Emotion as patheception

Raja Bahlul∗

Department of Philosophy, UAE University, Al Ain, UAE

Emotions cannot be fully understood in purely cognitive terms. Nor can they be fullyunderstood as mere feelings with no content. But it has not been easy to give anaccount of the relation of affect and cognition in a way that preserves the perceivedunity of emotional experience. Consequently, emotion theories tend to lean eithertoward cognitivism, or, alternatively, the view that emotions are basically non-cognitive affairs. The aim of this paper is to argue for an account of emotion as aunity of affect and cognition. Emotions, it will be suggested, do not combine, blend,add, or causally relate cognition to affect, or affect to cognition, but are ratheroriginal unities which should be viewed as coordinate with, rather than subordinateto, either cognition, perception, feeling, or any other basic mental category.

Keywords: affect; cognition; emotion; feeling; judgment; patheception; perception;representation

1. Introduction

Contemporary philosophical discussions of emotion tend to contemplate a division betweencognitive theories according to which emotions represent the world (or agent) as being in acertain way, and theories according to which emotions are, in and of themselves, just feel-ings, through which we cognize nothing. This division has been somewhat picturesquelydescribed as ‘the most conspicuous and volatile fault line within emotion research’(Prinz 2007, 50).

Cognitivism has dominated the scene for some time now. But it cannot be said to haveachieved full victory over its rivals.1 Philosophers continue to have misgivings about howwell cognitivism is able to handle affect and phenomenality, ‘objectless emotions’, andemotions experienced by animals and infants. Some have sought to model emotion on per-ception, with a view to taking advantage of the phenomenal and representational aspects ofperception.2 Lately, some philosophers have suggested that pain could be compared toemotion (Clark 2006; Gustafson 2006), an idea which naturally invites one to compareemotion to pain.

My aim in this paper is both modest and immodest. I want to argue that the ‘conspic-uous and volatile fault line’ which separates cognitivism and non-cognitivism is not real;that emotions themselves, as opposed to our view of them, exhibit an indissoluble unityof the cognitive (representational, appraisal-involving) and the affective. This I take tobe the immodest aspect of my aim, for it is not a small task to convince the reader thatwe should stop trying to analyze emotions into affect and/or cognition, when so mucheffort has been dedicated to proving that they are this or that. If I am successful, thenwhat I will have shown is that emotion is emotion, that it is not cognition, perception,

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# 2013 Taylor & Francis

∗Emails: rbahlul@uaeu.ac.ae, rbahlul@gmail.com

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affect, or anything else. This may not seem much, and for this reason I see my aim as beingmodest. Compared to a doctor who saves lives, this is the work of someone who merelystops murder.

In Section 2, I discuss feeling and cognitive theories of emotion, focusing more on criti-cism of the latter. This is not because I think that feeling theories promise a more adequateview of emotion, but rather because I think that criticism of cognitive theories brings uscloser to a proper, non-reductive understanding of emotion.

In Section 3, I discuss the view that emotions are perceptions of value, a view which isoften thought to combine elements of cognitivism and feeling theories. I argue that perce-pualism AQ1about emotion is a kind of cognitivism which is subject to the same criticisms, andsome others as well.

In Section 4, I outline a different view of emotion. The hallmark of my account is insis-tence on the unity and unanalyzability of the emotional experience. Emotions, I argue, areunique mental states – they are neither just cognitions nor ‘pure’ feelings, nor yet percep-tions, but something for which we need to coin a new term. ‘Patheception’ is the term Ichoose. Patheception, I shall argue, is indissolubly cognitive and affective. It cannot beunderstood in purely cognitive terms, nor can it be understood in ‘feeling’ terms. Norshould it be viewed as a sum, combination, blend, or causal relation of two elements.Rather, it should be viewed as an original unity.

Section 5 offers a summary and suggests an alternative approach to studying emotions.

2. Two theories of emotion

Cognitivism about emotion is an old philosophical view. This is probably to its credit,because its arch rival, which receives philosophical elaboration under the name of ‘thefeeling theory of emotion’, has always been more popular in folk psychology and ordinarythinking. According to these ways of thinking, emotions are feelings which overtake us.Not only are they often contrary to reason and good judgment (love, jealousy, and hatredare often said to be ‘blind’), but they are also intractable – we feel them even though weknow we should not. They often sweep over us with great force, and motivate (impel?)us to do that which we do not want to do. We are held powerless in their grip, a factwhich is sometimes used to plead diminished responsibility for wrong-doing. We arealso often said to be unable to ‘understand’ our feelings and those of other people.

At the same time, ordinary thinking and speech are not blind to the fact that emotionshave ‘grounds’, in that they are typically felt in connection with something or other (a per-ceived danger or a piece of good news). It is commonsense to believe that when our beliefschange, it is often the case that our feelings follow suit. Nor are emotions completelybeyond our control. We often urge people to control their feelings, and blame them forfailing to do so. It is from these sources and others that the cognitive theories of emotionsdraw much of their inspiration.

A certain dialectic has always existed between feeling and cognitive theories of emotionso that the two theories can be seen to clarify each other and to draw strength from mutualcriticism. A good place to begin the discussion is William James’s famous statement of thefeeling theory:

My thesis . . . is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, andthat our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Commonsense says, we loseour fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by arival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says . . . that we feel sorry

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because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble. Without the bodily statesfollowing on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, des-titute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive theinsult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry. (James1884, 189–190)

Philosophers nowadays tend to view feelings of bodily changes as cases of interoception,more or less on a par with ordinary perception. Not only is there a familiar sensory phenom-enology, a ‘what-it-is-like’ to have a sensation of quickened heartbeat, but, like ordinarysense perception, bodily sensations have content in that they disclose to us aspects of theworld, in this case our bodies, which are, in an important sense, part of the external world.

But a feeling of fear should be considered different from a feeling of quickened heart-beat. The latter is a bodily sensation of the ‘boom-boom-boom’ variety, occurring at a fasterrate than usual. It is conceivable that one could experience it, along with shallow breathingand cold sweat, after taking certain drugs. But feeling such changes ‘as they occur’ wouldnot constitute a feeling of fear. If we were to experience such feelings outside the context ofjudging that we are in danger, we would only think that there is something amiss with ourbodies, not that we are facing some kind of danger.

