DO EMOTIONS REPRESENT VALUES?

François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter, and Karen Jones

Abstract: According to advocates of perceptual accounts of the emotions, just as visual perception represents objects as having properties such as shape and color, emotions represent objects as having evaluative properties. Shame, for example, represents its object as shameful. Drawing on the extensive literature in the philosophy of perception, we unpack the theoretical commitments of representaionalism and argue that the representationalist regarding emotions is committed to defending the posited constitutive evaluative representations as explanatorily necessary. Moves in the literature apparently aimed at defending representationalism about the emotions – including the argument from fittingness, the argument from formal objects, and the argument from phenomenology plus anti-reductionism – misunderstand the depth of this explanatory challenge. Our conclusion is that the thesis that emotions represent evaluative properties stands in need of substantial further defense.

A central problem for realists in metaethics is to

explain how it’s possible for different individuals to

pick out the same property with evaluative predicates

like ‘right’, ‘unjust’, ‘fearsome’, or ‘contemptible’

despite widespread, apparently irresolvable, disagreement

about which things fall into the extension of such terms.

On the face of it, we seem to ascribe properties when we

use such terms in evaluative judgments. Indeed, we seem

to be ascribing the same property when we disagree about

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such questions as whether abortion is wrong, military

intervention unjust, or François Hollande contemptible –

otherwise we wouldn’t be making contradictory claims

about the world, we’d be just talking past each other.

Many metaethicists think the problem of disagreement is

insuperable, so that the initial assumption that speakers

co-refer with evaluative terms must be rejected. Indeed,

the problem of disagreement has played a large role in

motivating a range of anti-realist accounts of the

semantics of evaluative terms, including expressivism,

contextualism, new-wave relativism, error theory, and

fictionalism.1

The popular analogy between emotions and perception,

however, suggests there may be untapped resources for

solving the disagreement problem in metaethics. Many

theorists take the analogy between emotions and

perceptions literally in one crucial respect: just as

visual perception represents objects as having properties

such as shape, trajectory and color, emotions represent 1 For an extended discussion of the challenge realists face in securing co-reference despite disagreement, see [reference deleted for review].

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objects and situations as having evaluative properties .

Fear, for instance, represents situations as fearsome or

dangerous, and indignation represents situations as

unjust. In both perception and emotion, the

representation of the relevant properties is supposed to

be non-conceptual: it does not depend on the subject’s

having a concept dedicated to representing the relevant

feature. In the case of perception, theorists who posit

non-conceptual contents take those non-conceptual

contents to play a central role both in explaining the

acquisition of certain concepts (e.g. concepts of

particular shapes, colors, or orientations) and in

justifying perceptual beliefs that deploy those

concepts . If emotions have non-conceptual contents that

attribute evaluative properties, perhaps these non-

conceptual representations could play similar semantic

and epistemic roles. The suggestion then would be that

just as the non-conceptual content of visual experiences

helps secure a determinate reference for the concepts

expressed by ‘red’ or ‘oval’, the non-conceptual content

of emotions might help secure a determinate reference for

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evaluative concepts expressed by evaluative terms like

‘unjust’ or ‘contemptible’.

In this paper, we examine whether emotions really do have

the representational properties that would allow them to

play the semantic and epistemic roles that are of

interest to metaethicists. We start by unpacking the

commitments involved in the claim that emotions have

evaluative representational content (§1). Next we argue

that the representationalist regarding emotions is

committed to defending the posited constitutive

evaluative representations as explanatorily necessary.

Drawing on the extensive literature in the philosophy of

perception, we demonstrate that this is a considerable

explanatory burden to discharge and that, even in the

case of visual perception, there are a number of ways an

opponent of representationalism could challenge the

representationalist’s explanatory claims (§2). Finally

(§3), we argue that moves in the literature apparently

aimed at defending representationalism about the emotions

– including the argument from fittingness, the argument

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from formal objects, and the argument from phenomenology

plus anti-reductionism – misunderstand the depth of the

problem that needs to be addressed. We conclude by

sketching the prospects for, and challenges to, the kind

of explanatory arguments that would fit the bill. Our

conclusion is that the intriguing and ambitious thesis

that emotions represent evaluative properties stands in

need of substantial further defense.

1. Representation: vehicles and intrinsic accuracy

conditions

What it takes for a mental state to count as a

representation is a large and controversial question.

We’ll take as our starting point the notion of

representation as understood by the representationalist

theory of mind broadly construed. Although it is not

completely uncontroversial, representationalism is the

dominant paradigm for thinking about mental states or

processes and their representational properties.

Representationalism is committed to internal

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representations that inform cognitive processes and that

serve as the direct bearers of representational content.2

Representationalism conflicts with behaviorist and

interpretivist views of mental states, which attribute

representational content on the basis of global

input/output dispositions without any commitment as to

the nature of the internal cognitive structures that

ground those dispositions . According to interpretivism,

a robot connected to a giant look-up table correlating

micro-level sensory inputs with micro-behavioral outputs

could count as having mental states that represent

daggers, dragons, and danger, provided it was able to

pass a Turing test. Not so according to the

representationalist views of the mind, since such a robot

2 Jerry Fodor is an influential contemporary advocate of representationalism , who combines representationalism with a computational account of mental states and processes. But representationalism is compatible with very different accounts of the nature of mental states. Early modern theorists, for instance, generally assumed that mental states were structured by phenomenally or intellectually introspectable ideas . And contemporary connectionists and dynamic systems theorists, who disagree with classical computationalists about the nature of mental states, often argue in favor of internalrepresentations .

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would lack the relevant internal cognitive structures

that could serve as representations of such things.

