Emotions and Their Expressions

Abstract

In a well-known paper, Rosalind Hursthouse argues that certain common, and not irrational, actions cannot be accommodated by the dominant philosophical model of the rational explanation of action. Although there is no rational explanation, she claims, there is a good explanation for such action: they are done out of emotion. In this paper I argue that we can reject Hursthouse's conclusion that explanation of action as the expression of emotion is sui generis if we have a sufficiently broad understanding of how features can count in favour of actions. What is distinctive about expressive acts, I will argue, is not that they are spontaneous products of the 'overflowing of powerful feeling,' requiring a form of explanation that is arational, but rather that they are done intentionally but for their own sake as a constitutive part of doing justice to one's sense of the gravity (or indeed levity) of a situation. The action is not arational, but can be assessed for its expressive adequacy. Furthermore, the expressive action, on this view, has a purpose -that of doing justice, or giving adequate external form to one's sense of the situation.If there are reasons sometimes simply to acknowledge or honour the gravity of a situation then we can reconcile expressive action with the standard picture of rational explanation of action.

The Phenomenology of Emotional Expression

“…Put otherwise, they look happy. Variations on this view have been defended in a good deal of recent literature (McNeill, 2012;Smith, 2015;Sias & Bar-On, 2016). It is also present in the work of the classical phenomenologists mentioned in the previous section.…”

“…Rather, he offers a design account. For a critical discussion of the role of inference in Green's account see Bar-On & Sias (2016) and Green's (2016) reply.…”