The idea that emotions are basically feeling-states of some kind continues to bedefended by some philosophers. One clear statement of such a view says:

. . . fear might be identified with the distinctive edgy feeling that we experience in the gut andlimbs, and anger might be identified with the irritable feeling that pervades the spleen or chest.(Whiting 2009, 281)

According to another well-known view, that of Jesse Prinz, ‘somatic signals’ are bothnecessary and sufficient for emotion. In his discussion of cognitive theories, Prinz invitesthe reader to

[S]mile and see if you feel a little bit happier. Now assuming that you do, ask, are you enter-taining the thought that your goals have been satisfied? Next, scowl as if you are very angry,and see if you feel the anger. Then ask yourself whether you are entertaining the thought thatyou have been insulted. I suspect that you will answer these questions negatively. (Prinz 2007,58)

A third view is advocated by J. Deonna and F. Teroni. According to this view,

[We] should conceive of emotions as distinctive types of bodily awareness, where the subjectexperiences her body holistically as taking an attitude towards a certain object . . . . Feelings ofaction readiness are indeed obvious candidates for elucidating the nature of emotions as invol-ving awareness of one’s body adopting a specific stance towards an object, or being poised toact in given ways in relation to an object . . . . (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 79–80)

There is more going on in such theories than is indicated by the above statements. More willbe said about some of them in due course. Nevertheless, the statements indicate underlyingcommitments which cannot be cancelled by further elaborations designed to show howthese theories address various problems. Viewed in terms of such commitments, it is notobvious how much these theories improve on the traditional feeling theory of WilliamJames. Talk of the ‘distinctive edgy feeling which we experience in the gut and limbs’and the ‘irritable feeling that pervades the spleen or chest’ is a hybrid kind of talk.Mention of gut and limbs, spleen and chest localizes what we are talking about, and is

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thus similar to talking about a feeling of a lump in the throat. It is, however, less clearlyidentifiable – edginess is not a very definite quality, and many people have no ideawhat, or where, the spleen is. On the other hand, attributing irritability and edginess to loca-lized feelings psychologizes the matter quite a bit, inasmuch as irritability and edginess areprimarily attributable to a whole person, rather than a feeling in the spleen or chest. Whitingdoes not allow that irritability and edginess are ‘object-directed’ (2009, 283), the wayemotions are typically allowed to be. This opens the door for claiming that the irritabilityand edginess in question can be (and often are) caused by drugs, medicines, and other thingsof which the subject might have no inkling. In such cases, it is by no means clear that theirritable person is angry, even if he were to aver that anger is precisely what he feels.According to Anthony Kenny, a person is not sole judge of the correctness of describinghis feeling as one of fear. There are as well objective conditions, such as circumstances,outward symptoms, and behavior which play a determining role (Kenny 1963, 46).

Deonna and Teroni’s position seems different. They speak not only of feelings (of actionreadiness) but also of (bodily) awareness. In addition to this, what they find in the body isnot localized in this part or that – it is rather global. However, it is not clear if ‘local’ and‘global’ make any difference here. Aching all over is ‘global’, whereas having a headache is‘local’. Nevertheless, this makes no difference to their being, equally, kinds of bodilysensation.

The hybridism which characterizes Whiting’s position is to be found here also. Emotionis said to be an awareness of something the body is doing. Not any old thing, though, suchas sweating or shivering, the kinds of things which James would have been happy to cite.Rather, emotion is supposed to be an awareness of the body as taking an attitude, adoptinga stance, or being poised to act.

But ‘stance’ and ‘body’ go together as much as ‘irritable’ and ‘feeling’, which is to say,not very much. The activities being spoken of here are primarily attributable to the wholeperson, rather than his or her body. It is true that being poised to strike requires one to have abody, but this is quite different from the impression of one as a spectator in a physical dramawhere one experiences one’s body taking attitudes or being poised to do things. Such‘bodily’ doings are more psychic than physical. Pending a solution to the mind–bodyproblem, it is unfair to move them over to the physical side of the fence.

The tendency to cleave to the physical in order to explain emotion is also evident inPrinz’s view of the role of somatic signals in emotion. ‘Smile and see if you feel a littlebit happier’, one is told. But smiling is not a matter of facial muscles contracting in acertain shape or form, something which we can do on command. So what can therequest for one to smile mean? Saying ‘cheese’ in front of the camera does not cause happi-ness or amusement. What might accomplish this is the contemplation of a silly request tosay ‘cheese’, when cheese has nothing to do with the business at hand. Furthermore, it isfar from clear that the connection between smiling and feeling happy is causal, as suggestedby Prinz’s ‘and see if’. Referring to a facial expression as ‘smiling’ implicates affectivity asa matter of conceptual necessity. It is not a contingent relation that may or may not hold.

Cognitivists typically argue that one of the main problems with identifying emotionswith sensations of bodily condition is that bodily sensations are not intentional, that is,they are not ‘about something’ (as emotions are). As one writer humorously put it, oneexperiences pain at the dentist’s, not at the dentist (Gosling 1965, 487). But it could beargued that intentionality is not an adequate ground for distinguishing between emotionsand sensations of bodily condition. It is not implausible to attribute intentionality tobodily sensations. They have an ‘object’ in the bodily part which they typically refer to.This is obvious in the case of phantom limb pain, where one feels pain in a non-existent

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limb. It is not much less obvious in the more usual cases of bodily sensation. Here we alsohave the failure of substitutivity characteristic of intentional contexts. The hunter, aiming atthe dark spot yonder, does not know that he is taking aim at his father. Similarly, a personwho places his hand on his left chest need not know that it is his heart which he feelspounding.

But if intentionality is not an adequate ground for distinguishing between bodily sen-sations and emotions, what can the difference be then? The difference, it may be suggested,is the simple fact that the ‘feelings’ invoked are not affective. Neither the feeling of quick-ened heartbeat, cold sweat, shallow breathing, nor the three of them occurring as part of asystemic bodily condition, yield the distinctive affective qualities which we associate withfear and other emotional states. To see the distinctness of the affective, consider a patientwho feels and notes the aforementioned sensations carefully while undergoing treatment.He need not be experiencing fear. On the contrary, he could be affectively comfortablein the knowledge that he is being taken care of. But if he were to suddenly realize thathe is in danger of losing his life, there would be a new arrival on the feeling scene of hisconsciousness – a feeling of fear which was not there just a short while ago. In otherwords, there would be a change, an addition to the (bodily) feelings which were there allthe time.

Affectivity, it may be thus suggested, is what cognitive theories of emotions have to dealwith adequately, if they are to improve on what feeling theories have to offer. Yet it is farfrom obvious that they are able to accomplish this.

The notion on which many cognitive theories of emotion are based is that of belief,judgment, construal, or appraisal. According to Robert Solomon, ‘[Judgment is] not a mar-ginal fact about (some) emotions but the essence of all of them’ (Solomon 2004, 77). Thematter does not stop at placing emphasis on judgment. Some cognitivists seem willing toidentify emotion with judgment. At one point Solomon says that ‘my anger is my judgmentthat John has wronged me’ (Solomon 1980, 257). According to Martha Nussbaum, in thetelling title of her book, emotions are Upheavals of Thought (2001). In another place, Nuss-baum avers that one does not first believe that one has suffered a great loss and then feelssad as a result. ‘The real, complete recognition of [the terrible] event . . . is the upheaval’(Nussbaum 2003, 282).

