Abstract
Recent accounts of emotional action intend to explain such actions without reference to goals. Nevertheless, these accounts fail to specify the difference between goals and other kinds of motivational states. I offer two remedies. First, I develop an account of goals based on Michael Smith’s arguments for the Humean theory of motivation. On this account, a goal is a unified representation that determines behavior selection criteria and satisfaction conditions for an action. This opens the possibility that mental processes could influence behavior without such a unified representation and hence, without goals. Second, I develop a model of emotions and appetites on which behavior selection criteria can be decoupled from satisfaction conditions. If this model is correct, then in many cases, there is no unified representation that determines the behavior selection criteria and satisfaction conditions of emotional actions. In contrast with many traditional accounts of action, the model suggests the following: Whether or not a behavior constitutes an action does not depend on the agent’s grasp of the behavior’s aim. Rather, a behavior constitutes an action if it was organized by the agent, where an agent can organize actions without a coherent grasp of their aim. Some emotional actions are manifestations of this possibility.
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Notes
Hursthouse does not give a definition of emotions or emotional action, aside from saying that they are actions people take because they are in the grip of an emotion. I will follow her in this. A definition is superfluous so long as there is an identifiable phenomenon or set of examples of actions (such as those listed prior to this note), which all agree are emotional actions.
Several clarifications are in order here. First, if one is committed to a dependency relation between reasons for action and goal representations, as is Smith (1987), then Hursthouse’s second condition (the agent did not act for a reason) would mean that emotional actions do not have goals. But second, I think it is more plausible to say that the agent did not have a goal in acting than it is to say that she had no reason for acting. As Davidson notes, it seems natural in some cases to say that an agent’s only reason for acting is that she wanted to (Davidson 2001, p. 6). Applied to cases of emotional action, we could say that sometimes the agent’s only reason for acting was that she felt angry or that the action felt appropriate in some sense. I make no attempt here to argue for or against the plausibility of this claim. Rather, my aim is to show that some emotional actions do not have goals irrespective of whether they are done for reasons. If this argument is successful, then it is open to me either to agree with Hursthouse that these actions are not done for a reason or to take on Davidson’s (tentative) suggestion that they are done for a reason (where the emotion is part of the reason), while denying that the agent’s reason is constituted by one of her goals.
For further discussion, see Hursthouse (1991), pp. 60–61
As Hursthouse (1991, p. 60) points out, piecemeal explanations will not suffice.
So far, Smith’s description is mostly metaphorical. For a recent criticism of the direction of fit metaphor, see Frost (2014). On Frost’s view, Smith is not ultimately committed to the metaphor, because, as I discuss below, he replaces the metaphor with a functional characterization. In what follows, I sidestep recent discussions of the direction of fit metaphor. There are several reasons for this: First, most of the problems identified for the metaphor concern its usefulness for distinguishing beliefs from desires and other pro-attitudes (Milliken 2008; Schueler 1991; Sobel and Copp 2001). My interest is in whether emotional actions are goal-directed, but an argument to this conclusion need not be threatened by a permissive account of goals that fails to rule out some beliefs. If I show that emotions do not have goals on such an account, then I will have proven more, not less, than I set out to prove. So it matters little whether states of other kinds are adequately distinguished by having the opposite direction of fit from goals. Second, most discussions of direction of fit so far are criticisms of Smith’s broader account of action (not his account of goals). Whether these criticisms are correct seems irrelevant to my purpose here. If my arguments concerning emotional action are correct, then they can serve as a basis for criticizing Smith’s account of action (as I do in Sect. 5) by showing how some behaviors constitute actions even though they plausibly have no goals, even on his own characterization of goals. Third and most importantly, none of the counterexamples to Smith’s dispositional account of belief and desire undermine its applicability to the goal concept (Milliken 2008; Schueler 1991; Sobel and Copp 2001). Consider for example, Sobel and Copp’s (2001) fair-weather fan example: Sue wants the 49ers to do well, but if they begin to perform poorly, she starts wanting another team to do well. In this case, it certainly seems right that Sue has a desire that does not tend to endure when she perceives the negation of its content. However, it does not seem right to say that Sue has a goal with this feature. At the very least, it seems Smith could easily address this worry as applied to goals by pointing that a goal tends to persist in the perception of not-p unless overridden by another goal of the agent (e.g., the goal of rooting for a successful team). But in that case, the susceptibility to be overridden is not a tendency of the goal under consideration (e.g., the goal of helping her team to do well) but rather a tendency of another goal (and indeed, part of its tendency to make it the case that p). Thus, Sobel and Copp’s case seems to me a problem for reducing desires to goals, but not a problem for characterizing goals in terms of the conditions and constraints discussed in this section.
