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Emotion as patheception
Raja Bahlul*
Department of Philosophy, UAE University, Al Ain, UAE

Emotions cannot be fully understood in purely cognitive terms. Nor can they be
fully understood as mere feelings with no content. But it has not been easy to give
an account of the relation of affect and cognition in a way that preserves the
perceived unity of emotional experience. Consequently, emotion theories tend to
lean either towards cognitivism, or, alternatively, the view that emotions are
basically non-cognitive affairs. The aim of this paper is to argue for an account of
emotion as a unity of affect and cognition. Emotions, it will be suggested, do not
combine, blend, add, or causally relate cognition to affect, or affect to cognition,
but are rather original unities which should be viewed as coordinate with, rather
than subordinate to, either cognition, perception, feeling or any other basic mental
category.

Key Words: affect; cognition; emotion; feeling; judgment; patheception;

perception; representation

rbahlul@uaeu.ac.ae
rbahlul@gmail.com

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1. Introduction
Contemporary philosophical discussions of emotion tend to
contemplate a division between cognitive theories according to
which emotions represent the world (or agent) as being in a certain
way, and theories according to which emotions are, in and of
themselves, just feelings, through which we cognize nothing. This
division has been somewhat picturesquely described as 'the most
conspicuous and volatile fault line within emotion research'. (Prinz
2007, 50)
Cognitivism has dominated the scene for some time now. But it
cannot be said to have achieved full victory over its rivals.1
Philosophers continue to have misgivings about how well
cognitivism is able to handle affect and phenomenality, 'objectless
emotions', and emotions experienced by animals and infants. Some
have sought to model emotion on perception, with a view to taking
advantage of the phenomenal and representational aspects of
perception.2 Lately, some philosophers have suggested that pain

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could be compared to emotion (Gustafson 2006; Clark 2006), an idea
which naturally invites one to compare emotion to pain.
My aim in this paper is both modest and immodest. I want to
argue that the 'conspicuous and volatile fault line' which separates
cognitivism and non-cognitivism is not real; that emotions
themselves, as opposed to our view of them, exhibit an indissoluble
unity of the cognitive (representational, appraisal-involving) and the
affective. This I take to be the immodest aspect of my aim, for it is
not a small task to convince the reader that we should stop trying to
analyze emotions into affect and/or cognition, when so much effort
has been dedicated to proving that they are this or that. If I am
successful, then what I will have shown is that emotion is emotion,
that it is not cognition, perception, affect or anything else. This may
not seem much, and for this reason I see my aim as being modest.
Compared to a doctor who saves lives, this is the work of someone
who merely stops murder.
In Section 2 I discuss feeling and cognitive theories of emotion,
focussing more on criticism of the latter. This is not because I think

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that feeling theories promise a more adequate view of emotion, but
rather because I think that criticism of cognitive theories brings us
closer to a proper, non-reductive understanding of emotion.
In Section 3, I discuss the view that emotions are perceptions of
value, a view which is often thought to combine elements of
cognitivism and feeling theories. I argue that percepualism about
emotion is a kind of cognitivism which is subject to the same
criticisms, and some others as well.
In Section 4, I outline a different a view of emotion. The
hallmark of my account is insistence on the unity and
unanalyzability of the emotional experience. Emotions, I argue, are
unique mental statesthey are neither just cognitions, nor 'pure'
feelings, nor yet perceptions, but something for which we need to
coin a new term. 'Patheception' is the term I choose. Patheception, I
shall argue, is indissolubly cognitive and affective. It cannot be
understood in purely cognitive terms, nor can it be understood in
'feeling' terms. Nor should it be viewed as a sum, combination,

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blend, or causal relation of two elements. Rather, it should be
viewed as an original unity.
Section 5 offers a summary, and suggests an alternative
approach to studying emotions.

2. Two theories of emotion

Cognitivism about emotion is an old philosophical view. This is
probably to its credit, because its arch rival, which receives
philosophical elaboration under the name of 'the feeling theory of
emotion', has always been more popular in folk psychology and
ordinary thinking. According to these ways of thinking, emotions are
feelings which overtake us. Not only are they often contrary to
reason and good judgment (love, jealousy, and hatred are often said
to be 'blind'), but they are also intractablewe feel them even though
we know we should not. They often sweep over us with great force,
and motivate (impel?) us to do that which we do not want to do. We
are held powerless in their grip, a fact which is sometimes used to
plead diminished responsibility for wrong-doing. We are also often