To the uninitiated, it must sound strange to say that emotions are judgments. So theymust be told that the judgments in question are not the ordinary run-of-the-mill judgmentsthat we make every waking hour. The judgments in question are of the evaluative type. Aperson experiences fear in the context of judging that she is in danger, which is an evaluativejudgment (appraisal) of a kind. Similarly, one experiences sadness in the context of judgingthat one has suffered a loss. As Nussbaum puts it, citing an ancient Stoic position, ‘emotionsare forms of evaluative judgment that ascribe great importance to things and persons outsideone’s control’ (Nussbaum 2003, 273). This leads her to say that one cannot affirm a judg-ment of serious loss without going through the emotion of grief, as is evident from her rhe-torical question: ‘Can I assent to the idea that someone tremendously beloved is forever lostto me, and yet preserve emotional equanimity?’ (Nussbaum 2003, 280).

But many writers have entertained the possibility of ‘assenting’ to evaluative judgmentsof great importance without losing emotional equanimity. One writer has argued for thereasonableness (hence the possibility) of not feeling regret over a moral wrong whichone has done, even while fully recognizing its wrongfulness AQ2(Bittner 1992, 256–256).Robert C. Roberts has also raised a question about the person who very much desires tobe morally upright: could he culpably err and not feel guilty? Roberts’s answer is thatthis is psychologically possible, but not likely (Roberts 1988, 198).3

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The fact that sheer judgment (belief) is not sufficient to account for emotion has beennoted by many philosophers who are otherwise sympathetic to the cognitivist view. Thusmany of them have attempted to supplement the cognitive element of belief with somethingwhich fills the affective gap in the cognitivist account. Examples of such attempts at repaircan be found in the works of the late Peter Goldie, Robert C. Roberts, and P. S. Greenspan.

For his part, Goldie distinguishes between mere belief and emotional belief, as can beseen from this example:

Imagine you are in a zoo, looking at a gorilla grimly loping from left to right in its cage. You arethinking of the gorilla as dangerous, but you do not feel fear, as it seems to be safely behind bars.Then you see that the door to the cage has been left wide open . . . . [S]uddenly . . . your way ofthinking of the gorilla as dangerous is new; now it is dangerous in an emotionally relevant wayfor you. The earlier thought, naturally expressed as ‘That gorilla is dangerous’, is different incontent from the new thought, although this new thought, thought with emotional feeling, mightalso be naturally expressed in the same words. (Goldie 2000, 61, emphasis added)4

Goldie seems to think that a change in feeling entails a change in content; that if you believesomething without feeling, then it ceases to be the same when feeling enters the picture. Butthe example which Goldie offers does not make a good case for the idea that we have twothoughts here, one before, and a new one after realizing that the door is open. It is not asthough the indexical expression ‘that gorilla’ has changed its reference or that the word‘dangerous’ changed its meaning. A thought which is thought with or without emotionalfeeling is still the same thought. Thinking it with feeling does not change its content,any more that writing something in red changes the meaning of what is written. Theaffect that we are after cannot be a matter of different content.5

Another angle at Goldie’s view may be obtained by considering a term which he uses toexpress the idea of a thought that is ‘thought with emotional feeling’: ‘feeling towards’.‘Feeling towards is thinking of with feeling’ (Goldie 2000, 58). The term shifts focusfrom content (what we think) to attitude (how we feel about it). Thus it hints at an adver-bialist account which may be more perspicuously referred to by another term – ‘thinkingfeelingly’. Viewed in this manner, Goldie’s account joins ranks with two other apparently‘adverbialist accounts’ offered by R. C. Roberts and P. S. Greenspan.

For Roberts, emotion is a ‘serious concern-based construal’ of one’s condition (Roberts1988, 191). To experience an emotion is to construe one’s situation ‘concernfully’, it couldbe said. For Greenspan, emotion requires ‘thoughts held in the mind by intentional states ofcomfort or discomfort’ (Greenspan 1992, 293). The mere holding of a thought in mind byone intentional state or another does not amount to emotion; what is required is intentionalstates of comfort or discomfort.

Similar criticisms can be directed at both attempts at repair. Consider Roberts’s idea ofconcernful construal first. Initially, the idea of ‘concernfulness’ seems to invite Stocker’sobjection that

. . . [T]here are both feeling-laden and feelingless forms of care, concern and interest. Thefeeling cannot be located simply by care, concern and interest, but only by feeling-ladeninstances of them. (Stocker 1983, 13)

Stocker surely has a point here, but it must be allowed that the relation between concernsand felt concerns is not accidental. Concerns that are or have never been felt are not con-cerns that we can easily understand. A charitable reading of Robert’s ‘concernful construal’might allow emotional experiences to involve felt concerns rather than just concerns.

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Still, this does not yield a satisfactory cognitive theory of emotion. One wonders: whatis it to have a concernful construal of my situation as being in danger of falling off a cliff?The opposite of a concernful construal is (presumably) one that is characterized by indiffer-ence. Someone who is indifferent to life and death could construe himself as being in dangerof falling off a cliff, but his construal would not be ‘concernful’, or feeling-laden, to useStocker’s words. It is plausible to think that lack of ‘concernfulness’ stands for absenceof fear, sadness, or other modes of feeling through which concernfulness is typicallyinstanced. There is no such thing as concernfulness, or ‘feeling-ladenness’, pure andsimple, of no kind in particular. ‘Concernfulness’, it could be argued, functions as amere schema that is made meaningful only by the (conceptually necessary) availabilityof particular emotion words.6

If this is true, then the proposal to explicate emotions in terms of concernful construals(construing one’s situation ‘concernfully’) is an abbreviated way of saying that to undergoan emotional experience is to construe one’s situation in an emotional way – fearfully, joy-fully, sadly, indignantly, angrily, or whatever. Fear, to take a particular example, might turnout to be, quite tautologically, a matter of fearfully construing oneself as being in danger offalling off a cliff.

Greenspan’s idea of states of comfort and discomfort seems to replace concernfulnesswith valence, the commonly accepted idea that emotional states lie on one side or the otherof a pleasant–unpleasant continuum. Of course, the comfort and discomfort in questionhere are not the same as physical pain or pleasure. For physical pain is compatible withthe kind of ‘comfort’ which we take Greenspan to mean, as when a severely injuredperson realizes that she is being rescued. Similarly, bodily pleasure is compatible with dis-comfort in the present sense, as when a person feels a good deal of guilt as he participates ina pleasurable activity which he considers to be morally wrong. Emotionally relevantcomfort and discomfort must be viewed as ‘psychic’ affairs, even though they may beunderstood by analogy to physical pain and pleasure.7

But when we think of the ‘valence’ which our emotional states have we find that it isnever sheer, undifferentiated quality. Just as concernfulness is instantiated as fear,sadness, anger, joy, etc., emotional valence will have a character of sorts. Jealousy, fear,anger, sadness are uncomfortable feelings in a sense which we all understand. We mayview them as ways of being ‘psychically uncomfortable’, as it were.

