We have just seen that both Damasio’s and Prinz’s theories see emotional experiences as pos- sessing intentionality: they are about relationships between the organism and features of its environment. However, the way this intentionality is secured, on either picture, relies on its being brought in via perceptual representations. Perceptual representations trigger changes across the body which are then represented in emotional feelings. So, while the body remains the primary cause of emotional experiences, perceptual representations, we can say, are the occasional causesof all emotions, at least on these accounts. Granted, Damasio’s suggested list of world features that can trigger “primary” emotions is more elemental, so to speak, than is Prinz’s: Damasio talks of object features such as size and span as stimuli, while Prinz ex- plicates the necessity of perceiving anobject, such as a snake, in order to trigger an emotion.
On the other hand, Damasio’s triggering mechanism only works given its ability to utilize information stored in representations (“mental images”) of prior encounters with objects displaying such features as he lists. Thus, Damasio’s and Prinz’s accounts both require men- tal causes for emotional responses. The explanatory sequence on either view jumps between descriptive levels: a psychological state causes physiological changes which cause another psychological state. A necessary conclusion of this construal is that emotional experiences are unique to creatures who have access to mental images or concepts. Put crudely: one
must have a perceptual mindbeforeone can feel anything like an emotion.
One can question whether this psychological precursor is necessary for all emotional re- actions. The most commonly stated answer is yes: an affective state is not an emotion proper unless it has some object and isaboutthat object. Sometimes this point is made to distin- guish emotions from moods: where one has the symptoms (of fear, say) but cannot identify (through whatever measures are available) an object or situation that stands as the occasional cause of those symptoms, then one’s affective state is a mood, not an emotion. James, how- ever, made no such distinction, and in fact took objectless emotions to be evidence in favor of his claim that emotional reactions trigger emotional experiences. It matters not one bit to the classification of one’s mental state whether one can find an occasional cause: if one feels the symptoms of fear, then one simplyhasthe emotion of fear (James, 1890, II: 459). Since bodily states are the direct causes of emotions proper (viz. emotional experiences), distin- guishing between emotions and moods based on the presence or absence of a psychological cause is both uninformative and arbitrary.
However, James does refer to objectless emotions as “pathological cases” (James, 1890, II: 458), and indeed in most instances one will identify one’s emotional experience with reference to some occasional cause (the spider scurrying across your desk, or the unexpected presence of a loved one, or the like). So, there is nothing wrong, in principle, with claiming that a capacity for perception (or, perhaps, cognition) must logically precede a capacity for
emotion. But it’s not the only option, even if it is most intuitively obvious one.
Another way to think of the relationship between emotionality and perceptual capacity is to reverse the order of constitution: the capacity to perceive the external world meaningfully emerges out of emotionality. I will argue for exactly this position in the next chapter. Briefly, the argument will take the following form:
P1 A general physiological capacity for affect evolved before perceptual systems.
P2 The development of mode-specific perceptual systems was guided by organ-
isms’ ecological concerns.
P3 These ecological concerns were (and are) tokened as affective experiences: they
are grounded in microscopic and macroscopic bodily changes (emotional reac-
tions) on the part of the organism.
P4 As physiological sensory systems developed greater modal specialities (e.g., so-
phisticated tactile, visual, and auditory pathways), correlative affective experi- ences helped to (i) inform and maintain a self-other divide and (ii) relate the ecological significance of external stimuli to the organism.
P5 By enriching incoming sensory information with interoceptive information re-
garding the current state of the body (emotional reactions, e.g., hunger, thirst, vulnerability), a general affect system can produce a world-directed feeling: an emotional experience.
C Thus, emotions need not depend upon prior perceptual or cognitive states to
evoke them; they need only rely on interoceptive monitoring of exteroceptive activity.