Cf. Orlandi (2014, p. 12).
Perhaps Smith can just point out (and reasonably so, given his interests) that thermostats do not perceive anything. In that case, to specify which systems have goals, we would need to spell out which systems have perception. This would be an interesting way of proceeding but unfortunately not one that I can explore here. Thanks to Alexander Morgan for pointing out this avenue of inquiry.
Cf. Bermúdez (2005, pp. 75–81)
Notice the shift from a necessary condition on having a goal to a necessary condition on goal-directed behavior. The former is more difficult to specify in connection with behavior, given that a system can have goals that it never acts on. Here, I am concerned with the simpler task of saying whether a behavior sequence is produced by a (posited) goal as opposed to some other state.
It is tempting to think that such information is represented as means-ends beliefs, but yielding to such a temptation threatens over-intellectualizing action. Humans and other animals likely represent means-ends information in other forms, such as non-conceptual representations of affordances.
This is of central importance for a theory of goals and of goal-directed behavior. For instance, Woodfield (1976, pp. 92–102) criticizes behaviorist theories of goal-directed action on the basis that they cannot explain this critical feature of goals.
By contrast with Russell’s famous account of goal-directed behavior (Russell 1922, Chapter 3), this constraint is predictive rather than being conceptually necessary. The ceteris paribus is meant to allow for certain exceptional cases, in which an agent has information from which she could infer that the goal has been achieved, but does not draw the relevant inferences. To me, it seems safe to say that the cases of emotional action I discuss above are not exceptional in this way.
Note that some goals are never fully realized, such as the goal of maintaining optimal physical fitness.
There is reason to doubt whether Davidson would define pro-attitudes as “psychological states with which the world must fit.” Unlike Smith, Davidson does not explicitly aim to reduce reasons for action to goals. So it seems open to him to deny that pro-attitudes involve goals. In that case, the view of emotional actions I present below may be in line with a broadly Davidsonian (or even a Humean view).
These are undoubtedly oversimplifications of anger and fear, which even in nonhuman animals may actually incorporate several feedback systems. Caroline and Robert Blanchard, for instance, theorize that anti-predator responses in rats are controlled by competing aims of threat detection and avoidance, although they do not describe these competing aims in terms of feedback systems (see e.g., Blanchard and Blanchard 1987)
This is the part of the theory that originally led scientists to focus on involuntary facial expressions (which are hypothesized to function as signals) as a main line of evidence for the existence of basic emotions (e.g., Ekman 1972; Matsumoto and Willingham 2009). Nevertheless, it is obviously not true that the only function of emotions concerns sociality. For instance, disgust and fear, both considered basic emotions, have obvious individualistic functions of protecting the organism from various threats to the body’s survival and proper function.
See Griffiths (1997) for an early and influential philosophical perspective on basic emotion theories, which he calls “affect program” theories of emotion
I owe this term to John Doris (2009, p. 71).
Ekman and others allow that people can learn culture-specific display rules that are somewhat like habits for controlling the emotional response (Friesen 1973). Nevertheless, Ekman and others maintain that it is not easy to suppress or control the emotional response voluntarily. It is the habitual nature of display rules that supposedly allows them to interfere with the emotional response.