We must not think that humans start out their lives with inchoate, shapeless, contentlesscomfort/discomfort affect-stuff which gets to be fashioned into emotions through the use oflanguage, social conditioning, or rational criticism. Rather, what happens is that emotionscome to exist, change, and evolve. Emotional valence, like concernfulness, always comeswith a story to tell, even if the story is simple and unelaborated as stories are wont to be inearly life.

Because valence and concernfulness seem to bring in emotions once again, to defineemotion as concernful or valenced cognition does not seem to advance the issue much.We are led to ask: why is it that when we seek to understand emotion in terms of cognitionand feeling we find ourselves using the concept of emotion once again? Could we be doingthe wrong thing by trying to understand emotions in terms of cognition and feeling?

3. Perception and emotion

Experiencing an emotion is not the same as making an evaluative cognition. It is also not thesame as experiencing a feeling that is devoid of content. Nor is it the same as making anevaluative cognition with feeling (feelingly). What else can it be then?

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A fairly popular path taken by philosophers in recent times has been to make use of per-ception as a general concept under which emotional experiences can be subsumed. This isnot surprising, for perception has two features which many philosophers claim to find inemotion as well, namely intentionality and phenomenality (Salmela 2011, 1). In perceptionas well as emotion, there is a ‘contentful’ representation of the world as being thus-and-so.But in addition to content, there is something it is like to be having the experience in ques-tion – be it an experience of seeing, or feeling afraid. Could my feeling of fear be my ‘per-ception’ of the danger that I am in? More generally, could affect be understood as aperception of values that are exemplified in the environment?

Along these lines, Julien Deonna has suggested that emotions ‘track how the world isevaluative for one in a sense similar to the way perceptions track how the world is percep-tually for one’ (Deonna 2006, 37). Ruth Millikan also has suggested that evaluative aspectsof the environment may be thought of as attitudinal secondary properties. They are powersto produce in us responses that are attitudes of fear, sadness, etc. (Millikan 1995, 198).More explicitly than perhaps most philosophers, Mark Johnston speaks of a ‘sensoryencounter with value’ (Johnston 2001, 183) where we are attracted to or repelled by ‘sen-suous goods and bads’ (190). According to Johnston (2001),

This is part of how things are manifest to us: part of their appearing or presenting is their pre-senting to us in determinate ways and to various degrees as appealing or repulsive. On the faceof it, appeal is as much a manifest quality as shape, size, colour and motion. (188)

Such views of emotion as perception of value do not exhaust all that is on offer under thisheading. The view advocated by Jesse Prinz (briefly discussed in the previous section) canbe understood as saying that emotions are mediated perceptions of value. The mediationtakes the form of bodily changes (and subsequent awareness thereof) in response tochanges in organism–environment relations. For this reason some writers take Prinz’sview to be an indirect perception theory of emotion (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 72).

According to Prinz, emotions represent that which they have been set up to be set off by(Prinz 2007, 61). Thus fear represents danger, which regularly sets it off, and is reliablyindicated by it. The same applies to sadness and loss. But fear does not count as a perceptualexperience of danger the way a visual experience counts as a perception of color. Rather,what happens is that, finding oneself in danger sets off bodily responses (as in the Jamesianview) which we feel as emotion. The emotion ‘registers’ the bodily feelings, but, in addition(now going beyond James), it represents the danger which sets off the bodily changes in thefirst place. In Prinz’s own terms,

Each emotion is both an internal body monitor and a detector of dangers, threats, losses, orother matters of concern. Emotions are gut reactions; they use our bodies to tell how we arefaring in the world. (Prinz 2004, 69)8

Since Prinz understands observability in terms of representation, and since this latter isunderstood in terms of reliable indication, it may be concluded that a creature that‘detects’ the danger it is in is a creature that ‘perceives’ the danger it is in (Salmela2011, 5–6).

Now the idea that in emotion we ‘perceive’ how we are faring in the world is susceptibleto two interpretations (at least). According to the first, dangers and losses (for example) areobjects of perceptual experience. They are not colors and shapes, of course; they are morelike kinds of objects, or Gibsonian ‘affordances’ – features of the environment which

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‘afford’ creatures ill or well. The other, somewhat more modest interpretation is to say thatemotion such as fear ‘detects’ dangers the way a barometer detects bad weather – it is areliable indicator of it.

To take up the first interpretation first, a fairly popular objection to the perceptualanalogy is that we have no dedicated sense organs through which we become aware ofthe dangers, losses, insults, or wrongs that we encounter. It is just not obvious how, infearing, we ‘perceive’ the danger we are in.

An adequate discussion of this objection requires dealing with what has been aptlycalled the ‘thin view’ of perceptual experience, the view that perceptions in the strictsense are just basic, minimal perceptions which do not carry much information about per-ceived objects – nothing beyond color, shape, texture, and spatial lay-out (Masrour 2011,1). Many arguments have been presented in support of this view of perception, which wecannot discuss here. None of them seems to be conclusive against the commonsensical viewthat we see not only green or pink, but green trees and pink ice cubes. As Masrour hasargued, the attributes of being a cactus and the attribute of being green are each subjectto being mistaken for something else. Also, the experiences of seeing as of green, or asof a cactus, can be equally indubitable to the subject of them, while the possibility oferror is given in both cases. And there are times when a judgment of either kind is inferentialand other times when it is not. Thin and thick (or thicker) properties seem on par in allessential respects (Masrour 2011, 6ff).

Similar reasoning applies to so-called affordances, features of the environment whichbode us ill or well. The existence of seemingly unlearned fears among creatures, big andsmall, linguistic or not, argues for the fact that in some way or other, animals are oftenable to see dangers. The art of designing a good trap is based on the assumption that thequarry can see which things in the environment should or should not be avoided. Thetrapper designs a trap in such a way that the animal is fooled into seeing it as somethingwhich is not to be avoided.

Thus it is not obvious that the perceptual analogy is overthrown by the idea that evalua-tive aspects of our environment are not proper objects of perception. But this is not the realsource of trouble for the perceptualist view of emotion. On a thick view of sense experience,we can grant that dangers are often perceived, but that still would not mean that fear is aperception of danger.

For, suppose a person perceives the danger he is in. Let us say he is holding a tickingbomb, and (on some generous understanding of seeing) he sees the bomb, and sees that it isa bomb. Now if we were to say that he is afraid of the danger he is in, that would be anadditional thing to say about his state of mind. We would be saying: he sees the dangerhe is in and he is afraid of it. It is conceivable that he could be seeing the danger, andnot be in a state of fear. He could be drugged, or he could be indifferent to life anddeath. Presumably, the suicide bomber sees the danger he is in, but it is quite possiblethat the fear is not there on account of factors that have to do with beliefs and motivations.All of this follows from a fairly plausible view to the effect that the basic job of perception isto put us into contact with the world – to let us discover how things (including ourselves)are (faring). To fear (or to like) what we find out does not fall within perception’s jobdescription.

