Abstract
Recalcitrant emotions, such as fear of flying, are emotions that persist even though they are in tension with the emoter’s considered belief. A widely accepted argument against cognitivist theories of emotion holds that recalcitrant emotions show that emotions are more like sensory states than like thoughts or beliefs. I show that this argument does not succeed: Emotions are usually sensitive to our changing beliefs in a way that is more akin to cognitive states than to sensations. Moreover, empirical evidence strongly suggests that beliefs sometimes behave much like recalcitrant emotions do.
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Notes
Here, I count as cognitivist views which would reduce emotions to (or identify them with) cognitive states such as judgment or belief (Nussbaum, 2004; Solomon, 1993), as well as views which claim merely that a cognitive state such as belief or judgment is a constituent part of emotion, such as belief-desire accounts (Gordon, 1994; Green, 1992; Reisenzein, 2009). Some of what are termed ‘Neo-Cognitivist’ views (which often position themselves between cognitivist theories and perceptualist theories that seek to align emotions with perceptual states) will fall in this second camp. However, some Neo-Cognitivist views which hold that emotions have propositional content might not be vulnerable to the formulations of the argument from recalcitrance I discuss here. For instance, attitudinal accounts often allow that emotions have propositional content, but whether attitudinal views are vulnerable to these arguments from recalcitrance will depend on the way they specify the nature of the attitude in question (see Helm, forthcoming, for helpful discussion). According to Deonna and Teroni (2012, 2017), the attitude in question is the emoter’s experience of their body as ready for a particular action. This kind of attitude is unlikely to be vulnerable to the argument from recalcitrance (though note that Deonna and Teroni do not spell out the content of emotion propositionally, either). See D’Arms and Jacobson (2003), as well, for a discussion of what they dub ‘quasi-judgmentalist’ theories. See Grzankowski (2020) for helpful discussion and taxonomy of cognitivist, neo-cognitivist, and perceptualist views in the literature.
There is another, slightly different formulation advanced in Grzankowski (2017), which improves on Greenspan’s (1981) formulation. For brevity I will not include a separate discussion of this formulation, since it relies on the same idealized notion of belief, and hence fails for the same reasons as do the two formulations of the argument from recalcitrance that I discuss in Sects. 2 and 5.
See Döring (2014, p. 132), for an example.
This formulation of the argument has the added bonus of engaging closely with Feldman-Barrett’s (2017) challenge that, contra basic emotions theorists, emotions are not modular. However, whether encapsulation implies modularity is debated and nothing I say here takes a stance on this issue.
Note that even recalcitrant emotions seem in some instances laudatory: Emotions sometimes urge an emoter to act or to adjust their considered beliefs—and in some cases this seems to be a good thing. Recall the oft-cited example of Huck Finn, who hides Jim out of emotion but in spite of Huck’s considered judgment. This case is meant to show that not all recalcitrant emotions should yield to an emoter’s standing, considered beliefs and is discussed, for instance, in Döring (2014), and Benbaji (2013).
It is important to note here that whether and the extent to which encapsulation can divide perception from cognition is not settled. The extent to which perception is encapsulated from cognition is hotly debated, especially in light of cognitive penetration (the top-down influence cognition often has on perception). See e.g. Prinz (2006); Clark (2015). Hence, the role that encapsulation ought to play in drawing the border between perception and cognition is controversial, never mind how well this approach applies to questions about the divisions between emotion and cognition. Some writers in the literature on the perception-cognition border have suggested that encapsulation may come in degrees; perhaps this provides a more promising way to use encapsulation to divide perception from cognition. See Pacherie (2008); Shea (2015); Quilty-Dunn (2017).
Eric Mandelbaum’s work first drew attention to these examples, as well as those discussed later in this section, and to the pressure they put on the view that beliefs update reliably in an ideally rational way. Lord et al. (1979) was first discussed in the philosophical literature on belief by Mandelbaum (2013); Johnson and Seifert (1994) by Mandelbaum and Quilty-Dunn (2015); and Anderson (1983), Anderson et al. (1980), Anderson and Sechler (1986), Batson (1975), Lord et al. (1979), Slusher and Anderson (1989), and Taber and Lodge (2006) by Mandelbaum (2019). See also discussion of many of these studies in Bendaña (2021) and Bendaña and Mandelbaum (2021).
For the purposes of this paper, in (b) ‘awareness’ is meant to be first-personal awareness. I take it that many people will think that we are under less rational pressure to revise incompatible beliefs if we learn of the incompatibility third-personal means (by, for example, taking an implicit association test, contested though they may be) than if we learn of it first-personally.
As discussed in Bendaña (2021).
