RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER SEVEN

On What the Little Prince Learned:
Emotions and Belief

Section II

Stocker suggests that many current philosophical accounts of the emotions are seriously skewed in that they cast emotions "wholly in terms of their non-affective contents" (1993:56). Whatever emotions are, most philosophers agree, they are not feelings and vice versa (e.g., Wittgenstein, Solomon, Sartre, Pritchard). Stocker suggests that not only is this a philosophical mistake or lacking in philosophical imagination, but also symptomatic of "our philosophical mistrust of emotions and feelings" (1993:57). This is true to such an extent as to involve, on the part of philosophers, trusting those psychological tendencies that are "central to dissociation and intellectualization, and even alexithymic and schizoid phenomena" (1993:57). In light of this penchant for psychologically aberrant analyses, I shall turn to an account of the emotions by a philosopher who is also a psychologist, Robert C. Roberts.

Roberts agrees that they are correct that emotions are not feelings, if by "feelings" philosophers are thinking of items such as

This follows from the fact that emotions have intentional aspects in that they can be about, of, for, at, or to something or other. It does not follow from this, however, that no feelings are emotions or vice versa. After all, there are various kinds of feelings.

Roberts asks us to consider cases such as feeling triumphant, self-confident, self-righteous, awkward, guilty, incompetent, ripped off, or excluded. He suggests that these feelings essentially involve (in contrast with other kinds of feeling) "the person's taking himself to be in a certain condition or taking himself to have a certain property" (1988:186). I can, for instance, "feel depressed without construing myself as depressed," but I cannot "feel incompetent or excluded without construing myself as incompetent or excluded" (1988:186-7). Of course, as Roberts notes, "construing oneself as triumphant or awkward is not sufficient for feeling triumphant or awkward" (1988:188). For example,

What is missing is any concern about being in the condition that the subject construes himself to be in. So, to feel guilty one must dislike being construed as guilty. Or to feel triumphant one must like winning the contest. In this category of feeling, then, having a certain feeling just is the serious concern-based construal of oneself as such and such.

Feelings, however, are not quite the same thing as emotions. Feelings are, obviously, felt. Emotions, though often felt, need not be so. Psychology, among its other tasks, deals with unfelt emotions. Unfelt emotions are not to be confused with emotions apart from feelings: unfelt anxiety can be accompanied by various feelings--increased heart rate, tension, and so on--but those phenomena do not count as feeling anxiety. And so emotions differ from feelings in that we can make sense of an emotion being a serious concern-based construal of oneself as such and such that, while often enough something felt, is able to be unfelt.

Emotions, moreover, are not directly reflexive in the way that mere feelings always are. With mere feelings "I construe myself as triumphant, awkward, guilty, and so forth" (1988:190). Emotions, however, are different. As Roberts writes:

Emotions, then, are intentional feelings, that is, feelings that are about or of various objects.

Let us take a look at Roberts' notions of "construal" and "concern" in more detail. Then we will be in a position to relate Roberts' notion of an emotion to judgments, bodily states, and responsible control. Construal first. A construal, Roberts says, "is a mental event or state in which one thing is grasped in terms of something else" where the event or state can be grasped in terms of "a perception, a thought, an image, a concept" or some "hard-to-specify structure of percept, concept, image, and thought" (1988:190-91). Phenomenologically speaking, a construal is not simply an "interpretation laid over a neutrally perceived object, but a characterization of the object, a way the object presents itself" (1988:192; recall Millar at this point). In an emotion this construal is phenomenologically inseparable from the relevant concern that is involved. So, for example, "[m]y view of that interviewer as powerful and contemptuous gives her a threatening look only if filtered through my concern to succeed" (1988:192). Consequently, a construal appears to its subject as true even if the subject might not affirm the truth of the construal. That is also why emotional construals involve serious concern.

Now on to concern. By "concern" Roberts means "desires and aversion, and the attachments and interests from which many of our desires and aversions derive" (1988:202). Concerns come in various sorts. For example,

Only occurrent concerns, however, seem able to ground emotions.

Emotions involve concern and some concerns are emotions, but that does not mean that it is viciously circular to explain emotions in terms of concerns. Love, for instance, is perhaps a kind of concern and sometimes an emotion as when it is manifest in compassion. Love in general, however, is expressed in ways "too various and conflicting for it to be an emotion" (1988:203). Depending how the object of love is construed, love may manifest itself in joy or indignation or fear or hope or grief. Thus, while love may be a concern and, in a particular manifestation, an emotion, it is not an emotion generally speaking but a disposition to a particular range of emotions. Thus, while all emotions are rooted in concerns--sometimes even concerns arising out of other emotions--there are concerns which are not emotions and some concerns which are not involved in any emotion (e.g., primitive physical aversion to certain odors).

Now on to judgments. It seems that there are regularly certain judgments that correspond to and accompany certain emotions. For instance, a particular fear is usually accompanied by a judgment that what is feared is dangerous. Nevertheless, emotions are not judgments. This is clear from several points. First, an irrational emotion is often one coupled with disbelief of the proposition that would be affirmed by the judgment ordinarily corresponding to that emotion. So, for instance, I can "be anxious about my children's safety, and remain so at the very moment of sincerely admitting that they are safe" (1988:195). That may be irrational, but "a mental state is no less an emotion for being irrational" (1988:195). Therefore, emotions are not identical with a certain kind of judgment.

Second, one can judge oneself to be, for instance, guilty, desire very much not to be guilty, and still fail to have the emotion of guilt. A subject can have, therefore, judgments and desires that might dispose her toward a certain emotion, but unless they bring her to construe herself and her situation in terms of them, they do not turn into an emotion. Thus, emotions are not judgments.

Finally, and this will be explored more below, a subject "has more options with respect to his emotions than he has with respect to his judgments" (1988:198). In particular, a subject "can control his emotions to an extent, and in a way, that it would be unfitting for a person to control his judgments" (1988:198). As we shall see, we do quite appropriately have indirect immediate control over at least some of our emotions and lack that capacity in respect to beliefs and judgments (remember our discussion in Chapter Two). Thus, emotions are not judgments.

The main relation between emotions and their ordinarily corresponding beliefs/judgments "is that they share a propositional content" (1988:201). In any particular case, the proposition which might be believed along with and in correspondence to the emotion, is the proposition that "shapes or 'informs'" the construal involved in that emotion. But since a "construal is a necessary condition for the emotion's occurring, while the judgment is not, emotions are better thought of as construals than as beliefs or judgments" (1988:201). Judgments and beliefs are also related to emotions in another way. For the construal in an emotion to be seriously concern-based, what is specified by the proposition that shapes the construal must have the appearance of truth for the subject. But what has the appearance of truth also tends to be what is believed or judged to be the case.

Let us turn to bodily sensations. While emotions can be a kind of feeling and while they are not just bodily sensations (contra William James), emotions are closely related to bodily sensations in a wide range of cases. Bodily sensations do get "taken up into the construals that we call emotions" and exert a "steering function on the emotion[s]" (1988:207, 208). Thus, a burning feeling in one's mid-section (associated with anxiety) inclines one to see the world as threatening or a flushed, warm face can "enhance one's sense of being in an embarrassing situation" (1988:208). These sensations also play an important role in identifying what emotions one is experiencing.

With these points in hand, let us turn to the responsible control of our emotions.