Starting with representationalism should be unproblematic

in the present context. The interpretivist approach

provides a highly deflationary account of mental

representation: indeed the idea of mental representation

without representations is perhaps better understood as

‘as-if’ representation. According to interpretivism,

ascribing particular representational contents is a

matter of overall resemblance in global behavioral

dispositions to some paradigm. Since resemblance is a

matter of degree and since there will inevitably be

trade-offs in how to prioritize among partially

conflicting dispositions, the correctness of a particular

content ascription will depend on the interpreter’s

current interests and explanatory priorities . This means

that there would be very little at stake in arguing over

the truth of the claim that emotions represent values on

an interpretivist account of representation. We can all

agree that an animal’s fear of a predator resembles a

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judgment of dangerousness to some degree in the general

pattern of input/output dispositions. However, this

observation about overall behavioral similarity carries

very little theoretical weight. In particular, it makes

no sense on an interpretivist approach to say that

evaluative concepts acquire their content from the non-

conceptual content of emotions – for contents of the

whole intentional system are assigned holistically on the

basis of global behavioral dispositions. So on an

interpretivist approach to mental representation, the

claim that emotions represent values could not play the

important semantic role that would help solve the

disagreement problem for metaethical realism.

So what are the marks of representation, according to a

representationalist theory of mind? We’ll emphasize two

key features: representational vehicles and intrinsic

accuracy conditions.

Mental states like beliefs, conjectures, hallucinations,

or emotions count as representational insofar as they

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include as constituents representational vehicles – i.e.

internal cognitive structures (i) that are the direct

bearers of representational content and (ii) that are

manipulated by cognitive processes. There are many

different ways of fleshing out the core idea of a

representational vehicle that’s manipulated by cognitive

processes. According to advocates of the computationalist

theory of mind, representational vehicles should be

understood on the model of formally defined symbols in a

computer program . So a desire for chocolate, for

instance, is a dispositional state involving a mental

symbol that stands for chocolate – a symbol akin to a

mental word that’s individuated solely by its syntactic

properties. Cognitive processes are then analyzed as

manipulation of such symbols according to their syntactic

properties. But representational vehicles needn’t be

understood as formally defined symbols. In the

teleosemantic paradigm, for instance, it is common to

think of representations as signals that mediate between

a producing mechanism and a consuming mechanism .

Expressions in natural language play such a mediating

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role: linguistic signals are produced by a speaker and

consumed by a hearer. Similarly, perceptual states are

produced by sensory systems and consumed by action-

guiding systems within an organism. According to

teleosemanticists, the signals produced by sensory

systems count as representational vehicles insofar their

proper function is to serve as signals to a consuming

mechanism.3 It’s worth emphasizing that representational

vehicles are individuated independently of what they

represent (and independently of whether they succeed in

representing anything).4

3 A different way of understanding representational vehicles is as phenomenal states, which are salient from the first person perspective. On Christopher Peacocke’s account of non-conceptual content, for instance, subjectively discernible properties of the visual field, such as phenomenal redness (red*), are assigned to pointsin a three-dimensional egocentric representation of the environment (a scenario). It is a further question just which properties (if any) such subjective phenomenal properties represent . 4 This point is important, since it allows us to mark the distinction between a mental representation and its content. Compare: a natural language word like ‘glorp’ isindividuated independently of what it represents (e.g. itmay be individuated by its spelling or sound) and it acquires a content (if it has one) in virtue of how it isused by speakers. The same goes for mental representations: a representational vehicle acquires a content (if it has one) in virtue of how it is used by the thinker.

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Let’s turn now to the second core commitment of

representationalism, that representational states have

intrinsic accuracy conditions. It’s uncontroversial that

at least some mental states have representational

contents. Your belief that Bruno is a dog, for instance,

represents the world as being a certain way. It follows

that this belief has accuracy conditions: some possible ways

the world could be are in accordance with the content of

the belief and other ways the world could be are not. We

can also talk about the content of desires: some ways the

world might be are in accordance with the content of the

desire, and others are not. The content of the

constituent representations that figure in propositional

attitudes or sensory states can likewise be specified in

terms of accuracy conditions. For instance, the ‘dog’

concept that figures in your belief about Bruno

accurately represents all and only dogs, and your

circular visual percept when you gaze at the ball in

Times Square on New Year’s Eve accurately represents all

and only spheres of a certain size, shape, distance, etc.5

5 Accuracy conditions contribute to the evaluation of whole attitudes: when the world accords with the accuracyconditions of a belief or perception, the attitude as a

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In this context we’re interested in the intrinsic, non-

derived accuracy conditions of mental states. Virtually

any state can be used as a representation: you can decide

to use a red flag to represent danger and you can take

your aching muscles as a sign that your workout was

effective. But these representational contents seem to

derive from contingent dispositions to interpret the

relevant states in certain ways. Since you could equally

well take red flags or aching muscles to represent

something different, neither of these states has the

proposed representational content intrinsically. In

contrast, your propositional attitudes and perceptions

don’t seem to derive their representational contents from

other states in this way: they have their content

originally, not in virtue of being interpreted via some

other mental state.

A central issue that any theory of mental representation

must address is how exactly mental representations

whole is true or veridical; and when the world accords with the accuracy conditions of a desire, hope or intention, the attitude as a whole is satisfied.

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acquire their accuracy conditions. One superficially

tempting proposal is that the representational content of

an internal representation is determined by simple

counterfactual co-variation relations, perhaps backed by causal

laws and past causal dependence . Causally-backed co-

variation relations are ubiquitous: tree rings causally

co-vary with the age of the tree, smoke causally co-

varies with fire, and utterances of ‘Fire!’ causally co-

vary with the presence of a speaker at the time and

location of the utterance. However, it is widely agreed

that simple causal co-variation relations cannot be what

determines the representational content of mental states.