How else can fear be said to be a ‘perception’ of danger? Perhaps fear does not representdanger the way a visual experience represents a red tomato. According to Geach andAnscombe (1961, 95), a sensation of X is like a painting of X, except that it is in nomedium! Furthermore (it could be said), there is a clear sense in which dangerous, fearsomeobjects do not look any different from other objects. (Bared teeth are just teeth exposed in a

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certain way, for those who care to notice.) But suppose there is a nomic connection wherebylosses and dangers, for example, are associated with emotional responses of sadness andfear – would we not then be entitled to think that sadness represents loss by being an indi-cator or a detector of it? There is a well-known concept of representation, defended byDretske (1988), with roots in Peirce (1955, 108–109), according to which something rep-resents another by being a reliable indicator of it (‘index’ is the term Peirce uses). This is theconcept which Prinz employs in his theory of emotion.9 Thinking in terms of natural selec-tion and function, Jesse Prinz says it was advantageous to our ancestors to detect losses ofloved ones, failures of achievement, or rejection by a lover. ‘Sadness evolved as a responseto losses writ large’ (Prinz 2007, 62). In short, sadness is a loss detector.

Despite initial plausibility, there are at least three objections than can be raised. To dothis, let us first distinguish between the person (or cognitive system) that experiences anemotion, and the person (or cognitive system) that makes judgments as to what emotionwas experienced, and what, if anything, indicates (represents) what. The ‘two’ personscould be one, of course, if one were to engage in introspection or self-observation.Nothing hangs on this, but to keep matters tidy, we can assume this is not the case.

Suppose I am an observer or a (would be) scientist. I recognize a nomic connectionbetween episodes of loss and episodes of sadness in subjects who suffer loss. Observingyou being sad, I infer that you must have sustained some kind of loss. (This is not to saythat I do not often go wrong in making such inferences.) In doing this I follow the samepractice as when I, sitting in my air-conditioned room, infer a rise in the temperatureoutside. There is a thermometer in the garden, which I can see from my room. To me, arise in thermometer reading indicates a rise in temperature. To a bird, it indicates nothingof the kind.

This can be applied to the case of emotion in a more or less straightforward manner. Tome, your sadness indicates that you have sustained a loss. I gain knowledge about the fact ofyour loss without being witness to it. But now let us look at the matter from your point ofview. Surely, you do not wait to feel sad in order to know that you have sustained a loss.When you ‘detect’ (that is to say, when there is ‘indication’) that the beloved mother-in-law is no longer, this knowledge does not come from a feeling of sadness. Rather, yousee, hear, infer, or somehow use your senses and your powers of reasoning, to know thatthe beloved one is no longer. It is not clear that your feeling of sadness plays a role of detec-tor, as far as you are concerned. To an outsider, perhaps yes, but not to you, the subject ofthe emotion. As many philosophers have insisted, ‘indication’ is a tertiary relation thatrequires not only a ‘sign’ and an object, but also an interpreter for whom something isto be a sign of something else.10

Worse than this: it is sometimes the other way around. We need other, non-emotionalknowledge before we can ‘detect’ what emotion we are feeling. Suppose I and my col-league are up for promotion. She gets it but I do not. I find myself in a weird emotionalstate which I want to describe. It is negatively valenced, let us say, and there is definitely a‘concernful construal’ of how I am faring in the world. But we want a more exact descrip-tion. Could it be that I am experiencing envy? Jealousy? Or resentment?11 The answer isnot obvious on the face of it. To ‘detect’ (which is to say, to identify) the emotion I amhaving, I may need to do a lot of soul searching. For example, if it turns out that Ibelieve that I am more qualified than her, then perhaps I am responding to an injustice,and my emotion could be viewed as resentment. But if it turns out that all I really careabout is staying ahead in the race, then perhaps the emotion is one of jealousy or envy.Far from detecting how I am faring in the world, it is the emotion itself that stands inneed of being detected!12

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Finally, it could be asked, is it a good idea to explicate the representationality of emotionin terms of detection? This is far from obvious. Take the example of consecutive ther-mometer readings which indicate that the temperature is rising. To use a term employedby Charles Travis, higher readings factively mean that the temperature is rising. Butfactive meaning is not representational at all:

Factive meaning is, crucially, something utterly different from representation. The mostobvious point is this: if A factively means B, then since (if) A, B. If Sid did not lose hisjob, then his drunkenness does not mean that. By contrast, if B is not so, that is no bar to some-thing having represented it as so. Just that makes room for representing falsely, so for represent-ing things as so at all. (Travis 2004, 66)

Dretske disagrees. He invites the reader to

Think of radar misrepresenting an aircraft approaching from the east. There is a slowly movingblip that – when things are working right – is the kind of blip an aircraft produces. In this case,though, no such aircraft exists. The radar still ‘says’ there is. (Dretske 2003, 69)

This is an interesting, and rather subtle, type of disagreement to adjudicate in a brief space.But one may wonder whether the kind of talk that has the radar ‘saying’ something as com-plicated as ‘there is an aircraft approaching from the east’ can be justified. We seem to beattributing intentionality to an inanimate object by having it ‘express’ falsehoods, such assaying that there is a plane, when there is not one. The problematic nature of such a take onwhat the radar is doing can be seen when we compare this to a bona fide case of representingfalsely. A flight controller wrongly believes, and says to us, that there is a plane approachingfrom the east. He represents things to us and to himself as being thus and so. He representsfalsely. But the radar with its blip moving this way and that does nothing of the kind. Con-sidered in themselves, its movements do not refer to anything, much less anything beyondthemselves, as the flight controller’s thoughts obviously do. In other words, it is not plaus-ible to impute intentionality in such cases.13

The conclusion to draw from all of this is that emotions, like thoughts, are best viewedas representing things as being thus and so, as opposed to detecting that things are thus andso. To view them as detectors is to place them in the company of perception and reason asagents of discovery. Emotions are not in business of discovering how things are. They arerepresentations of how things are. But, as we shall explain in the AQ3next section, this is not allthat can be said about them.

4. Emotion as patheception

Now that we have seen that emotion is neither a kind of feeling nor a kind of judgment, noran act of perceiving or detecting an evaluative aspect of the environment, let us start afreshby looking at a typical emotional experience. We shall take the experience just as it strikesus, without any preconceived idea as to what its proper analysis must be.

Imagine someone has an only child whom he loves dearly. The child becomes seriouslyill and dies. The father is sad to no end over the loss of his child. His well-being is affected –he is not faring well in the world. Now there are a number of things which we can dis-tinguish in this situation. First, we assume that the father has sustained a loss. We maynot be able to define ‘loss’ in terms of other notions, and there is no call for us to give defi-nitions of such concepts as loss, danger, aggravation, and others, which may turn out to bedisjunctive, or which may entangle descriptive and evaluative elements in an irrevocable

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way. Second, let us assume that the father understands that he has sustained a loss in thedeath of his child. He is in possession of the concept loss, and he is able to subsume thedeath of his child under this concept. He can think the proposition ‘The death of mychild is a great loss to me’. Third, we can grant that the father not only understands thathe has sustained a loss, but also that he perceived his loss, that he had a perceptual experi-ence of it. For he saw the child become more and more ill, and he finally witnessed the deathof the child. And he has empirical knowledge of the meaning of life and death – he knows,for example, that dead children do not come back to life. Fourth, we assume that he is sadover the death of his child.