This argument will form the basis of theprimitivist theory of emotion. A key feature of the theory—one that derives from James’s insights—is that emotion is a psychological prim-
itive: it is not reducible to other psychological events, including the physiological changes (emotional reactions) that trigger instances of emotion. Rather, emotion contributes to other psychological processes such as perception and cognition.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined extant responses to James’s original theory of emotion. While the cognitivist approach, currently dominating the field of emotion research, is a concep- tual counterposition to James’s theory, some theorists have attempted to extend the spirit of Jamesianism into the contemporary sciences of the mind. Although these approaches have themselves furthered knowledge and guided empirical investigation into the nature and op- erations of emotion, they all rest on an assumption that emotions are necessarily triggered by some prior mental state: either a cognition or a perception. But this claim is not present in James’s theory (see Chapter 1, section 1.2.2); and as the next chapter will argue in detail, nor is it logically necessary or probable according to our current understanding of the mind. Indeed, James’s theorydoesrequire alteration in order to bring it in line with our current knowledge. The message underlying the present chapter is that we must be careful to make the right kinds of changes if we are to protect and progress James’s legacy. With that in mind, Chapter 3 will offer a positive, contemporary take on the Jamesian theory of emotion.
A primitivist theory of emotion
Introduction
This chapter presents a novel theory of emotion. It is a primitivist theory of emotion. It presents emotions as affective phenomena that are intrinsic to the consciousness of creatures capable of sensing the world outside their bodies.
The primitivist theory of emotion draws on the lessons of the previous chapters while maintaining the spirit of James’s theory: it is a neo-Jamesian theory of emotion. Like James’s theory, primitivism (i) understands emotional experiences (kinds of subjective feelings) as emotions proper, (ii) identifies bodily changes as the direct causes of emotional experiences, and (iii) emphasizes the important causal and ecological relationship between emotions and other mental states such as perceptual and cognitive representations. At the same time, its major tenets are motivated by recent discoveries and theories from across the sciences of the mind.
To foreshadow discussion, the following causal schema, derived from James’s theory (see Chapter 1, page 23), represents the neo-Jamesian account developed here:
stimulus→sensory registration→bodily excitement (interoceptive
monitoring)
→emotional experience
Note that this portrayal replaces the notion of stimulusperceptionwithsensory registra- tion. The difference is important. Sensory registration is not a mental process per se; it can be examined and described at the level of sensory organ physiology and neural activity. Per- ception, however, is a process that involves description of sensory registration at one level but also the generation of intentional mental states at another. This explanatory positioning of sensory registration is a crucial feature of my primitivist theory: it does not require that there be any prior perceptual processing in order for an emotion to be generated. Instead, as the present chapter will argue, this emotional sequence itself contributes to the generation of a perceptual state.28
The chapter is comprised of two major sections. Section 3.1 explores affect: its experi- ential characteristics (3.1.1), bodily causes (3.1.2), and ecological functions (3.1.3). It then presents emotional experiences as species of affective states. Emotional experiences, which are emotions proper, are distinguished from other affective states according to their inten- tionality and the information they carry. While other affective states (such as hunger, thirst, and pains) portray the state of the organism’s body, emotional experiences inform the or- ganism of its possible behavioral responses to its environment.
In this respect, emotions contribute a certain affective quality to perceptual states: they represent certain kinds ofaffordances (Gibson, 1979). This idea is detailed in section 3.2. Many contemporary theorists advocate for a theory of perceptual affordances, but I believe the primitivist theory can benefit from revisiting its key concepts. This second section con- sequently differentiates between physical affordances, defined and described in the abstract, and psychological affordances, whose constitution requires the active involvement of the emotive, sensing organism.
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I also want to remain silent for now on whether perception is direct or indirect (i.e., internally mediated). The current causal schema allows for this.
A caveat before we dive in. The primitivist theory demands a revisionist attitude to- ward the concept emotion. As the first and second chapters demonstrated, James’s question, “What is an emotion?” lacks a clear and universal answer. Primitivism is not proposed as a resource for explaining all events that we humans dub “emotions”. Moreover, it is a theory for psychological explanations of emotional phenomena, not universalist or folk explanations. Therefore, it may look a little narrow or weird in scope to those who have not spent much time working in the philosophy and the sciences of the mind. Some concerns that apply specifically to human emotions will be addressed in the next chapter.
A major issue is that we readily apply the termemotionand its cognates to so many phe- nomena that we struggle to identify anything that makes some phenomenon emotional by its nature. One response from a scientific perspective is to eliminate emotion from a scientific vocabulary (Griffiths, 1997, 2004a,b). But this is heavy-handed: according to a primitivist construal, emotion denotes mental phenomena that play important roles in explanations of human and non-human psychology. Therefore, proponents of the theory introduced below should revise, rather than eliminate, their use of the term.
Now let’s get started on the theory.