view is much weaker than the one proposed by Slaby and Wüschner, though. …”

“…35 35 Naar (2020, p. 27) also expresses sympathy with the idea that the passivity of emotions should be accounted for in a way that acknowledges their responsive character. While he does not flesh this idea out, Naar suggests that certain unthinking actions (he calls them “spontaneous,” which I here take to mean that they are initiated without prior thought or decision) might serve as a suitable model here.…”

Armchair Evaluative Knowledge and Sentimental Perceptualism

“…The evaluative experiences we have in response to our perceptions and beliefs about the world-our online evaluative experiences-do not seem always to be privileged over the evaluative experiences we have in response to imaginings-our offline evaluative experiences. 10 Consider the case above of a runaway trolley; it does not seem as if actually witnessing the event would improve our epistemic position in such a way that that experience should (all else equal) take priority over our responses to the vignette. To borrow an observation from Sarah McGrath, while we rely on actual experiments to figure out the nature of the empirical world, evaluative inquiry generally only seems to require thought experiments [27].…”

“…For contemporary proponents, see, among others, Mark Johnston [5], Graham Oddie [6], Robert Roberts [7], and Christine Tappolet [8]. Notably, some theorists prefer to think of desires and emotions as responses to perceptual-like feelings of value rather than as perceptual-like themselves [9,10]. Theorists drawn to this model should feel free to translate my arguments accordingly.…”

Emotions and Their Correctness Conditions: A Defense of Attitudinalism

“…So, what can we say about emotional attitudes? The attitudinalist insists that the most illuminating thing to say about emotional attitudes in general is that they are different ways of reacting to and engaging with what is represented (Deonna & Teroni, 2012;Müller, 2017Müller, , 2018Mulligan, 2007;Naar, 2020).…”