Our previous discussions have led us to believe that sadness is not the same as percep-tion of loss, nor the same as understanding, or judging, that one has sustained a loss. We cangrant that perceivings and conceivings are representations of loss. They all say: ‘I have sus-tained a loss’. But this is not the same as feeling sad. What can this feeling which we callsadness be?

By way of leading up to the answer I want to recommend in what follows, one thingmay be noted: it is customary to speak of losses as being suffered, rather than being per-ceived or conceptually grasped. Now, typically, part of what it means to say thatsomeone has suffered a loss is that she has undergone a certain change in her relation tothe world, a change which she may have seen or understood as a loss. But suffering aloss is not just this. Ordinary usage also typically refers to the subjective quality of theexperience, not just its ontological ground (the actual changes which constitute the loss).

Suffering, in normal usage, attaches to losses, injuries, harms, wrongs, and other occur-rences of a negative nature. But to accomplish our theoretical purpose we want a term thatcan be applied more generally – not just to losses, dangers, and other ‘bads’, but also togains, successes, and other ‘goods’ as well – in short, to all ‘creature/environment relations’that bear on well-being. Gains, successes, narrow escapes from misfortune, and other typesof ‘goods’ are also ‘undergone’ in an experience with a subjective character of a certainkind. There is something which experiences, good and bad, have in common which isnot well-served by the current restrictive use of ‘suffer’.

What we want can be found in reviving an older usage of the term ‘emotion’, wherebyemotions were understood as ‘passions’. ‘Passion’ brings to mind the Latin pati (to suffer)as well pathos (suffering)14. Passions, in this usage, were supposed to be things with regardto which we are patients rather than agents. This applies to the person who endures an injus-tice and gets to feel resentful, as much as it does to the person who wins a great victory andis ‘overcome’ with joy. Guided by this older usage, we can stipulatively expand and neu-tralize the meaning of ‘suffer’ so as to say that losses and gains are all ‘suffered’ in thisneutral, inclusive sense.

But with an eye to being able to encompass the qualities that can be thus ‘suffered’, aswell as the particular way in which they are suffered, we can do better. We shall choose aneologism whose usage has not been pre-empted in anyway: sadness, anger, fear, joy, etc.,we shall say, are patheceptions of loss, offense, danger, and (say) success. These evaluativefeatures themselves we shall refer to as pathetic qualities. Thus if something is dangerousthen it has the pathetic quality of being dangerous. It is a quality that we may not only beable to perceive or conceive (of), but also patheceive.

Patheceiving, of course, sounds like perceiving and conceiving. But in saying thatsomeone patheceives the danger she is in we are not saying that she perceives it, muchless that she subsumes what she perceives under the concept dangerous. Patheception ofdanger can happen when one perceives danger, as well as when one simply understandsthat one is in danger. It can even be experienced in situations where only imagination is

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mainly operative, as when one watches a sad movie or merely imagines the death of a lovedone who is now merely ill.

But if patheceiving is neither perceiving nor conceiving, what is it then? I submit that itis best viewed as a third kind of animal, one that is distinct from these two more familiarkinds. It is distinct, but it is not completely dissimilar. Like perception and conception,patheception has content. Nevertheless, it differs from both of them in being a necessarilyaffective affair as well. The important thing we need to emphasize is that cases of pathecep-tion are unitary processes that do not break down into feeling and content components.

This may sound highly unmotivated in view of what we have just implied, namely, thatpatheception is both cognitive and affective. Are these not our old friends, cognition andfeeling, as disunited as ever? If this is indeed the case, then no advance has been made.We are still caught between the Scylla of cognitivism and the Charybdis of feeling theories.This is a serious difficulty which needs to be addressed. For starters, an analogy might help.

Consider the notion of understanding a statement, in the sense of just thinking it, asopposed to doubting it, or taking some other attitude towards it. Here is a ‘garden-path’ sen-tence which readers unacquainted with English grammatical games and diversions willprobably not understand on a first reading: ‘The boy the man the girl saw chased fled.’15

The sentence is about a certain boy, Johnny, who was being chased by a man, Mr.Smith. A girl, Mary, saw the man. What is being said is that Johnny (who was beingchased by Mr Smith, who, in his turn, was seen by Mary) fled. After initial incomprehen-sion, something happens in the reader’s mind: she understands, grasps, or thinks a certainthought, however perversely expressed the thought may have been. Doubting the prop-osition, or taking any other attitude towards it, is not yet in the picture. The reader mightfall dead before she has had a chance to form an opinion on the matter.

Now consider what it is to doubt a statement, instead of just thinking it. In doubting astatement, we think it, of course, for one cannot doubt what one does not think or under-stand. But this is not the whole of what we do. What else do we do? Is doubting a statementthe same as grasping what it means plus something else (other than doubting) whichsomehow completes the job, and adds up to doubting? I do not think so.

Doubting a proposition may happen as we grasp it, or (if we are unable to give thematter more thought) it may happen later. But once doubt takes hold of our mindswith respect to a certain proposition, it does not do this in two stages – first grasp,and then . . . what? It is certainly not grasping plus feeling uncertain, or wavering, withrespect to the proposition, for this is doubting all over again. Nor is it flip-floppingbetween belief and disbelief, for these are distinct states that neither separately norjointly amount to doubting. Doubting does not build on a foundation of grasping. Itimplies grasping, but it is not analyzable into grasping plus something else. In short,the claim is that nothing short of doubting will do the work of doubting. Doubting islike being red. The latter implies being colored, but we do not get red by adding some-thing to being colored.

So it is with fearing, and patheceiving in general. Fear may take hold of our minds thevery instant we see (or grasp) the situation we are in, or we may behold our situation for amoment before fear succeeds contemplation. (The latter can happen, with comical effect, tothose who are not very smart or perceptive, as Tom often is in Tom and Jerry cartoons.) Butonce fear sets in it does not do this in two stages – first, we see (or grasp) that we are stand-ing on the window ledge, and then we have a certain feeling which in itself is somehow lessthan or other than fear.

The view which we are trying to steer clear of refuses to attribute genuine unity toemotion. Here is a particularly lucid example of this type of view, as expressed by Larry

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Herzberg, explaining a view which he attributes to R. S. Lazarus. It shows precisely whatwe do not want to end up doing.

