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Emotion as High-level Perception

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Abstract

According to the perceptual theory of emotions, emotions are perceptions of evaluative properties. The account has recently faced a barrage of criticism recently by critics who point out varies disanalogies between emotion and paradigmatic perceptual experiences. What many theorists fail to note however, is that many of the disanalogies that have been raised to exclude emotions from being perceptual states that represent evaluative properties have also been used to exclude high-level properties from appearing in the content of perception. This suggests that (1) emotions are perceptions of high level properties and (2) perceptual theorists can marshal the arguments used by proponents of high-level perception to defend the perceptual theory. This paper therefore defends an account of emotion as high-level perception.

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Notes

  1. That emotions represent some situation as impinging on one’s concerns may lead to an objection here. It seems unlikely that emotions have a kind of self-reference to the agent that is represented in the content of the emotion. Perhaps certain emotions (e.g. pride) might involve some kind of self-reference but it seems implausible that fear of the dog involves representing myself and my bodily integrity in the content of the emotion somehow. However, the self-referential nature of the emotional content is best understood as following from the egocentric, perspectival nature of emotion in a manner analogous to the egocentric nature of perception in general. Perception always presents objects from ‘my point of view’ e.g. that red house is presented as a red house seen from such and such a perspective which I hold. However, that does not mean that I am somehow represented in the content of the perception. In the same way, to see the death of my grandfather in terms of an irrevocable loss of something deeply concerning to me does not mean that I am somehow represented in the content of the perception, only that it is an irrevocable loss of great value represented from my point of view. See (de Sousa 1987; Deonna 2006) for a discussion of the perspectival nature of emotion. I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.

  2. What it means for some thought to be conceptual or non-conceptual is a thorny issue. Tappolet frames the distinction in terms of the structure of the content of a certain thought. According to her, “concepts can be defined as inferentially relevant constituents of content” (2016, p. 17)—i.e. they are structured in a manner that allows for inferential connections between different thoughts. In my view, the best way to understand what it is for some thought to have content structured in this manner is for the thought to satisfy Evans’ generality constraint: “If a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F then he must have the conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is G, of every property of being G of which he has a conception.” (Evans, 1982, p. 104) Conceptual thought thus implies systemically recombinable representational ability. See (Camp 2009) for discussion. I’d like to thank Philip Pettit for discussion on this point.

  3. Perhaps emotion may differ from paradigmatic cases of perception in its implementation machinery, but this does not obviously mean that it plays a different functional role. This is an important point that is relevant in responding to Mitchell’s (2019) affective representation view.

  4. I’d like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helping me to clarify my epistemological commitments here.

  5. See Silins (2019) for an overview of the literature on perceptual justification.

  6. Vance (2014) makes a similar point in the context of cognitive penetration of perception and emotion by some other belief, but I believe the point may be generalised to include the developmental etiology of the perception or emotion.

  7. That high-level perception provides immediate justification for high-level contents is also controversial, but see (Silins 2013) for a defence of this claim.

  8. This echoes McDowell’s (1979) point that evaluative perception is available only to the virtuous who have the right kinds of upbringing.

  9. Deonna (2006) makes a similar comparison between emotional disorders and systematic perceptual error.

  10. I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address this objection.

  11. Interestingly, Salmela himself points out one exception to this in the case of perceptual facts. This is the case of skilled perception. As he notes (2011, p. 19), experienced chess players can perceive the implications of moves they could have made and this perception develops only with careful practice. The ordinary folk lack access to these facts. However, it is precisely along the lines of skilled perception that I want to model my perceptual account of emotion.

  12. See e.g. D’Arms and Jacobson (2006), McDowell (1985), Wiggins (1976) I defend such an account as well in (Yip MS).

  13. The debate on high versus low level perception is one that is carried out within proponents who hold a broadly representational view of perception and the mind. One my wonder what implication there might be for my argument if one adopts an anti-representational view, such as some variety of enactivism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore this issue, but let me make a couple of brief comments here.