First, causal co-variation cannot adequately account for

the possibility of error. A belief or perception can

misrepresent the world – but a tree ring cannot

misrepresent the age of the tree. In general, if we

identify that which is represented by a given state type

with whatever causally co-varies with it, then the

existence of the mental state will guarantee the

existence of the thing represented. A second related

problem is that natural representation cannot explain the

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determinacy of representational content. Your ‘horse’

concept is accurate of all and only horses, but its

occurrence in your thinking causally co-varies with many

other things, including the proximal retinal stimuli that

lead you to identify horses, as well as many non-horses

in the distal environment. So the worry is that causal

co-variation accounts of mental representation will take

‘horse’ to represent not the natural kind horse, but the

disjunctive kind horse-or-horsey-images-on-the-retina-or thoughts-of-

cowboys-or-cows-on-a-dark-night-or-donkeys-in-the-distance-or-… . If we

want to explain the determinate and fallible accuracy

conditions we attribute to mental states, we need a less

permissive representation relation than mere causal co-

variation.6

What’s crucial to the representationalist thesis about

the emotions, then, is that emotions have as components

representational vehicles with intrinsic accuracy

6 Causally-backed co-variation relations are sometimes called ‘natural’ meaning relations, following , who contrasted it with ‘non-natural’ meaning characteristic of linguistic representation. For overviews of the problems faced by co-variation-based accounts of representational content, see .

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conditions of a specific kind: emotions of a particular

type attribute a specific evaluative property to the

state of affairs or object targeted by the emotion. For

instance, the emotion of fear that Teddy feels towards

the (alleged) monster under his bed and that Sally feels

towards the idea of tumbling over the cliff she’s

standing on represents a specific evaluative property

(e.g. dangerousness or fearsomeness) and attributes that

property to the emotion’s target. So their emotions have

intrinsic accuracy conditions such as:

Teddy: The monster is fearsome.

Sally: The possibility of tumbling off the cliff is

fearsome.

Since emotions are supposed to be analogous to

perceptions, Teddy’s and Sally’s fears are veridical or

falsidical depending on whether these intrinsic accuracy

conditions are satisfied.

How do we adjudicate the debate between

representationalists, who hold that emotions represent

evaluative properties, and skeptics , who may grant that

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emotions represent objects or situations, but deny that

they represent them as having an evaluative property? In

the next section, we turn to a standard strategy for

adjudicating this sort of question: appealing to

explanatory necessity.

2. The explanatory challenge

When does an internal state count as a genuine

representation with specific accuracy conditions?

Consider a much-discussed example: magnotactic bacteria.

Certain anaerobic bacteria possess internal structures –

magnetosomes – that are sensitive to magnetic fields. In

the bacterium’s home environment, these structures

normally align with the earth’s magnetic field, causing

the bacterium to move downwards towards oxygen-poor

water, which is essential to its survival. So there is a

reliable co-variation – backed by causal laws and

selected for by evolutionary processes – between the

alignment of the magnetosomes with the direction of a

magnetic field, the North Pole, the ocean depths, oxygen-

free water, survival-friendly conditions, and so on.

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Should we say that the alignment of the magnetosomes in

these bacteria is a representation with the content, say,

magnetic north is in that direction, or oxygen-poor water is over there,

or it’s safe down there?

A major objection to the attribution of such

representational properties is that they don’t seem to be

doing any real explanatory work. As many theorists have

pointed out, we can give a full explanation of the

movements of the bacterium in one direction rather than

another by providing a mechanical account of (i) why

magnetosomes are sensitive to magnetic fields, (ii) how

the presence of a magnetic field controls their alignment

within the organism, (iii) how alignment of the

magnetosomes affects the orientation of the organism as a

whole, and (iv) how the organism’s flagella propel it in

the direction in which it’s oriented. There is no need to

mention representational states with intrinsic accuracy

conditions in this explanation – the mechanical account

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is a complete proximal explanation the organism’s

reaction to the stimulus.7

This sort of example suggests a simple and powerful

criterion for determining whether a state counts as a

representation – i.e. a state with intrinsic accuracy

conditions: Does ascribing representational properties to

the state play a genuine explanatory role? If all the

real explanatory work can be done without mentioning the

alleged representational content, by simply citing

independently specifiable mechanisms or dispositions,

7 Of course, speaking loosely, we call the magnetosome’s alignment a ‘perception’ of oxygen-free water or the direction of safety – and this may make the explanation more colorful, just as we may say our car doesn’t want tostart in cold weather. But such colorful intentional descriptions don’t add anything to the causal explanationof the underlying processes that produce the relevant behavior. Moreover, if taken literally such intentional descriptions suggest more complex psychological capacities than the target system really has. One sign that the content ascription is playing no essential explanatory role is that there is no serious scientific dispute about precisely which content should be ascribed:it makes no difference to the underlying explanation if we label the magnetosomes as representing oxygen-free water that way or no danger down there or magnetic field stronger in this direction. On this point, see especially .