For instance, if an event is cognitively appraised in terms that can properly be summarized as ademeaning offense to me or mine, this judgment normally causes an affective response ofanger, a felt impulse associated with particular physiological conditions. This affective com-ponent immediately combines psychologically with the eliciting cognition to yield anemotion with object-identifying content, one that typically guides the impulse towards theoffender. (Herzberg 2012, 76)

‘An appraisal that causes an affective response which immediately combines with . . . ’: thisis a discourse of temporal stages and ontologically separate elements, held together incausal relationship, where time is of the essence (because causation takes time). But it isnot clear that anger is caused by appraisal.16 It is even less clear how feelings combinewith appraisals. Many people reject the idea that anger is a dumb feeling that does not initself constitute an emotion; that it has to combine with something else before anemotion comes into being. (Why call it ‘anger’ in the first place?) Causes, moreover,take time, however small, to produce their effects, and combining, too, takes time.Causal connections can be interrupted, and combining can be halted. What if you makean appraisal, which causes ‘anger’, but then (somehow) the combining does not happen?Are you angry or not? According to the statement quoted above, we can say that you areangry, for the anger has been caused, and it exists in you. Presumably, the anger will be‘dumb’ and objectless, because it has not combined with the ‘guiding’ cognition. (Youjudge that you have been insulted, and you are angry, but you do not know whom tolash out at.) Nevertheless, according to very same statement, we can say that no emotionof anger exists, because the combining has been halted. None of this seems veryconvincing.

In arguing against the notion that anger is an appraisal of offense plus something else,we do not merely mean to deny a temporal succession of stages which culminates in anemotion. The unity of emotion is not just a matter of there being no such temporal division.Another way to insist on the unity of emotion is to say that anger, fear, joy, and other formsof patheception do not allow for a conjunctive or a genus-differentia type of analysis.

One cannot, in the nature of the case, prove that it is impossible to produce such ana-lyses. But it is helpful to see this analytical project in the context of similar and apparentlyunsuccessful projects to analyze fundamental concepts in other areas of philosophy.Especially worthy of mention are attempts to understand knowledge as a species ofbelief differentiated by truth, justification, and (since the Gettier problem) right causation.The causal theory of perception has suggested to many philosophers that seeing and hallu-cinating can be understood in terms of ‘neutral’ common factors and causal ancestry. Last,but not least, one can mention ‘thick’ moral concepts which have been supposed to reduceto a purely descriptive content that can be disentangled from an evaluative aspect. Emotionswere supposed to follow suit. As we saw in the preceding sections, cognitivists have tendedto view them as judgments or appraisals of a certain type, whereas feeling theorists havethought they could be reduced to feelings that occur under certain conditions.

The pattern to be seen in many such analyses, as Timothy Williamson captures it for thecase of knowledge, has been, first, to get hold of a certain condition, one that seems necess-ary for a certain fundamental concept (as belief is necessary for knowledge). Then one setsoff on a journey to find other conditions which will, together with the first, prove to be suf-ficient for the fundamental concept under examination. But this expectation, Williamson

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claims, is based on a fallacy. ‘If G is necessary for F, there need be no further condition H,specifiable independently of F, such that the conjunction of G and H is necessary and suffi-cient for F’ (Williamson 1995, 542).17

Williamson illustrates the fallacy by reference to the concept of being red and the(necessary) condition of being colored, where it is obvious that nothing short of beingred will get us what we want. But we saw particularly clear examples of this in the ideathat emotions could be viewed as ‘concernful construals’ of one’s condition or ‘thoughtsheld in the mind by intentional states of comfort or discomfort’. Filling in the blanks in Wil-liamson’s statement we may say:

If construal (thought) is necessary for emotion, there need be no further condition such as con-cernfulness, (being held in mind by intentional states of comfort or discomfort), specifiableindependently of emotion, such that the conjunction of construal (thought) and concernfulness(being held in mind by intentional states of comfort or discomfort) is necessary and sufficientfor emotion.

Our claim has been precisely that concernfulness and being held in mind by intentionalstates of comfort or discomfort cannot be understood without reference to emotion.

It may be instructive to compare emotion to two other fundamental concepts whichseem equally complex, but which prove hard to break down into constituent elements.The unity of emotion may then cease to seem strange after all, when it turns out thatunity is a feature to be found elsewhere in the realm of the mental. The two concepts arethose of pain and perception. We choose to discuss pain and perception because thesetwo are in some ways akin to emotion. They give rise to similar challenges, and it maybe that success at understanding one will translate into success at understanding theother two.

Consider perception first. Perception has a cognitive aspect as well as a sensuous aspectthat is to be met with nowhere else. When you see a dog running down the street, youstraight away learn something about the world, which, clearly enough, is a cognitiveachievement. But I could have given you the same piece of information with your eyesclosed, and, in a way, it would have been the same as far as your stock of knowledge isconcerned. In a way the same, but (obviously) not in another. Now, is it really helpful tosay that, when you saw for yourself a dog running down the street, you formed a ‘sensuousbelief’ of a dog running down the street, whereas when you took my word for it, you formedthe very same belief, but non-sensuously? It is not as if ‘sensuousness’, which is the hall-mark of perceptual experiences, is a mere side-show that accompanies an emerging belief.18

No more than is the feeling of anger a sensation that accompanies an emerging judgment ofdemeaning offense to me or mine. (It does not matter if we were to have causation, becausecausation involves accompanying.) Rather, it is just that you see a dog running down thestreet. Content and sensuousness come in one package. We call that package seeing orperceiving.

Or consider pain, which provides another perhaps more instructive variation on thesame theme. Pain, it is commonly acknowledged nowadays, requires us to talk about itin sensory-informational as well as affective terms. If you can muster enough philosophicalcuriosity to introspect as you hop around in pain after stubbing your toe, this is what youwill probably find. First, there is the pain, described by Pitcher (1970) in terms of a homelybut very meaningful word, ‘awfulness’. It is that which makes you wince, hop, nurse, andseek help. It is ‘aversive’ – linked to avoidance and the desire for this not to happen again.But this is not all. In addition to awfulness, your experience has a sensory-informational

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dimension which gives you information about what happened: location (it happened in thebig toe of your left foot), extent (more than the tip of the toe was involved), intensity (it wasa hard bump), how long the impact lasted, and what kind of impact it was (collision, notcrushing, or piercing).

These two aspects of the pain experience, the sensory-informational and the affective,are distinguishable. The ‘awfulness’ of a pain experience can be compared to the sensuous-ness of a sense experience and to the affective aspect of an anger experience. The awfulnessis not there just for the ride with the sensory-informational aspect. The ‘awfulness’ tells thestory of the stubbed toe in great detail, because it ‘wraps’ itself around the collision, in thetoe, extending this much, for so long. It is not a dumb, undifferentiated awfulness. It is anawfulness of this kind. (For the variety of dimensions along which ‘awfulness’ can beexperienced, see Clark 2006, 182.) Even in the case of phantom limb pain, where thereis no big toe to throb with pain, and no flat of a foot to be tingling with pins-and-needlestype of pain, the pain has to tell a story of where and what like. There is simply no painwithout a story to tell, no matter how vague it is (as when one ‘aches all over’), just asthere is no anger without a story to tell, and no perceptual experience which does notsay how things seem.