Cf. Gendler (2008, p. 634)
This is to say that some basic emotions are likely influenced by Pavlovian learning mechanisms (see e.g. Dayan and Berridge 2014) that use an organism’s individual experience to expand or contract the range of elicitors for a given basic emotion. In my manner of speaking, the reference signal for fear shifts to avoiding a larger class of entities and situations as the range of elicitors for fear increases due to Pavlovian learning processes. See Kelly (2011, Chapter 2) for an account of how simple appraisal mechanisms for disgust might have evolved to flexibly adapt to an organism’s environment and thus how they explain the cross cultural variation of disgust elicitors and also their intra-cultural stability. Because of this flexibility, Ekman (Ekman 2003, p. 66) thinks basic emotions are “open programs” in Mayr’s (1974) sense. By contrast with closed programs, open programs can be modified over the course of development (e.g. by learning). Moreover, they can be open in this way and also ballistic (in the manner just described). The fact that they are open programs only means that the ballistic response (or its triggers) can be modified over the organism’s lifespan, not necessarily within a given emotional episode
Relational aims and reference signals as I call them are different from what have been called relational goals (Scarantino 2015; Scarantino and Nielsen 2015). First, relational goals are understood as a motivational aspect of emotions: they represent goals to be executed (or not) by rational control processes. Thus they are implemented by processes for emotion production as opposed to appraisal. By contrast, on my articulation of the basic emotion picture, reference signals are better understood as informational in nature: they are the part of the emotion that carries (imperfect) information about the organism’s relation to the environment and perhaps also about the ecological success condition of the emotion’s relational aim. Accordingly, they are implemented by processes for appraisal or elicitation rather than emotion production.
A second and related point is that relational goals appear to be attributable to agents. This appearance comes out when Scarantino and Nielsen speak of the deliberative phase of rational control processes in emotional actions: “In the deliberative phase, the emoter must determine whether the relational goal of the emotion should be pursued and, if so, how it should be pursued, translating the abstract goal of the emotion (e.g. attacking an opponent) into a set of situated sub-goals that achieve the abstract goal in a concrete context (e.g. picking up a bottle from a nearby table and hitting the opponent on the head with it)” (p. 2989). On this account, insofar as an emotion influences action, it does so because the agent takes on the relational goal specified by the emotion. By contrast, the relational aim of fear is not usually attributable to the agent in this way. The emoter may have no clear grasp or understanding of what elicits an emotional episode (e.g., one that incorporates concepts of “danger” or “threat”) in general or in a specific instance. For example, the episode could be triggered by low level sensory stimuli or simple associations thereof. More specifically, it could be triggered by an association of a particular sound with pain (or nausea or pleasure, etc.); an association that exists because of a previous pairing of that sound with a pain (cf. Seymour et al. 2007). In cases like this, the emoter may be unaware of both the immediate cause of their fear or of the relational aim that fear serves (e.g., to help predict and avoid bodily damage).
In connection with this point, cf. Goldie (2000, p. 34).
As a result, my use of the theoretical term, “affect program” is not continuous with its use in basic emotion theory. For instance, Ekman does not think that affect programs include innate action tendencies of the sort I posit here (see Ekman 2003, p. 268 n. 8). Nevertheless, I find this a useful way of picking out the subcomponent of emotions that is responsible for emotion production.
When someone has a panic attack on an airplane because they are afraid of flying, it may be because the appraisal mechanism for fear is triggered and also the action tendency to escape or avoid a threat. Nevertheless, there may be no clear object from which flight/escape is directed. One way of explaining this is by supposing that appraisal mechanisms do not share information with affect programs about what triggered the emotion. This possibility may also help explain certain features of displaced aggression discussed below.
These features of the model give it a strong resemblance to the Motivational Theory of Emotions (Scarantino 2015). Perhaps it is even an instance of that theory, though see fn. 19 for what may be a substantive difference between the two models. Perhaps the most important contribution of this model above and beyond the Motivational Theory of Emotions is the explicit recognition that the behavior selection criteria and satisfaction conditions of emotions can come apart. Regardless, the Motivational Theory of Emotions has likely influenced my thinking on this topic in more ways than I am able to trace in this paper.
I say “partially” because emotions are likely to be shaped not only by the forces of natural selection in response to a basic life problem but also by phylogenetic constraints imposed by the organism’s ancestry. See e.g. Griffiths (2006, 2007). This is why different organisms respond very differently to the same basic life problem. For example, given their differences in size (relative to predators), body plan and ecological niche, the moose and the mouse are likely to respond to predators in extremely different ways.