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then we should conclude that there is no representation

involved.8

The task for representationalists about emotions, then,

is to show that construing emotions as representing

specific evaluative properties is part of the best, most

economical explanation of the psychological processes

underlying perception, behavior, and cognition. In

particular, representationalists are committed to the

following three claims as explanatorily indispensible:

First, emotions are constituted in part by representational

vehicles. They have as constituents internal cognitive

structures that function as representations within the

subject’s cognitive system and that can be interpreted as

representing evaluative properties. So construing

emotions as mere attitudes towards targets – i.e. mere

dispositions to manipulate representations of objects or

8 For similar appeals to explanatory necessity as a criterion for positing representational content see .

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situations targeted by the emotion – would leave crucial

psychological phenomena unexplained.9

Second, the proprietary representational component of an

emotion has intrinsic accuracy conditions. Fear, for instance,

picks out an evaluative property and attributes that

property to the targeted object or situation. The

evaluative representational content of fear does not

derive from other mental states or depend on contingent

interpretive goals – it is grounded in the nature of the

emotion itself. So any account of the emotion of fear

that failed to take the emotion’s proprietary attributed

property into account would be explanatorily inferior.

Third, emotions represent specific evaluative properties. If

emotions have intrinsic accuracy conditions, there must

be some principles that determine precisely which

properties are picked out. Why think fear attributes

fearsomeness to the target, rather than dangerousness (or

vice versa)? Once again, the precise evaluative contents

9 See for an argument that representationalism about emotions fails to meet this first explanatory challenge.

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ascribed by the representationalist must play an

essential role in the best explanation of psychological

processes involving emotions. Without a principled

explanation of precisely which property is represented,

the claim that the emotion has any determinate

representational content will be undermined.

To clarify the nature of the three explanatory tasks

facing representationalists about emotions, it’s helpful

to consider the analogous challenge in the comparatively

less controversial case of visual perception (of shape,

color, or distance). This will allow us to get a feel for

how the challenge might be met, and for the difficulties

one may encounter.

First, does visual perception involve representational

vehicles? The claim is disputed. Certain enactivists, for

instance, hold that perception is a dynamic interaction

between the visual system and the environment: visual

perception does not rely on any static, stable internal

states that encode information about distal features of

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the environment such as shape, color or distance . In

response, representationalists about perception argue

that representations are needed to explain certain

empirical phenomena. Consider a case of multi-modal

perception: you may perceive a fire truck as having both

visual and auditory properties: you perceive the truck as

bright red and as emitting a blaring noise. The worry is that

enactivism cannot explain how specific visual properties

get bound to specific auditory properties without

invoking visual and auditory representations that are

matched by internal cognitive processes .

Second, does visual perception have intrinsic accuracy

conditions? This claim has been challenged from two very

different directions. Relationalists hold that perceptual

states are constituted in part by direct, non-intentional

relations to the perceived objects . In themselves,

perceptions don’t have accuracy conditions. So a

perception of a fire truck and a subjectively

indiscernible hallucination of a fire truck are not

members of any fundamental psychological kind defined by

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shared accuracy conditions.10 Syntacticists reject

intrinsic accuracy conditions on very different grounds.

In their view, psychological states, including

perceptions, are individuated by the internal functional

roles they play in a computationally defined cognitive

system . So there is no need to bring in semantic

properties like representation, or accuracy conditions in

the definition of the states of computational systems.

In response, representationalists about perception have

argued that ascribing intrinsic accuracy conditions to

perceptual states plays an ineliminable explanatory role.

Tyler Burge , for instance, argues that perceptual

psychology is a highly successful research program that

presupposes that perceptual states are individuated by

10 Charles Travis, for instance writes, ‘[…] perception, as such, simply places our surroundings in view; affords us awareness of them. There is no commitment to their being one way or another. It confronts us with what is there, so that, by attending, noting, recognizing, and otherwise exercising what capacities we have, we may [. ..] make out what is there for what it is—or, again, fail to [. . . ] in perception things are not presented, or represented, to us as being thus and so. They are just presented to us, full stop.’ .

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their accuracy conditions. In general, we have reason to

accept the posits of successful scientific theories.

Burge grounds his claim in a detailed analysis of the

explanatory project of perceptual psychology. The input

into the visual system, for instance, is a pattern of

retinal stimulation that directly registers a two-

dimensional projection of incoming light. It’s not

appropriate to attribute intrinsic accuracy conditions to

these patterns of retinal stimulation: although there is

causally backed co-variation between retinal stimulation

and features of the world, there is no sense in which

retinal stimulations themselves are accurate or

inaccurate about particular distal features of the

environment. According to mainstream vision science, the

visual system uses retinal input to construct a three-

dimensional representation of the environment attributing

properties such as shape, color, size and distance. Given

that the two-dimensional input underdetermines the three-

dimensional output, the computational processes that

generate the output must rely on implicit internalized

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“rules” or “heuristics” to generate these

representations. It is natural to take these “rules” to

embody assumptions about the external states of affairs

that normally cause the retinal stimulations. Depending

on whether these assumptions are satisfied or not, it is

then natural to characterize the three-dimensional

outputs as accurate or inaccurate representations of

specific distal features of the environment.

According to Burge, the accuracy conditions invoked by

vision science are intrinsic to the perceptual states

themselves: perceptual states are individuated in part by

their function of representing particular distal features

of the environment. Moreover, Burge argues that

individuating perceptual states in this way is crucial to

the explanations of perceptual psychology – vision

science, in Burge’s view, is organized around explaining

how representations of the world are constructed from

impoverished sensory input:

The fundamental mode of explanation in the

perceptual psychology of vision is to explain ways

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in which veridical representations of the

environment are formed from and distinguished from

registration, or encoding, of proximal stimulation.