In all three cases of emotion, perception, and pain we seem to be dealing with some-thing that has a peculiar kind of unbreakable complexity. It is not just that we get to knowabout a dog running down the street, or a toe that has been stubbed, or a loss that has beensuffered. There is, one is tempted to say, something additional: the sensuousness, theawfulness, and the feeling. The problem is just this: the sensuousness (of seeing), theawfulness (of pain), and the feeling (of sadness) are not really ‘additional’. The veryact of having them implicates content as a matter of conceptual, rather than causal neces-sity. This is probably what we need to reconcile ourselves to if we are to begin to under-stand what emotion is.

5. Conclusion

The main burden of my discussion has been to recommend the view that, despite our abilityto distinguish conceptually between affect and cognition in emotion, this ability does notreflect a division at the level of reality. Emotion is experienced as a unity, and repeated fail-ures at analysis should convince us to think of it as such. Patheception, we have suggested,may be compared to perception, conception, and nociception. These are different capacitieswhich we have. They should be viewed as co-ordinate with, rather than subordinate to, eachother. This does not gainsay the fact that they are similar in many different and interestingways (which explains the constant attraction of reductive projects).

Instead of analyzing these different capacities into one another, it may be philosophi-cally more enlightening to look for patterns, relations, and structural similarities. Thiswill be a kind of ‘descriptive phenomenology’ – a step (if one so wishes) on the way towhat Strawson called ‘descriptive metaphysics’, which aims ‘to lay bare the mostgeneral features of our conceptual structure’ (Strawson 1959, 9).

AcknowledgmentsThe author wishes to thank Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, for a grantthat enabled him to start working on the subject of (political) emotions. Thanks are also due to theeditor and anonymous referees of this journal for many constructive remarks and suggestions forimprovement.

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Notes1. For a recent defense of ‘feeling’ theories of emotions, see Whiting (2009). In an earlier paper

Whiting (2006, 261) recognizes what many people will agree with, namely, that no contempor-ary philosophers have been willing to defend the view that ‘emotions are nothing more thantypes of feelings’.

2. For an overview of perceptualist theories of emotion see Salmela (2011, 1–29).3. Nussbaum’s attempt to deal with the problem of emotion-free evaluative judgments is not con-

vincing. Years after a sad event, feelings of sadness subside, but people continue to make thesame evaluative judgments as before. Nussbaum speaks of the ‘freshness’ (novelty, newness)of the evaluative judgment that can properly be identified with an emotion. Such a judgmenthas power to affect our attitude toward other propositions. She even suggests that passage oftime may bring about a change in estimate of value. But as Roberts suggests (1999, 797–798), a difference in ‘freshness’ in not a difference in judgment proper, nor does grievingconsist in one proposition affecting our attitude toward other propositions, nor is a change inestimate of value necessary for the subsiding of emotion.

4. Cf. also Stocker (1983, 21): ‘ . . . having fallen on the ice, the very same knowledge of (and wishto avoid) the dangers of walking on ice are “emotionally present” to me’. To speak of ‘the verysame knowledge of the dangers’ suggests that there is no change in content before and after.

5. Gunther (2004, 49) seems to go farther than Goldie, holding that there is change in content ifand only if there change in feeling (‘emotional phenomenology’). Thus if you find the jokeless funny after hearing it for the fourth time, then the content is not the same, even thoughit may be expressed in the same words. According to the author, ‘we lack the linguistic resourcesto differentiate . . . ’ (50). The claim is supported by reference to a comparison with ‘red’, whichcan refer to different levels of grain. But grain has no clear meaning in the context of a joke’scontent. It might have some meaning in the context of amusement at a joke’s content, as theauthor seems to suggest. Amusement does come in degrees. But this seems to drag attitudeinto content – attitude becomes part of content, instead of being attitude toward it.

6. Cf. Deonna and Teroni, (2012, 78): ‘there is no reason to think that [a] general attitude . . . haspsychological reality over and above that of its determinate instances . . . ’.

7. As Greenspan rightly says (1992, 293), discomfort (like pain) is a ‘general state of feeling of asort one would naturally want to get out of’.

8. The understanding which Deonna and Teroni (2012, 72), and Herzberg (2012, 76) seem to haveof Prinz’s view is very much based on this statement.

9. According to Prinz, ‘Dretske’s independently motivated theory of representation delivers a verysatisfying answer to the question about what sadness represents. It simply falls out of Dretske’stheory that sadness represents loss’ (Prinz 2007, 62).

10. Peirce is foremost among such philosophers. As Ramsey (2007, 22) reads him, ‘there can be nomeaning or representational content unless there is something or someone for whom the sign ismeaningful.’

11. This example, calling for cognitive involvement in order to distinguish between envy andresentment, is suggested by Richard Norman’s discussion (2002).

12. Prinz practically acknowledges this point when he says that ‘somatic signal [s] of the samebodily pattern can have distinct meanings on different occasions depending on the mentalmechanisms that caused that pattern to form’ (Prinz 2007, 66). The somatic signals, register-ing as this emotion or that, are disambiguated by reference to our knowledge of what causedthem (in our example, was it a perception of injustice, or seeing someone get ahead of me inthe race?).

13. Cf. Ramsey’s conclusion about ‘receptors’ (his term for mechanisms, or features, which nomi-cally detect, indicate, or respond to distal stimuli): ‘When we look at the role of receptors insideof cognitive systems, as described by cognitive theories that employ them, we see that the role isbetter described as something like a reliable causal mediator or relay circuit which, as such, isnot representational in nature’ (Ramsey 2007, 149).

14. This older meaning of ‘passion’ is well-preserved in the special-purpose religious use of theterm ‘the Passion of Christ’.

15. This example is made use of by Pit (2004, 27) in the context of discussing cognitive phenom-enology, or ‘what it is like to think that P’.

16. Recall Solomon’s statement, quoted earlier, ‘my anger is my judgment that John has wrongedme.’

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17. For a similar opposition to a dismembering analysis of seeing, see Hyman (1992, 291); for thecase of ‘thick’ ethical concepts, see Williams (1973).

18. Cases of blindsight may suggest that there could be ‘perceptual contact with the world unyokedto conscious portrayal’ (Sturgeon 2008, 114). It is not clear if ‘perceptual contact’ amounts to akind of perception. It is probably clearer that blindsight is not a kind of sight or seeing. Whatmatters to us is that sensuousness (‘conscious portrayal’, in Sturgeon’s terms), much likepain, or anger, ‘portrays’ things as being a certain way. Portrayal is of the essence.

Notes on contributorRaja Bahlul is Professor of Philosophy at UAE University. He has publications in the areas of meta-physics (identity of indiscernibles, universals), Islamic philosophy and theology (Ghazali, Avicenna)and contemporary Islamic social and political thought (democracy, secularism). He writes in Englishand in Arabic.

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