Abstract
We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure of emotion and show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires—they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it.
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Notes
One might wonder if these commitments about the belief-desire system and central processing are really what all Humeans are committed to. Thus, for example, one may take Davidson to really be concerned about our practices of giving explanations of action rather than making any point about our mental architecture. I take it, however, that for at least most of the emotion theorists who claim that the Humean picture is mistaken, they are really targeting the claim that the belief-desire system constitutes a genuine part of our mental architecture that explains and causes action. Insofar as one is worried merely about our practice of providing explanations, however, I grant later that appealing to a belief-desire pair is necessary though insufficient to make some emotional actions intelligible. Thanks to various members of the ANU Philosophy of Mind Work-in-progress group, especially Daniel Stoljar, Bronwyn Finnigan and Garrett Cullity, for helping me to see this point.
Arguably, Hursthouse is primarily concerned again with our practices of explanation rather than any claim about our mental architecture. However, her line of thought can and has been (e.g. in Döring 2003) taken to challenge the claim that the belief-desire system alone causally generates action and this is the claim that I want to defend.
One who is committed to the standard Fodorean view might point out here that in calling the central belief-desire system domain general they do not mean to imply that the relevant beliefs and desires will always get to combine, merely that they have the potential to do so. However, systematic failures of combination in cases of emotional action, even when the relevant belief and desire is made salient, does raise the question of whether the belief-desire system is being engaged and these cases do call from some explanation. I show how one can provide this explanation later (Sect. 4.2.4).
Scarantino uses the term ‘relational goal’ to play a different role in his account. In his account, the relational goal is goal that is adopted by the agent in the grip of an emotion. What I want, however, is a term that captures the function of the emotion in the organism irrespective of which particular goal the emotion leads the agent to adopt.
In calling these changes behavioural dispositions, I don’t mean anything more than that the body is disposed to generate these various bodily changes when the agent in the grip of an emotion. I don’t mean to suggest, for example, that the phenomenology of these bodily changes is a kind of dispositional phenomenology. These changes, and the feeling of these changes, are presumably occurrent. I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me to clarify this.
The role I have sketched for emotion here is therefore similar to the notion that emotions are irruptive motivational states (Griffiths 1997). They disrupt our previous pattern of reasoning and action by modulating desires in the belief-desire system.
I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
That this is the right way to think about automaticity is of course controversial, but I address some worries about this in Sect. 5.1.
Hunger is complicated; there are appear to be in fact three distinct pathways through which our appetite is modulated, triggered by a variety of such events as the level of satiety and perception of food intake. See (Sternson and Eiselt 2017).
Another worry one may have here is whether the kind of process I invoke is a process that is incompatible with another standard commitment of the Humean theory of motivation: that reason is not a process that can control the passions. The strongest way of formulating this claim, I take it, is Neil Sinhababhu’s formulation: “Desire that M is created as the conclusion of reasoning if and only if the reasoning combines desire that E with belief that M would raise E’s probability. It is eliminated as the conclusion of reasoning if and only if the reasoning eliminates such a combination.” (2017: 2) The formulation is supposed to be a restriction on the ways in which reasoning is supposed to generate desire. Reasoning, as I have sketched in the introduction, should be understood in terms of interaction among beliefs and desires in the domain general central-processing system. The basic idea then is that central processing only generates new desires as a result of means-end reasoning. The modulatory process that I am proposing, however, does not occur within the central processing system and so does not fall afoul of this standard Humean commitment. I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
Nussbaum reviews the literature on this in (2001, pp.174–237).
I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
I think this also suggests a weakness in Deonna and Teroni’s (2012, 2015) claim that emotions are felt bodily attitudes towards some object. According to them, the phenomenology of emotional experience is best captured in terms of our body being felt to be globally poised to take a certain attitude towards some object. Thus, for example, “In fear, one feels one’s own body poised to defuse something; in anger, one feels its preparedness to deal with it in an actively hostile way” (2015: 303) As I note, however, while the relational aim of an emotion does individuate it, that relational aim is not necessarily chief among the desires that the emotion modulates and these desires can vary depending on the developmental history of the agent. The global felt motivational profile can thus vary for the same emotion. For example, we can imagine an agent who, perhaps because of an abusive childhood, has desires to avoid some person whenever that person angers her. Her bodily felt attitude would not, then, be one that is best described as being “prepared to deal with [the offender] in an actively hostile way”. It may take years of therapy perhaps to even recognise that it was anger all along that she felt towards the various abusive figures in her life. The variability of the modulated desires, then, puts pressure on a view that individuates emotions according to particular felt motivational patterns.
Wiegman conducts most of the discussion in terms of ‘goals’ rather than ‘desires’, but he makes it clear that his account of goals aims to capture the relevant mental state that Smith talks about in his defence of Humeanism i.e. desires.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefitted from two anonymous referees of Philosophical Studies whose comments greatly improved this paper. I am grateful to Bronwyn Finnigan, Neil Sinhababu, the members of the ANU MSPT Reading Group, the ANU Philosophy of Mind Work-in-progress group and ‘Colin’s Crowd’ for valuable discussion. Finally, I’d like to especially thank Colin Klein, Philip Pettit, Victoria McGeer and Michael Nielson for reading and providing invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Yip, B. Emotions as modulators of desire. Philos Stud 179, 855–878 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01697-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01697-y