Veridicality, fulfillment of representational

function, is the central explanandum of visual

psychology. Illusions are explained as lapses from

normal representational operation, or as the product

of special environmental conditions. (Burge 2010:

310-311)

Ultimately, the success of this explanatory paradigm

lends empirical support to the assumption that the

relevant visual states have intrinsic accuracy

conditions.11

Consider now the third challenge: Assuming that

perceptual states do have intrinsic accuracy conditions,

what exactly do they represent? A frog snaps at a passing

fly. Assuming that its visual system is representing some11 Burge’s defense of intrinsic accuracy conditions for perceptual states is controversial, and it involves more detailed commitments than we have sketched here. For criticisms, see for instance . Our aim, however, is simply to illustrate strategies for meeting the explanatory challenge, independently of the ultimate success of these strategies.

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feature of the world, what exactly is the content of that

representation? Does the frog’s visual system represent

something as specific as the content that there is a house fly

(musca domestica) at location x? Or does it represent that there is a

packet of frog food at location x? Or does it just represent that

there is a small, dark, moving object at location x?

There is a good deal of disagreement about this question,

and alleged pre-theoretic intuitions about the case vary.

However, the key to resolving the issue surely lies in

showing that one’s favored interpretation is superior

from an explanatory point of view. In particular, the

correct interpretation must underwrite the type of

explanation that requires attributing representational

content in the first place. Several theorists have argued

that this explanatory strategy favors attributing the

least theoretically ambitious content, small, dark moving

object .

When suitably motivated and undistracted, a frog will

snap at any small, dark, moving object within a certain

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spatial range. Moreover, its discriminatory capacity is

entirely inflexible: the frog will continue to snap at

foreign insects or indigestible bee-bees ad infinitum,

provided that they exhibit the relevant perceptible

profile. Given that it is impossible for the frog to

visually discriminate anything finer-grained than the

superficial perceptual property, being a small, dark moving

object, it seems wrong prima facie to claim that states of

the frog’s visual system represents “deeper” functional

or natural kind properties such as having the power to nourish

Northern leopard frogs (rana pipiens) or being a housefly (musca

domestica). The worry is that such interpretations are not

supported by the explanatory projects of cognitive

science, cognitive ethology, or commonsense psychology:

the organism’s behavior and cognitive dispositions can be

fully explained at the psychological level without

attributing “deeper” functional or natural kind contents

that would be appropriate for cognitively more

sophisticated creatures. Thus, deep content ascriptions

would be explanatorily idle.

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To see the intuitive force of this point, consider

possible psychological explanations of a five-year-old’s

choice of ice cream over broccoli :

1. The child chooses ice cream over broccoli because in

the past she perceived ice cream as sweet & she likes

sweet things.

2. The child chooses ice cream over broccoli because in

the past she perceived ice cream as having concentrated

nutrients and she likes things with concentrated nutrients.

3. The child chooses ice cream over broccoli because in

the past she perceived ice cream as containing large

proportion of mono or disaccharides and she likes things

containing large proportion of mono or disaccharides.

Whereas the first explanation seems apt, the second two

explanations seem distinctly odd from a psychological

point of view. Of course, it’s plausible that natural

selection favored certain gustatory representations in

the child’s ancestors because they were correlated often

enough with high nutrient foods and mono- and

disaccharides fulfilled this nutritional role. But we

should not confuse an historical explanation of why

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certain capacities originally evolved with a

psychological explanation of an individual’s current

behavior. From a psychological point of view, attributing

a gustatory perception as of concentrated nutrients or of

containing mono- and disaccharides seems to over-intellectualize

the child’s perspectives: these contents require much

more cognitive sophistication than the child possesses.

Such attributions suggest a different pattern of

dispositions than the child actually exhibits: we’d

expect a desire for concentrated nutrients to lead to a

rejection of artificially sweetened foods or some

(perhaps cognitively mediated) ability to distinguish

between nutritious and non-nutritious foods.12

12 In the philosophical literature on content determination, ‘consumer-based’ teleosemantic theories assign contents to perceptual representations on the basis of how they’ve been used by other ‘consuming’ subsystems within the organism (or the organism’s ancestors), and ultimately how this use contributed to the survival and reproduction of the organism as a whole . Since the frog’s visual representation leads to asnapping response, and ultimately to the digestion of food, consumer-based theorists argue that the visual representation has the content frog food in location l. An important worry about such approaches is that they are not suited to psychological explanations of the actual cognition and behavior of an individual organism (Pietroski 1992; Sterelny 1995; Neander 2006; Schulte 2012). In the literature on emotions, Jesse Prinz suggests that adding a consumer-based constraint to his

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The discussion of perception lets us see the depth of the

explanatory burden that an advocate of

representationalism about the emotions must discharge.

They must show that it is part of our best explanation of

how emotions contribute to our motivational, cognitive,

and/or behavioral economies that emotions are partly

constituted by representational vehicles, which have

intrinsic accuracy conditions, and represent the relevant

specific evaluative properties.

3. Meeting the challenge

The nature and extent of the explanatory burden that

advocates of representationalism about the emotions face

has not previously been carefully articulated in the

literature. As a consequence, there has been no

systematic attempt to meet it. Three familiar arguments

that are assumed to support representationalism – the

Dretskean theory of content determination can vindicate the assignment of evaluative properties (‘core relationalthemes’) as the representational content of emotions as opposed to non-evaluative properties (‘bodily changes’) .Prinz’s appeal to consumer-based semantics here will facethe explanatory worry sketched in the text.

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argument from fittingness assessment, the argument from

formal objects, and the argument from phenomenology plus

anti-reductionism – fail to lend genuine support to any

of the core theses of representationalism. We examine and

dismiss each of these arguments in turn before outlining

the prospects and problems for the kind of explanatory

argument that could meet the challenge. Our conclusion is

not that the explanatory burden cannot be meet, only that

it has not yet been meet, and that meeting it is much

more difficult than has been supposed.