Recalibrational theories make a wide range of accurate predictions concerning, among other things, punishment, revenge, forgiveness, and confession. See for example, the work of Aaron Sell, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby and others (McCullough et al. 2012; Petersen et al. 2010, 2012; Sell 2005, 2011; Sell et al. 2009).
I am inclined to think that anger has a single function of dealing with goal obstructions, and that is why it is so closely connected with violated expectations of reward or non-punishment (Berkowitz 1989, 2012). On this view, WTRs should be understood in these terms: I expect to be “rewarded” (or not punished) with a certain quality of will from others, and those expectations are violated when I register their ill-will (for discussion see, e.g., revoked reference).
This might be a feature of anger rather than a glitch. Evolutionary psychologists are keen to point out cases in which aggression is sensitive to reputational benefits (Kurzban et al. 2007). There is even some evidence in primates that displaced aggression (also known as “redirected aggression”) deters subsequent aggression (Aureli et al. 1992).
This is a simplification. Inverse models and some form of practical reasoning are probably also required (see, e.g., Pacherie 2008, pp. 191–194), but a forward model captures the lion’s share of the explanatory burden here. A Kalman filter is another component that can play a similar role to a forward model. See e.g. Grush (2009) for further discussion.
One way to implement this would be for the person to have a concept of what satisfies a given emotion. Such a concept would be similar to a response-dependent concept (e.g., the OUTRAGEOUS, or “that which elicits outrage”), but instead of capturing that which emotions respond to, it captures that which satisfies emotions (e.g., RETRIBUTION or “that which satisfies outrage”).
So, at least some action theorists wish to subsume emotional actions (or at least a considerable swath of them) under the class of rational actions, in virtue of their being more directly explicable in terms of beliefs and desires. Another way of addressing the problems raised by these emotional actions is to deny that they are really actions. Yet there appears to be wide agreement among the parties to this discussion that many of the emotional behaviors introduced by Hursthouse are in fact actions (Smith 1998, 21–23; Goldie 2000, 26–28, 34–37). To my knowledge, none of Hursthouse’s interlocutors have undertaken to show that her entire range of examples are not actions.
Scarantino and Nielsen (2015) also criticize Smith’s account as ad hoc. They accuse Smith of postulating sui generis emotional desires that can be “elastically stretched to fit whatever properties emotions may be found to have…” (p. 2986). For example, the desires necessary to explain displaced aggression would need to differ from ordinary desires in terms of their strength and capacity to override reasoning. The criticism I make here is slightly different. Even if we assume that Smith can explain the relevant cases with ordinary desires, he still needs some principled basis for determining which kinds of desires an emotion will instate, where different kinds of desires are individuated by content rather than strength or impulsivity.
I, for one, doubt that the agent is trying to put the door “in its place.” However, some have defended a claim along these lines (see, e.g. Nussbaum 2016, pp. 18–19).
The details of the experiment suggest to me that participants would take on this goal. All participants are led to believe that a confederate got three more anagrams correct on the initial task.
On the importance of forward models in motor commands, see Kandel et al (2012, pp. 744–760). Stepping movements over smooth ground are spinally mediated and therefore probably do not require a forward model. Nevertheless, walking over uneven terrain and avoiding obstacles in one’s path requires visual guidance that appears to be implemented by the posterior parietal cortex, since lesions to this area interfere with the avoidance of obstacles (Kandel et al. 2012, p. 828). Moreover, it seems likely that the function of this area is to implement forward models of limb movements.
Given that his primary theoretical interests are metaethical, this is understandable.
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In more ways than one, writing this paper has helped me understand how crucial feedback can be. It would not have reached its current form without generous help from Olivia Bailey, José Luis Bermúdez, Matt Bower, John Doris, Colin Klein, Charlie Kurth, Ron Mallon, Alexander Morgan, Brooke Robb, Elizabeth Schechter, Maura Tumulty, and numerous reviewers and conference attendees.
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Wiegman, I. Emotional Actions Without Goals. Erkenn 87, 393–423 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00200-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00200-8