Abstract
Human subjects seem to have a type of introspective access to their mental states that allows them to immediately judge the types and intensities of their occurrent emotions, as well as what those emotions are about or “directed at”. Such judgments manifest what I call “emotion-direction beliefs”, which, if reliably produced, may constitute emotion-direction knowledge. Many psychologists have argued that the “directed emotions” such beliefs represent have a componential structure, one that includes feelings of emotional responses and related but independent representations of what those feelings are about. I argue that such componentiality may help to explain how emotion-direction knowledge is achievable. I begin by developing a hybrid view of introspection that combines David Chalmers’ phenomenal realism with Alvin Goldman’s “partial redeployment” account of meta-belief content. I then provide a process-reliabilist account of introspectively gained emotion-direction knowledge that outlines the minimum conditions of reliably forming emotion-direction beliefs, and specifies several ways in which the warrant of such beliefs could be defeated by relevant counterfactual alternatives. The overall account suggests how distinct introspective processes might be epistemically synergistic.
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Notes
‘Self-knowledge’ may refer to knowledge of one’s mental states, or to knowledge of some entity that has mental states, namely oneself. I use the term here only in the former sense. The same is true for ‘self-awareness’. I discuss reliabilism about knowledge below.
I use ‘justified’ and ‘warranted’ roughly synonymously, but I reserve the former term for cases of inferred beliefs, and the latter for cases of non-inferred beliefs. See note 10 below.
Bilgrami 1998 is perhaps the main exception to this rule.
See Gertler 2011 for discussion of the relations between theories of self-awareness and self-knowledge.
Lazarus (1999) goes to some lengths to argue that triggering representations become components of the emotions they trigger. Prinz (2004) tries to finesse the issue by distinguishing “state emotions” (emotional feelings without their triggering representations) from “attitudinal emotions” (such feelings plus their triggering representations).
In this case, the content of the state representing the emotion’s particular object is different than the content of the belief that causally triggered the emotion. However, there are other sorts of case where the contents remain roughly the same but their modes of representation differ, as when one’s fear caused by a visual percept of a nearby snake is sustained (as one runs away) by a memory of having seen a nearby snake.
Herzberg (2009). In that article, I referred to affect-causation and affect-direction, but I have since decided that using the term ‘affect’, which is broader and perhaps less well-defined than ‘emotion’, raises unnecessary questions.
Nisbett and Wilson (1977) famously found that subjects sometimes “confabulate” erroneous conjectures about the causes of their preferences.
I say ‘normally’ here because I am thinking of cases of warranted true beliefs in which the Gettier problem does not arise. Other conditions may need to be added to rule out Gettier cases.
For Goldman’s own summary of both the objections and his replies, see (2011).
A note on terminology: as I use the term, ‘inference’ refers to an (often deliberate) activity governed by rational and logical norms, and for which the subject can properly be held responsible. Importantly, both the inputs and outputs of inferential processes are conceptual representations, most commonly judgments, which are manifestations of beliefs. Beliefs are assertoric propositional dispositional attitudes (as these terms are commonly analyzed). Inferred beliefs are produced by inference. Non-inferred beliefs, by contrast, are often produced by sub-personal processes over which the subject has little or no direct control, although the subject may properly be held responsible for endorsing or rejecting a belief that has been non-inferentially produced. Unlike inferential processes, the inputs to non-inferential processes are usually non-conceptual representations like perceptions, non-representational or pre-representational sensory registrations, or indeed nothing at all (e.g., random guessing). But there are also non-inferential processes—free association, for instance—that have conceptual inputs.
Cf. Bonjour (1976).
The reader may have noticed that I am hedging here a bit between considering properties and components. As I have already indicated, I favor a componential view of directed emotion structure, but my epistemological interests extend to self-knowledge of perhaps more singular states with both phenomenal and representational properties.
Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references to Goldman are to (2006).
Goldman (2006, 244) also defends his view from Shoemaker’s famous “self-blindness” objection. However, Gertler (2011, 149–159) mounts a more broadly applicable defense by arguing that the conceptual requirements of rationality are orthogonal to the viability of “inner-sense” views of self-awareness.
