Abstract
Though there are many challenges to Ekman’s thesis that there are basic emotions with universal corresponding facial expressions, our main criticism revolves around the extent to which grounding situations alter how people read faces. To that end, we recruit testifying experimental studies that show identical faces expressing varying emotions when contextualized differently. Rather than dismissing these as illusions, we start with the position—generally favored by embodied thinkers—that situations are primary: they are where specifiable and hence knowable properties first show up. We further argue that situationally inflected emotional expressions are informationally meaningful. We reject the idea that reading expressions is primarily about ascertaining internal mental states, arguing instead that people are registering overall situations when looking at faces. However, if mind is understood as a situated phenomenon that extends into active ecological frames, then one can still argue that mindreading is going on. Although we do not claim isolated things like cliffs or cars have agency, we speculate networked systems with cliffs, people, cars, bears, etc., collectively function with intentionality, more so if advancing a robust situated mind thesis, contra figures like Dennett who argue that people over-impute mind to things. Our position has practical implications insofar as it casts doubts on recent attempts to develop AI systems that extract emotional intent out of facial expressions since many of these systems are grounded on Ekman’s basic view.
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Notes
For bikini example, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAE0t6KwJY.
For Vader example, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRvvlRbHfqM.
Similarly, Peter Hujar’s Orgasmic Man series consists of photographs of faces of men having orgasms, some of whom look sad or agonized precisely when background contexts are missing. One of these portraits was used for the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, A Little Life.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is part of the special issue of Topoi “What’s so special about faces? Visages at the crossroad between philosophy, semiotics and cognition”, edited by Marco Viola and Massimo Leone, which results from a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No 819649-FACETS). We are grateful to Aimée Lê for her conceptual and linguistic suggestions. We also thank Marco Viola, Massimo Leone and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.
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Crippen, M., Rolla, G. Faces and situational Agency. Topoi 41, 659–670 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09816-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09816-y