The argument from fittingness assessment appears to lend

support to one of the three constitutive claims of

representationalism; namely, that emotions have intrinsic

accuracy conditions. It is universally agreed that

emotions can be assessed for fittingness, or success, and

this, it might be supposed, establishes that they must

have intrinsic accuracy conditions, though without yet

telling us what those conditions must be. Emotions can be

assessed along multiple dimensions; for example, we can

ask of feeling an emotion in a particular context whether

32

it is likely to further or hinder the agent’s ends ,

whether it is morally appropriate , or whether it is well

enough grounded in evidence available to the agent .

Distinct from each of these dimensions is the question of

whether it is a response that is appropriate to, or fits

the situation. It is typically assumed that this

dimension is one of representational correctness .

However, the mere fact that emotions are liable for

assessment in terms of fittingness does not establish

that fittingness is to be interpreted along

representationalist lines. Only if we have antecedently

established that emotions function as representations can

we conclude that fittingness assessment is assessment for

representational correctness. Consider, for example, the

relationship between salivation and the ingestion of

food. The salivary response evolved to enable the

digestion of food. It is an appropriate, or fit response,

just in case the organism is presented with food. But it

would be absurd to suppose that salivation represents the

presence of food. Any biological state with an

evolutionary function can be assessed for fittingness;

33

from the fact that flight behaviour evolved to enable

predator escape we can conclude that such behaviour is

appropriate in the presence of a predator, but not that

it represents the predator’s presence. If offered as an

argument for the representationalist thesis of intrinsic

accuracy conditions, appeal to assessment for fittingness

is circular.

We can give short-shrift to a related argument that

appeals to the notion of an emotion’s formal object to

conclude that emotions must both have intrinsic accuracy

conditions and represent specific evaluative properties.

The notion of an emotion’s formal object was first

introduced into the literature by Anthony Kenny. Actions

and activities as well as mental states have formal

objects . Thus Kenny claims that the formal object of

tailoring is clothes, of cleaning, the dirty, and so on

(191). Reference to formal objects is supposed to help us

see what all instances of an activity or mental state

have in common: though their particular objects differ,

they are individuated as the kind of activity or state

34

that they are in virtue of sharing a common formal

object. Kenny claims that the relation between an emotion

and its formal object is a logical one: it is a conceptual

truth that only that which is believed to be in some way

bad can be feared (192). Fear that is directed at

something perceived to be good in all respects is

unintelligible. When it comes to mental states, formal

objects do two things: divide mental states into kinds

and provide their criterion of success. Truth is the

formal object of belief, the probable of conjecture,

fearsomeness (or on some accounts, the dangerous) of

fear, the shameful of shame, and so on. It might be

thought that it immediately follows from the thought that

the shameful is the formal object of shame that shame

represents its particular object (or state of affairs) as

shameful and is apt or fitting if and only if that object

has the evaluative property of being shameful. Hence, if

we want to reject representationalism it might seem that

we must reject the claim that emotions have formal

objects.13 The inference is not warranted, however. We can13 Of course we might want to reject the notion of formal objects for other reasons. We might, for example, be skeptical of the claimed logical connection between

35

see that the inference does not follow by considering the

case of belief: accepting that the formal object of

belief is the true does nothing to establish that every

belief contains, in addition to its particular

representational content, a representation of that

content as true. Instead of explaining why truth is the

formal object of belief in terms of contents, we can

explain it in terms of the kind of attitude that is

believing (Deonna and Terroni forthcoming). There is no

short path from accepting that emotions have formal

objects to accepting that they constitutively contain

representations in which the property identified by the

formal object is ascribed to the object of emotion.14

A third argument, which has perhaps exerted more

influence in the literature than the previous two, is the

argument from phenomenology plus anti-reductionism.

formal object and emotion and think that we require a substantive argument that explains why the formal object provides the standard for success.14 Nor can we infer the somewhat weaker claim that an emotion must have a representational content on which theformal object supervenes. For this weaker claim, see (Döring 2003, 222).

36

Emotions present themselves as being about something.15

Unlike twinges and pangs, emotions have intentionality: I am

not simply angry, but my state of anger seems directed at

something outside itself. In particular, emotions seem to

represent their targets: I’m angry at someone or some

situation (even if the person or situation I’m angry at

doesn’t exist). More controversially, it is further

claimed that the phenomenology of emotional experience

seems to represent the targeted things or states of

affairs as having evaluative properties: my anger seems

to represent the person targeted as offensive, in much

the same way as it is part of the phenomenology of visual

experience that it seems to represent objects in my

visual field as being colored. If emotions are partly

constituted by evaluative judgments, then we have a

simple way of accounting for this phenomenology of

emotions as seeming to represent evaluative properties:

emotions are simply evaluative judgments, which attribute

evaluative properties to objects or states of affairs. 15 This claim is uncontroversial in the literature and is shared by theorists as diverse as Nussbaum at the judgmentalist end, and Prinz at the feeling end, as well as quasi-judmentalists (Greenspan) and quasi-perceptualists in between.

