Explaining action by emotion

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 53, Issue 211, 2003, Pages 214-230

  Döring, Sabine A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DUISBURG ESSEN   (Germany)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 54449100125     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9213.00307     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. See, e.g., Donald Davidson, 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes', repr. in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 3-19
2. P. Goldie, The Emotions: a Philosophical Exploration (Oxford UP, 2000), ch. 5
3. see also his 'Explaining Expression of Emotion', Mind, 109 (2000), pp. 25-38
4. As the article is an extract from the book, I refer exclusively to the latter. See also M. Smith, 'The Possibility of Action', in J. Bransen (ed.), Human Action, Deliberation and Causation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 17-41
5. R. Hursthouse, 'Arational Actions', Journal of Philosophy, 88 (1991), pp. 57-68
6. See M. Smith, 'The Humean Theory of Motivation', Mind, 96 (1987), pp. 36-61
7. and his The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), ch. 4
8. Some would question whether expressions of emotions are actions. In my judgement, the general category of action is one with many subvarieties. I follow Brian O'Shaughnessy in holding that what makes something an action is that it is caused in a suitable way by one of the agent's tryings. Trying is present in the successful cases as well as in the failures. Anyone who tries to kick the table and fails because of some blockage of the neural signals would be surprised. See B. O'Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge UP, 1980), Vol. II, chs 9 and 11-15
9. On the analogy between perception and the emotions see R. de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (MIT Press, 1987), pp. 149-56 and ch. 7
10. also L. Charland, 'Feeling and Representing: Computational Theory and the Modularity of Affect', Synthese, 105 (1996), pp. 273-301. Thanks are due to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to Charland's paper
11. See, e.g., P. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are (Chicago UP, 1997)
12. It is this dispositional conception of desires to which their interpretation in terms of their characteristic world-to-mind direction of fit amounts. See Smith, 'The Humean Theory of Motivation', p. 52
13. Some claim that desires have an evaluative content too: see, e.g., G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), §§37ff
14. de Sousa, 'The Good and the True', Mind, 83 (1974), pp. 534-51
15. and The Rationality of Emotion, pp. 20, 122-3
16. and T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Belknap, 1998), pp. 38-41
17. I follow J. David Velleman in rejecting this claim. As Velleman argues, desires are directed at the attainable: 'The Guise of the Good', Noûs, 26 (1992), pp. 3-26, at p. 17
18. See de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion, pp. 122-3
19. W. Lyons, Emotion (Cambridge UP, 1980), pp. 99-104
20. A. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 187-94
21. See C. Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (MIT Press, 1992), in particular ch. 3
22. and 'Scenarios, Contents and Perception, in T. Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience (Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. 105-35
23. Robert C. Roberts is particularly clear on this. His view is that emotions are a certain kind of 'verisimilar concernful construals', and 'By "verisimilar" I mean to say that the construal has, for the construer, the appearance of truth, whether or not she would affirm the truth of the construal': 'What an Emotion Is: a Sketch', Philosophical Review, 97 (1988), pp. 183-209, at p. 191
24. By contrast, Robert Solomon even claims that emotions can be reduced to evaluative judgements: The Passions (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), pp. 125-32
25. W.P. Alston, 'Emotion and Feeling', in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), Vol. II, pp. 479-86, at p. 485
26. Opponents of this claim, who in my view tend to mistake the mere disposition towards an emotion for the emotion itself, are, e.g., E. Bedford, 'Emotions', in V.C. Chappell (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 110-26
27. G. Pitcher, 'Emotion', Mind, 74 (1965), pp. 326-46, at p. 338
28. Solomon, The Passions, pp. 96-102
29. To quote Roberts again, an emotion has a content that is 'concernful'. See his 'What an Emotion Is', p. 191
30. R. Zajonc, 'Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences', in American Psychologist, 35 (1980), pp. 151-75
31. This is also pointed out by Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: the Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Touchstone, 1998), p. 68
32. See Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, pp. 25-7 and 93-7
33. See S.A. Döring and C. Peacocke, 'Handlungen, Gründe und Emotionen', in S.A. Döring and V. Mayer (eds), Die Moralität der Gefühle (Berlin: Akademie, 2002), pp. 81-103