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Seeing emotions without mindreading them

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Abstract

According to direct perception approaches we directly see others’ emotions, and by seeing emotions we immediately ascribe them to others. Direct perception is explicitly presented as an alternative account of mindreading (the ability to recognize and attribute mental states to others), but it also contains an implicit thesis about the extent of the reach of perception. In this paper emotion perception is defended: siding with the direct perception approach I claim that we can simply see emotions and not just low level features of the facial and bodily displays, but contra the direct perception approach I argue that seeing emotions is not sufficient for recognizing emotions as mental states in order to ascribe them to others.

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Notes

  1. As a reviewer points out, this description of the phenomenology is perhaps oversimplified: in the case of an actor merely pretending to be sad we might have the phenomenal experience of an “acted sadness” only, because, unlike the real sadness case, we do not rush to help the actor on the stage. I wonder whether this is the correct description of the phenomenology. For instance, when we don’t know that the person in front of us is just pretending to be sad we cannot distinguish between the two experiences. However, when we know she is merely pretending it is an open question whether the phenomenology changes or the interpretation and the action possibilities triggered by the experience change. What matters for my purposes is that there is some significant degree of emotional response that remains even when one knows it is only pretense, even if there is no complete overlap. This phenomenological claim is hard to deny.

  2. One could argue that concepts also exhibit some context-dependency. For example in Rozin et al.’s (1990) experiments, subjects were more reluctant to drink water from a bottle with the label “poison” even if they knew for sure that the bottle contained water. Context-independency might come in degrees, with non-conceptual content showing the lowest rate of context-independency and conceptual content showing higher rates of context-independency. Prototypes (Rosch 1983) might be intermediate between non-conceptual and full-blown conceptual content.

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  1. Institut für Philosophie II Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätstr. 150, D-44780, Bochum, Germany

    Joulia Smortchkova

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Smortchkova, J. Seeing emotions without mindreading them. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 525–543 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9473-z

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