37

Suppose, however, that you reject all attempts to reduce

emotions to the more familiar mental furniture of

judgments and desires, or judgments, and desires, plus

feelings, or to any other combination of mental states or

mental states together with bodily changes. Suppose that

is, you reject additive views in all their many

varieties and claim instead that emotions are sui generis

irreducible mental states. It might then seem that the

phenomenology of emotions – the fact that they seem prima

facie to represent their targets as having properties –

supports the representationalist’s claim that emotions

themselves attribute evaluative properties to their

objects. Since there is nowhere else to locate the

phenomenologically given representationality, it must be

located in the emotion itself. There’s no need for a

separate argument for a representationalist account of

the emotions since representationalism is a

straightforward corollary of the argument from

phenomenology plus anti-reductionism.16

16 This inference is made by both and .

38

Given that anti-reductionism is widely accepted in the

literature, the standard way of responding to this

argument is by challenging the alleged phenomenology. One

might try to claim that, pace Döring, Goldie and Roberts,

the phenomenology of an emotional experience lacks any

representational appearance and so is not like the

phenomenology of perception. The phenomenology of fear,

it might be claimed, is a kind of “unpleasant edgy

feeling” that lacks representational content (Whiting

2012, 97). Alternatively, one might point out that, while

the experience of visual perception is arguably

transparent , emotional experience is clearly opaque.

That is to say, when asked to describe what a visual

experience is like, one describes not some

introspectively accessible state, but rather the world,

as it appears to be. In contrast, in describing what an

emotional experience is like, one might choose either to

describe its object or to focus instead on the internal

felt nature of that experience, such as felt agitation,

or one might offer a mixed description. Hence, there are

39

significant differences in the phenomenology of emotional

experience and of perceptual experience.

Even though there is room to engage in debate over the

correct characterization of the phenomenology of

emotional experience, we believe that the argument of

Section 2 shows that that debate, regardless of its

outcome, cannot resolve the dispute between

representationalism and its critics. No matter how alike

the phenomenology of emotional experience is to the

phenomenology of perception, there is no direct

argumentative path from phenomenology to

representationalism. This is as true in the case of the

emotions as it is in the case of perception. Note, also,

that the arguments a representationalist must make in the

case of perception are both specific and fine-grained;

that is, they do not defend the representational status

of perception as such, but of visual perception of e.g.

color and shape. The global case needs to be built up

piecemeal.17 Because of this, even if perception’s 17 To see why we need a case-by-case consideration of the properties represented, consider the phenomenology of vision. Granting that the distinctive visual

40

representational status is secured, that status does not

transfer to the emotions. A representationalist about

emotions can use the representationalist case for

perception as a model, but they must make their own,

emotion-specific case. Doing so is going to require

defending each of the three core claims of

representationalism, but the resources for doing this

cannot be provided by phenomenology. The question of

whether emotions have representational vehicles as

constituent parts turns on the cognitive role of

emotions, which is not the sort of thing to which we can

expect to have introspective access. Likewise, whether a

state has intrinsic accuracy conditions is a theoretical

question to be resolved by asking whether the best

explanation of the role that emotions play in cognition,

motivation, and action requires assigning propriety

representational contents to them. Even supposing we

answer these first two questions positively from the

phenomenology of color and shape represent properties of objects doesn’t eo ipso commit one to the claim that the visual phenomenology of blurriness or salience represent the objective blurriness or salience of an object. Some phenomenal properties might simply be a manifestation of the manner in which our visual system represents ordinaryobjective properties, like shape and color.

41

perspective of the representationalist, there is the

further problem of establishing exactly what that

representational content is and whether there is, as

claimed, some shared content that all instances of an

emotion type have in common.

Representationalism, of the kind in question, thus faces

challenge from two different directions: First, challenge

from those who deny that emotions have proprietary

representational contents. There are a number of ways to

develop an anti-representationalist position that is

nonetheless anti-reductionist (and, of course, for anyone

willing to reopen the issue of reductionism, the range of

ways challenging representationalism enlarges further).

Perhaps the most promising line to take in developing a

position that is both anti-representationalist and non-

reductionist is to claim that the different emotions are

simply sui generis attitude types – on a par with

believing, desiring, seeing, or imagining – which can be

directed towards the very same sorts of contents as these

other attitudes . There are different ways of developing

42

an attitudinal account of the emotions: particular

emotions like fear or love may be individuated by

distinctive functional roles, distinctive

phenomenologies, distinctive formal objects, or some

combination of these features. The crucial claim is that

the explanatory role of an emotion can be fully

characterized at the level of the attitude itself,

without invoking any proprietary representational

contents attributed by that emotion.18

The second direction of challenge is from alternative

forms of representationalism, which take emotions to

ascribe different properties than those traditional 18 An attitudinal account of the emotions is analogous to a similar anti-representationalist position in the literature on phenomenal consciousness. David Chalmers introduced the distinction between pure and impure representationalism: pure representationalisms claims that the phenomenal character of experiences is fully determined by the representational contents of that experience, whereas impure representationalism claims that the phenomenal character of experience is determinedby the attitude or ‘manner’ of representing particular contents . Impure representationalism explains the sense in which phenomenal experiences seem directed towards theworld, without claiming that phenomenal experience attributes any distinctive representational contents. Theattitudinal account of emotions makes a similar move. Prominent defenders of impure representationalism about phenomenal experience include .

43

representationalists propose. Again, there are different

ways of going here. One could accept, as traditional

representationalists do, that all tokens of an emotion

type attribute the very same property to their targets,

but deny that the attributed property is evaluative.

Perhaps every fear attributes to its target the purely

descriptive dispositional property of being such as to cause

fear responses, or perhaps they attribute the property of

being such as to cause bodily harm. Alternatively, an evaluative

version of representationalism might be developed along

particularist lines: although emotions do attribute

evaluatively-laden properties to their targets, not all

tokens of the same emotion type attribute the very same

property. Call such a view modest representationalism.