Goldman is thinking specifically of Nichols and Stich (2003).
The following summary is of (246–253).
If there are such differences to be felt, they stem from somatosensory registrations of the neurophysiological profiles associated with emotion types. Both Prinz (2004) and LeDoux (1996) argue that the profiles of at least basic emotions involve enough parameters to produce discriminable differences. In cases of non-basic emotions, I believe that the subject’s awareness of the emotion’s particular object may play a key role in accurate type recognition, and allowing for this is a key feature of my analysis of emotion-direction knowledge.
In what follows, I follow Chalmers’ convention of italicizing concepts or the conceptual contents of beliefs.
Identifying the types of one’s emotional feelings need not be based entirely on attending to their phenomenal qualities. Just as Goldman assumes that emotion type concepts like hope are not exhausted by their I-code representations, I assume that they are not exhausted by their phenomenal properties.
Of course, it was precisely Russell’s view of acquaintance that inspired Wittgenstein (1953) to develop his argument against any “private language”, particularly one that could refer to a sensation type. Here, I will simply concur with Chalmers’ comment on Wittgenstein’s argument: “I can say only that I have seen no reconstruction of it that provides a strong case against the view I have laid out.” (241)
Gertler (2001) provides a detailed metaphysical account of the embedding relation and relates it to her “demonstrative attention” account introspection. Chalmers describes the difference between their accounts in terms of the relative priority of attention and embedding. I take no position on that issue here.
Even if the belief that this feeling is S s is literally true, the belief might be faulty in a rather different way. For, being recalled from memory, the phenomenal quality that S s embeds might no longer match the phenomenal quality originally embedded in S, and insofar as the function of S s is to memorialize that quality, it will have failed to fulfill that function. So the belief, although true, might be misleading.
Such an inference would of course require me to draw from a great deal of background knowledge about the similarities between myself and others, as well as some basic assumptions about the relationship between phenomenal and neurological properties.
I say ‘generally’ here to allow that meta-beliefs in epistemically rational subjects might constitute the first-order beliefs they are about. See brief discussion below.
There have been competing characterizations of the subjunctively expressed conditions on reliability, starting with Dretske’s (1971) “conclusive reasons” view, and extending through Goldman’s (1976, 1986) “relevant alternatives” view, Nozick’s (1981) “sensitivity” requirement, and Sosa’s (1996) closely related “safety” requirement. Goldman (2011) defends his “relevant alternatives” view, which I adopt here.
For simplicity’s sake, I am omitting from this analysis a small set of cases in which M is a non-representational phenomenal state—for instance, a novel sensation about which one might feel anxious. In such a case, the emotional feeling would be directed at (or be about) the instance of the phenomenal quality itself.
Emotion-type concept E may require A to have a combination of phenomenal and functional properties. The concept may begin as phenomenal (direct, standing, or demonstrative), and then evolve to include functional factors after it becomes apparent that A is R-related to M, and if M is perceptual, that some aspect of M’s non-conceptual content is P. Finally, when expressed linguistically, E might be a community-based concept requiring A to have mostly functional properties. Not understanding the contextual flexibility of E’s content can lead to needless debate about the necessary conditions of emotion-type concepts.
Of course, sometimes the relation is merely implied, as in “I love you”.
Herzberg (2009).
I explore such cases in detail in Herzberg (2008).
For ease of exposition, I am referring here to a general incapacity to conceptually discriminate between emotion types on the basis of introspection. However, given Chalmers’ distinction between direct, demonstrative, standing, individual-based, and community-based phenomenal concepts, it seems clear that different cases may involve different (and sometimes multiple) potential incapacities.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Brie Gertler for her comments on an early version of this paper, presented at the Winter 2013 meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division. I also wish to thank an anonymous referee from Acta Analytica, who made several helpful suggestions. Completion of this paper was facilitated by a sabbatical research grant from the Office of Grants and Faculty Development at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.
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Herzberg, L.A. On Knowing How I Feel About That—A Process-Reliabilist Approach. Acta Anal 31, 419–438 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0282-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0282-3