One might also worry that recalcitrance reveals that emotions must have non-propositional or non-conceptual content. The idea would be that states with propositional content don’t exhibit resistance to rational revision, so a state that exhibits recalcitrance can’t have propositional content. However, belief arguably has propositional content if any state does. If beliefs are sometimes stubborn, then stubbornness of token mental states does not reveal that the type of mental state to which the token belongs must have non-propositional or non-conceptual content. This is already acknowledged in the literature on the perception-cognition border, since architectural approaches allow that perception and cognition may turn out to use the same kinds of representations; their difference is to be drawn according to the ways the different types of states are structured and interact with one another, rather than according to their representational features. See, e.g., Pylyshyn (2003). For a nice discussion of perceptual pluralism, propositional content, and perceptual views of emotion, see Wringe (2015).
There are other ways a cognitivist might avoid the problems purportedly associated with recalcitrant emotion than this paper considers. Nussbaum, for instance, argues that that in recalcitrant emotions a subject does not have incompatible judgments simultaneously, but rather toggles between them (e.g. Nussbaum, 2009, pp. 383–85). If this paper’s argument goes through, however, no such toggling is required. Since this paper is concerned neither with evaluating nor with advancing a positive view of emotion, a full treatment of Nussbaum’s view as well as of her solution to the problem of recalcitrance is beyond the scope of this paper.
As nicely noted and discussed in Bendaña (2021).
Even more permissive views, such as McLaughlin’s (1988), don’t allow for recalcitrant beliefs. Though McLaughlin allows that a subject can have incompatible beliefs, he denies that a subject could be aware of both incompatible beliefs. Instead, he has it that at least one of the beliefs must be “inaccessible” to the subject in cases of incompatibility.
Criterialists bear the additional burden of positing new types of mental states to account for what I’ve been calling stubborn beliefs. Some posit ‘aliefs’ (Gendler, 2008) or merely very vivid imaginings. See Mandelbaum (2013) and Viedge (2018) for detailed treatments of the problems they see plaguing this kind of approach.
c.f. Huddleston’s (2012) argument that ‘naughty’ beliefs are still beliefs.
Some people who take the line that beliefs could never be recalcitrant might still be comfortable admitting that these studies show that beliefs are sometimes evidence-resistant. Perhaps the critic of would insist that nevertheless the intuitions about the coherence of belief must be right, even if beliefs are not always as evidence-responsive as many intuitively take them to be.
There are thorny issues about the relationship between evidence-responsiveness and coherence. Though a treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of this paper, some argue that coherence is at bottom a matter of evidence-responsiveness. See for instance Kolodny (2007, 2008) and Broome (2013).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this issue.
See Tappin and Gadsby (2019) for review and discussion.
See Jern et al. (2014).
Tappin and Gadsby themselves note that this effect is “extremely robust” (2019, p. 110).
Some of this debate also concerns the degree to which belief perseverance might be rational. This is largely beside the point for what I argue here; for brevity, I leave it aside.
First presented by Makinson (1965).
With the possible exception of phobias, a full consideration of which is beyond the scope of this paper.
And, finally, suppose that this case is not pathological.
Additionally, if a possible outcome is sufficiently bad, perhaps it is in fact most rational to avoid that event if the cost of doing so isn’t too high, even if the emoter believes the likelihood of the dangerous outcome is small. Perhaps for fear of flying, your belief that flying is relatively safe overrides your fear, maybe in part because you estimate that the costs of never flying are too high.
Döring (2014) makes this suggestion, writing that when a person is in the grip of a recalcitrant emotion, “The subject does not contradict himself because he only regards his judgement’s content as true, whilst the content of his emotion merely appears to be true to him.” (p. 134).
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Acknowledgements
This paper is especially indebted to Joseph Bendaña and Eric Mandelbaum. Conversations with Joseph on an earlier version of this paper greatly improved it and helped develop the paper to bring it into closer conversation with the empirical literature. This paper follows Joseph’s own work which discusses that literature in the context of implicit bias and belief. The paper not only benefitted from Eric Mandelbaum’s guidance and feedback, but also depends on Eric’s prior work drawing attention to the body of empirical studies marshalled here as telling against an idealized notion of belief. I also thank Simon Brown, Nemira Gasiunas-Kopp, Matthew Heeney, Eric Bayruns García, Santiago Echeverri, David Rosenthal, Michelle Montague, Jeff Seidman, and participants in the New York Philosophy of Psychology workshop and the Cognitive Science Symposium at the CUNY Graduate Center for their feedback and conversation. Helpful comments from several anonymous reviewers also significantly improved the paper.
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Pendoley, K. Stubborn emotions, stubborn beliefs. Synthese 201, 165 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04165-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04165-8