    Firstly, note that enactivist accounts have been applied to perception in particular (e.g. Noë, 2005; O’Regan and Noë, 2001). Thus, enactive accounts of perception aim to show that perception is not simply the activation of some internal representation in the brain but is an action of exploring the environment and is thus partly constituted by this interaction. An enactive approach to emotion might suggest something similar for emotion. Thus, for example, Colombetti (2007) argues that emotional appraisals (which I understand in terms of concern-based construal) are not constituted by some internal representation but by some kind of interaction between the brain, body and the environment. Depending on how these claims are fleshed out, an enactivist approach may well provide more reason to suggest that emotion and perception are akin to one another. Secondly, note that at least on Noë’s account of enactive perception, vision is “a mode of exploration of the world that is mediated by knowledge of what we call sensorimotor contingencies” (O’Regan & Noë, 2001, p. 940). Thus, knowledge of the sensorimotor laws that govern our interaction with objects has to play a role in generating our visual experience of even low-level properties such as shape. The role that such knowledge plays could seem like the kind of ‘informational enrichment’ (See §1.2, 2.2) that has been claimed to be problematic for high-level perception as well as perceptual accounts of the emotion. If Noë is right, then, this is another reason to think that such objections to the perceptual theory are less problematic than it seems.

  14. This is of course related to Moore’s Open Question argument. Even if one points to the non-evaluative properties that form the supervening base of some evaluative property, there will always be an open question whether the evaluative property is realised. See (Echeverri 2019) for discussion on this point.

  15. Thanks to Victoria McGeer and Daniel Stoljar for discussion on this point.

  16. Notice also that this suggests that the idea that emotions are always dependent on cognitive bases in personal-level representation is false. One can represent the evaluative property in perception without representing the non-evaluative properties which form its supervening base. To give another example in the emotional case, someone who is unfortunately attuned to the lechery of certain kinds of men might find some person who is overtly respectable disgusting without necessarily being able to pin down why. Presumably, she would be attuned to certain cues in the situation and sub-personally register certain non-evaluative features of the situation, but these non-evaluative features do not appear in the personal-level representation of perception. What does appear is the evaluative property of being disgusting. I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this point.

  17. It may be helpful here as well to consider that olfactory, gustatory and tactile perception might also occur in the same way. I become aware of the sourness of that fruit by becoming aware of its producing a certain sensation on my tongue, or the roughness of the carpet by becoming aware of its producing a certain sensation on my skin. These are situations where the implementational vehicle appears different from that of visual perception and plausibly one where, to use Mitchell’s language, our being affected in a certain way represents some object as having a certain property. Thanks to Philip Pettit and Colin Klein for pointing this out to me.

  18. Camp (2009) also argues that some animals can plausibly be credited with conceptual thought by showing how a wide range of animals could be seen to satisfy the generality constraint in their thought.

  19. See (Nussbaum, 2001, pp. 119–38) for a stirring account in narrative form of the complex emotional life of two dogs.

  20. We may therefore take the point that McDowell (1994) makes in his defence of the conceptuality of perception: “We do not need to say that we have what mere animals have, non-conceptual content, and we have something else as well, since we can conceptualise that content and they cannot. Instead we can say that we have what mere animals have, perceptual sensitivity to features of our environment, but we have it in a special form.”

  21. There is already evidence that some of the more complicated emotions arise only after children have acquired certain conceptual abilities. Thus, the capacity for self-recognition is required for self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment or shame (see Lewis et al., 1989).

  22. Thanks to Colin Klein, Daniel Stoljar, Justin D’Ambrosio, Philip Pettit, Victoria McGeer and two anonymous referees for reading and providing invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I’d also like to thank the members of the ANU Philosophy of Mind work-in progress group as well as ‘Colin’s Crowd’ for helpful feedback on this paper.

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Yip, B. Emotion as High-level Perception. Synthese 199, 7181–7201 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03109-4

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