The New Ledoux: Survival Circuits and the Surplus Meaning of ‘Fear’

Abstract

LeDoux's pioneering work on the neurobiology of fear has played a crucial role in informing debates in the philosophy of emotion. For example, it plays a key part in Griffiths’ argument for why emotions don’t form a natural kind. Likewise, it is employed by Faucher and Tappolet to defend pro-emotion views, which claim that emotions aid reasoning. LeDoux, however, now argues that his work has been misread. He argues that using emotion terms, like ‘fear’, to describe neurocognitive data adds a ‘surplus meaning’: it attributes phenomenal properties to survival circuits which they don’t possess. This paper aims to explore LeDoux's new proposal, and examine the potentially devastating consequences that ensue for the aforementioned views. I end by addressing the worry that these lessons are conditional on LeDoux's own higher-order theory of emotional consciousness being true.

On How to Develop Emotion Taxonomies

“…But that is not the main point here. Rather, the point is that if the growing consensus is right, to categorize emotions with respect to things such as Darwinian modules, basic emotions, or affect programs, is to offer emotion categories that might exclude the conscious components of emotion (Majeed, 2020).…”

“…Philosophers of emotion are typically interested in emotions as first-person accessible phenomena: states with subjective feelings, in particular, states with distinctive sorts of phenomenology to other mental states. For this reason, they are bound to find research into (just) the neural underpinnings of certain sorts of expressive, physiological, and behavioral responses at a disconnect from their central concerns (Majeed, 2020). This is not to say that all scientific research into emotion is irrelevant.…”

Rethinking the wrong of rape1

“…On this view, fear is the awareness that you are in danger or are being threatened. For some of the implications of LeDoux's conceptual shift for the philosophy of emotion, see Majeed (2020). 35 This is referred to as the defense cascade (Kozlowska et al, 2015), envisioned as proceeding along a continuum, depending on the level and proximity of threat, and moving from arousal to fight-flight-freeze, and then to the more extreme tonic immobility (where the person can't move or speak), collapsed immobility (a variant of tonic, when active defenses have failed) and quiescent immobility (playing dead), depending on which defensive behavior is best geared to survival.…”

“…On this view, fear is the awareness that you are in danger or are being threatened. For some of the implications of LeDoux's conceptual shift for the philosophy of emotion, see Majeed (2020).…”