For instance, the view that emotions are reason-tracking

mechanisms could be (though doesn’t have to be) developed

along these lines. When you fear the jagged rocks below,

a phenomenally salient aspect of your fear may attribute

to the rocks the fine-grained property of providing you with a

reason to stay well back from the cliff’s edge. But another episode of

fear, such as your fear of financial ruin, may attribute

44

a different property to its target, such as providing you

with a reason to invest all your savings in safe havens like gold or US

Treasury-bonds. From a theoretical perspective, it may prove

fruitful to group all token fears together as attributing

similar evaluative or reason-giving properties to their

targets. But the overarching similarities that theorists

highlight for the purposes of explanation or

justification need not be something that is actually

attributed by the various episodes of fear themselves.

Any adequate defense of representationalism must

therefore show that it is explanatorily superior to both

non-representationalist and to alternative

representationalist positions, both descriptive and

particularist. That is, it must show that there is some

significant explanatory work that cannot be done without

postulating that emotions represent specific evaluative

properties. Any argument capable of showing this is

necessarily long, since each of the three constitutive

claims of representationalism can be challenged. Final

adjudication between representationalism and its rivals

45

is a task beyond the scope of this paper. However, we

would like to conclude with a quick sketch of the

problems and prospects for establishing the third

constitutive claim of representationalism; namely that

each token of an emotion type represents the same

specific evaluative property. Focusing here will let us

see the dual challenge that standard representationalist

faces from anti-representationalism and from more modest

representationalism. For simplicity, we focus on modest

evaluative representationalism19

One of the central virtues of perceptual accounts of the

emotions over their earlier judgmentalist rivals is the

promise that they can locate adult human emotions on a

continuum with the emotions of small children and

animals. Small children and animals do not possess the

sophisticated concepts, such as the concept of the 19 We choose to focus here for the further reason that oneof the co-authors is committed to modest representationalism [reference deleted for review]. Although modest representationalism can allow that emotions have a central role in practical rationality, itis too weak to provide a solution to the metaethical problem of co-reference across disagreement. In order to do that, emotions must have, as non-conceptual contents, thick evaluative properties.

46

shameful or the dangerous (or fearsome), that

judgmentalist analyses are committed to saying are

deployed in emotions’ constitutive judgments.

Nonetheless, they might be able to have non-conceptual

access to those properties through affective perceptual

experience. Any such claim is, however, vulnerable to an

argument that exactly parallels the argument given in

Section 2 regarding determining the cognitive content of

a frog’s visual system. Consider the ground squirrel’s

agitated flight and burrow-seeking response, which we can

agree to label fear. This response is triggered by

perceived moving shadows and the appearance of certain

movements, as well as by the two different types of alarm

calls conspecifics make that signal these things.20 To the

earlier identified question as to whether we should

suppose ground squirrels’ perceptions are properly

attributed the content “predator overhead” instead of,

say, “moving shadow”, given the crudeness of their

discriminatory dispositions, we add a new question: why 20 Why choose this example? Others would do, but the evolution of ground squirrel alarm calls has long provided the benchmark for well-conducted evolutionary investigations into social behavior and is as well understood as any animal case. See .

47

suppose that there is a representational content that is

shared between their fear responses to what we would call

overhead predators and to what we would call land-based

predators and why should we suppose that content is

“dangerousness” (or fearsomeness)? Grant that they engage

in avoidance behavior in both cases; however, they are

not able to discriminate between dangerous and non-

dangerous moving shadows, or between land movements that

are marks of land-based predators and those that are

somewhat like them. They group together the dangerous and

the non-dangerous in a hair-trigger set of responses.

Ground squirrel fear/flight responses (and calling

behavior) evolved in order to escape predation, and

predators are indeed dangerous, but from this it does not

follow that the emotional response represents danger, for

the reasons given in section 2. The hair-trigger nature

of these responses and their relative indifference to

false negatives, suggests that the response is weighted

by the practical significance of the possible threat.

Possible threats are reasons to take protective action,

which the ground squirrel does. Modest

48

representationalists could offer a number of alternative

hypotheses about the representational content of the

ground squirrel’s fear response, including the hypothesis

that they involve a phenomenally distinctive and

motivationally engaged mode of representation of the

moving shadow or land-based movement. This would explain

the animal’s response and its relatively indiscriminate

nature.

Modest representationalism has fewer commitments than

does the more familiar version of representationalism,

but the non-representationalist has fewer again. They

seek to explain an animal’s behavior in terms of the

distinctive attitude-state that is fear and that state’s

downstream dispositional effects including effects on

perceptual salience, ranking of action-plans, and

epistemic search dispositions, including for routes for

evasion, obstacles, further looming shadows, and so on.

The three explanatory strategies available in the ground

squirrel case are equally available in human case. None

49

of this means, of course, that traditional

representationalism is false. We haven’t shown that it is

explanatorily inferior to these alternatives, for that

would take a much longer argument. Our claim is the more

modest one: it is not obviously explanatorily superior

and since only an explanatory argument will do here,

representationalism stands in need of further defense.

4. Conclusion

In order to assess the proposal that the non-conceptual

content of emotions, understood on analogy with the non-

conceptual content of visual experience, might help in

providing determinate reference for thick evaluative

concepts and so solve the metaethical problem of co-

reference, we have made a lengthy foray into the

literature on perception and representation. We think

this foray has paid off, not because it shows that

representationalism about the emotion is wrong, but

rather because it shows just how hard representationalism

is to defend, whether in the case of perception or of

emotion. Current arguments in favor of

50

representationalism about the emotions, with their heavy

reliance on phenomenology, do not even come close to

providing the required defense. Perhaps that defense will

be forthcoming, but if not, that does not mean that

emotions have no epistemic significance or do not make an

important contribution to the practical rationality of

finite, cognitively limited beings, but it does mean

their significance for metaethics will be less than is

sometimes supposed.

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