Philosophy of emotions

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Philosophy of emotions

• Emotional affectivity
• 26.11.08
• Mikko Salmela
• mikko.salmela_at_helsinki.fi

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Semantic preliminaries

• Emotion vs. feeling
• Emotion an intentional multimodal state
• Feeling the what-is-it-likeness of an emotion,
  intensity (strong vs. weak) and hedonic valence
  (pleasant vs. painful) as main dimensions
• Bodily vs. psychic feelings (Stocker)
• No corresponding distinction in Finnish, Swedish,
  or German The Finnish tunne, the Swedish
  känsla, and the German Gefühl all translate
  as feeling rather than emotion ? counterintuitive
  consequences
• Gilbert Ryle 7 uses of feeling
• Perceptual
• Exploratory
• Mock-perceptual, metaphorical
• Sensation
• Feeling ones general condition
• Epistemic
• Feeling like doing
• senses 1, 3 , 4, and 5 associate with emotion

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Philosophical accounts of emotional affectivity

• Noncognitive theories
• James feelings as sensations of bodily changes
• Damasio emotional feelings combine sensations of
  bodily changes with mental images of the presumed
  cause of those changes
• Feeling an emotion consists of having mental
  images arising from the neural patterns which
  represent the changes in body and brain that make
  up an emotion. (Damasio 1999, 280).
• Cognitive theories
• 1. Strong cognitivism
• Emotional feelings can be reduced to the
  propositional content of emotion together with an
  attitudinal mode of holding this content.
• Stocker Once questions about content are
  resolved, there is no further question about
  affectivity, precisely because such content is
  affectivity.
• Proposals for attitudinal mode self-involved and
  intense judgments (Solomon) fresh evaluative
  judgments (Nussbaum) focused attention and
  overvaluation (Nash) adverbially characterized
  apprehensions (Armon-Jones)
• Problem a mission impossible

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• 2. Componential cognitivism
• The propositional content of emotion can explain,
  both causally and rationally, the emergence of
  emotional feeling.
• No unified view about the relation of cognition
  and feeling or the nature of emotional feelings.
• AARON BEN-ZEEV
• Feeling is a primitive, nonintentional mode of
  consciousness that associates with the
  intentional components of emotion cognition,
  evaluation, and desire.
• Feelings involve intensity, duration, hedonic
  quality, and a certain level of arousal, but no
  content or intentionality.
• Problem double-aspect theory does not explain
  how and why feeling and intentional components
  complement each other in emotion (the bungee jump
  example complementing is not sufficient)
• 3. Perceptual cognitivism
• The emotional content is both affective and
  cognitive.
• Goldie thinking of with feeling (falling on ice)
• Response-dependence of emotional properties.
• Problem how the emotional content comes to
  possess its specific cognitive-cum-affective
  character?

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Empirical research of emotion experience

• John Lambie Anthony Marcel Consciousness and
  the Varieties of
• Emotion Experience A Theoretical Framework
  (2002)
• Previous research has paid insufficient attention
  to world-focused affective experiences.
• The content of emotion is not the same as what
  underlies the experience.
• An emotion an appraisal gives rise to an action
  attitude (AA) and leaves a record of its own
  result in an evaluative description (ED) of the
  altered self-world relationship or of the state
  of self.
• Two levels of consciousness in emotion
  experience
• First-order phenomenal experience
• An immersed, synthetic, and nonpropositional
  bodily experience of what it is like to be in
  an emotional state.
• Attentional focus on the self in term of a
  particular ED or AA, or on the world
• Second-order awareness of the first-order
  experience.
• Attentional focus on either the self or the world
• Propositional vs. nonpropositional awareness
• Analytic vs. synthetic mode of attention

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The content of 1st order emotion experience
(Lambie Marcel, 2002)

• SELF-FOCUSED
  WORLD-FOCUSED

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The content of 2nd order emotion
experience(Lambie Marcel, 2002)
the content of propositional awareness, as
distinct from nonpropositional awareness
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Article 4 Peter Goldie Emotions, Feelings, and
IntentionalityPhenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, 1 (2002), pp. 235-254

• Questions for reading
• What are bodily feelings and what kind of
  intentionality do they exhibit?
• How can we mistake about our feelings?
• What kind of justificatory role can bodily
  feelings have in grounding perceptual
• beliefs about the world?
• What are feelings towards, and what kind of
  intentionality do they exhibit?
• What does the analogy between Jacksons vision
  scientist Mary and Goldies
• ice-scientist Irene argue?
• What holds bodily feelings and feelings towards
  together?
• What is lacking from scientific emotion research?