Emotion: More like Action than Perception
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Emotion: More like Action than Perception Hichem Naar1 Received: 12 November 2018 / Accepted: 7 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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.
1 Introduction Although some still advance a reductive account of emotions—according to which emotion falls under a better understood type of mental state (e.g., judgment, desire, etc.)1—contemporary philosophers working on emotion tend to agree that emotions probably constitute their own kind of mental state (D’Arms and Jacobson 2003; de Sousa 1987; Döring 2007; Goldie 2000; Greenspan 1988; Helm 2001; Roberts 2003). But even if reduction is not to be expected, there is a tendency to account for emotions in terms which are nonetheless familiar. Many philosophers indeed tend to think of emotions as representations, that is, roughly, as mental states with a 1
Of course, there are accounts that aim to reduce mental states to physical states (e.g., brain states). I would like to stay neutral on the big issue of physicalism. * Hichem Naar [email protected] 1
University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany
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content with an object-property structure (i.e., they attribute properties to objects).2 Moreover, some theorists tend to think of emotions as epistemically significant in some way; emotions, as it were, are forms of awareness of the world (Tappolet 2016, 30). To bring out these features in a systematic way—and given the absence of a plausible reduction—a number of theorists have drawn an analogy between emotion and some better understood mental state. According to the advocates of the socalled ‘Perceptual Analogy’ (e.g., Deonna 2006; de Sousa 1987; Döring 2003, 2007; Milona 2016; Pelser 2014; Roberts 2013; Tappolet 2000, 2016), thinking of emotions in terms of perception can fruitfully advance our understanding of their core aspects even though they may not be reducible to ordinary perception
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