Abstract
A recalcitrant emotion is one which conflicts with evaluative judgement. (A standard example is where someone is afraid of flying despite believing that it poses little or no danger.) The phenomenon of emotional recalcitrance raises an important problem for theories of emotion, namely to explain the sense in which recalcitrant emotions involve rational conflict. In this paper I argue that existing ‘neojudgementalist’ accounts of emotions fail to provide plausible explanations of the irrationality of recalcitrant emotions, and develop and defend my own neojudgementalist account. On my view, recalcitrant emotions are irrational insofar as they incline the subject to accept an evaluative construal that the subject has already rejected.
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Notes
D’Arms and Jacobson (2003, p. 129).
Helm (2001, p. 42).
Greenspan (1988, p. 18).
This argument has been widely accepted. For a dissenting voice in the judgementalist camp, see Nussbaum (2001).
Greenspan (1988, p. 3).
These kinds of example are due to Roberts (2003, pp. 70–74).
Roberts (2003, p. 75).
Ibid., p. 77.
See Roberts (2003, p. 84). See also Nussbaum (op. cit.).
Helm (2001, p. 45).
Helm (2001, p. 45).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Helm (2001, Chap. 3, esp. pp. 67–71).
Ibid., p. 80.
For Helm, emotions involve assent to how things are, which is “a commitment to things being that way, where this is a commitment to…having the other felt evaluations.” pp. 70, 152.
Indeed, from the standpoint of rationality, the fact that I would feel relieved in this case makes matters worse, since I would now experience two instances of recalcitrant emotion instead of one.
The account which follows can be understood as a form of processing mode theory of emotions, according to which emotions involve “systematic changes in faculties of attention, memory, and reasoning.” Prinz (2004, p. 10). In some respects it is similar to the account proposed by Calhoun (1984). Calhoun regards emotions as “cognitive sets, interpretative frameworks, patterns of attention” (p. 340) which constitute a subject’s seeing the world in a particular evaluative way. But Calhoun (like other neojudgementalists) fails to explain the irrationality of recalcitrant emotions, since she fails to explain how seeing the world in an evaluative way can rationally conflict with evaluative belief.
Ben Ze’ev (2000, p. 13).
For this line, see for instance Vuilleumier et al. (2003, p. 419).
Dolan (2002, p. 1191).
Dolan (op. cit.)
See Vuilleumier et al. (2003, p. 420).
LeDoux (1996, p. 287).
Ibid., p. 289.
Ibid., pp. 287–288.
Ibid., p. 290.
Vuilleumier et al. (2003).
LeDoux (1996, p. 290).
I say ‘in part’ in order to accommodate the feelings of pleasure or pain which are typically central to emotional experience, and which plausibly account for emotional ‘valence,’ i.e., the fact that emotions strike us as positive or negative.
Indeed, some theorists define emotions in terms of tendencies to act. See Frijda (1986).
To say that one is primed to assent to a construal of the situation as dangerous does not mean that one wants to assent to this; perhaps one fervently desires not to hear additional sounds of a burglar when one is afraid. But the fact that one is looking out for danger signs—instead of burying one’s head under the pillow—means that one is responsive to evidence rather than basic inclination or desire in these cases.
Goldie (2004, p. 99).
This is to be distinguished from a case where mobilization is prudent. It might be prudent for me to mobilize cognitive and motivational resources to buy house insurance, even though I believe that my house won’t burn down. But here mobilization is aimed at the legitimate goal of financial security, and hence is not wasteful. In cases of recalcitrant emotion, however, resources are mobilized even though the legitimate goal has been achieved.
See Bach (1994).
This is why S’s inclination to assent to her construal in a case of recalcitrant emotion is unlike the case where S is inclined to change her mind as a result of new reasons or information.
Consider, to illustrate, what we would say to someone who changed his mind on the question of whether or not he was in danger purely as a result of his inclination to accept his emotional construal. This would be a paradigmatic case of an irrational change in belief, insofar as the relevant inclination is unsupported by reasons.
Goldie (2004, p. 99).
LeDoux (op. cit., p. 290).
This does not mean that someone—for instance, someone studying the science of perception—couldn’t be extremely attentive to visual illusions. Nevertheless, such attentional focus would seem to be under the subject’s control, and hence very different from kind of involuntary attentional persistence involved in recalcitrant emotional response. So there is a difference between visual illusions and recalcitrant emotions at the level of attentional capture and consumption. On my view, this explains why emotions incline us to accept evaluative construals, whilst illusions do not incline us to form perceptual beliefs.
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Acknowledgements
The first draft of this paper was written whilst I was on research leave at the Philosophy Program of the RSSS, Australian National University. I would like to thank all at the Program, and in particular David Chalmers, for their hospitality. I am grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Glasgow, and to the AHRC Research Leave Scheme, for funding my leave. Later versions of the paper were presented at the Universities of Canterbury, Glasgow and Massey, at Charles University in Prague, and at a workshop on the emotions at the New University of Lisbon. I would like to thank the audiences at these talks for their feedback. I would also like to thank Daniel Friedrich, Nic Southwood and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. And I am particularly grateful to Fiona Macpherson and David Wall for their generous and helpful remarks on previous drafts, and for fruitful and enjoyable discussions of the issues herein.
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Brady, M.S. The irrationality of recalcitrant emotions. Philos Stud 145, 413–430 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9241-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9241-1