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said to be unable to 'understand' our feelings and those of other
people.
At the same time, ordinary thinking and speech are not blind to
the fact that emotions have 'grounds', in that they are typically felt in
connection with something or other (a perceived danger, or a piece of
good news). It is commonsense to believe that when our beliefs
change, it is often the case that our feelings follow suit. Nor are
emotions completely beyond our control. We often urge people to
control their feelings, and blame them for failing to do so. It is from
these sources and others that the cognitive theories of emotions draw
much of their inspiration.
A certain dialectic has always existed between feeling and
cognitive theories of emotion so that the two theories can be seen to
clarify each other, and to draw strength from mutual criticism. A
good place to begin the discussion is William Jamess famous
statement of the feeling theory:

My thesis ... is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of
the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS

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the emotion. Commonsense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep;
we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are
angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that we feel
sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.
Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be
purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.
We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and
deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry
(James 1884, 189-90).

Philosophers nowadays tend to view feelings of bodily changes

as cases of interoception, more or less on a par with ordinary
perception. Not only is there a familiar sensory phenomenology, a
'what-it-is-like' to have a sensation of quickened heart beat, but, like
ordinary sense perception, bodily sensations have content in that they
disclose to us aspects of the world, in this case our bodies, which are,
in an important sense, part of the external world.
But a feeling of fear should be considered different from a feeling
of quickened heart beat. The latter is a bodily sensation of the 'boomboom-boom' variety, occurring at a faster rate than usual. It is

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conceivable that one could experience it, along with shallow
breathing and cold sweat, after taking certain drugs. But feeling such
changes 'as they occur' would not constitute a feeling of fear. If we
were to experience such feelings outside the context of judging that
we are in danger, we would only think that there is something amiss
with our bodies, not that we are facing some kind of danger.
The idea that emotions are basically feeling-states of some kind
continues to be defended by some philosophers. One clear statement
of such a view says:

... fear might be identified with the distinctive edgy feeling that we
experience in the gut and limbs, and anger might be identified with the
irritable feeling that pervades the spleen or chest (Whiting 2009, 281).

According to another well-known view, that of Jesse Prinz,

'somatic signals' are both necessary and sufficient for emotion. In his
discussion of cognitive theories, Prinz invites the reader to

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[S]mile and see if you feel a little bit happier. Now assuming that you do,
ask, are you entertaining the thought that your goals have been satisfied?
Next, scowl as if you are very angry, and see if you feel the anger. Then
ask yourself whether you are entertaining the thought that you have been
insulted. I suspect that you will answer these questions negatively (Prinz
2007, 58).

A third view is advocated by J. Deonna and F. Teroni. According

to this view,

[We] should conceive of emotions as distinctive types of bodily

awareness, where the subject experiences her body holistically as taking
an attitude towards a certain object . Feelings of action readiness are
indeed obvious candidates for elucidating the nature of emotions as
involving awareness of ones body adopting a specific stance towards an
object, or being poised to act in given ways in relation to an
object.(Deonna and Teroni 2012, 79-80).

There is more going on in such theories than is indicated by the

above statements. More will be said about some of them in due
course. Nevertheless, the statements indicate underlying

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commitments which cannot be cancelled by further elaborations
designed to show how these theories address various problems.
Viewed in terms of such commitments, it is not obvious how much
these theories improve on the traditional feeling theory of William
James. Talk of the 'distinctive edgy feeling which we experience in
the gut and limbs', and the 'irritable feeling that pervades the spleen
or chest', is a hybrid kind of talk. Mention of gut and limbs, spleen
and chest localizes what we are talking about, and is thus similar to
talking about a feeling of a lump in the throat. It is, however, less
clearly identifiableedginess is not a very definite quality, and
many people have no idea what, or where, the spleen is. On the other
hand, attributing irritability and edginess to localized feelings
psychologises the matter quite a bit, inasmuch as irritability and
edginess are primarily attributable to a whole person, rather than a
feeling in the spleen or chest. Whiting does not allow that irritability
and edginess are 'object-directed' (2009, 283), the way emotions are
typically allowed to be. This opens the door for claiming that the
irritability and edginess in question can (and often are) caused by

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drugs, medicines, and other things of which the subject might have
no inkling. In such cases, it is by no means clear that the irritable
person is angry, even if he were to aver that anger is precisely what
he feels. According to Anthony Kenny, a person is not sole judge of
the correctness of describing his feeling as one of fear. There are as
well objective conditions, such as circumstances, outward symptoms,
and behaviour which play a determining role (Kenny 1963, 46).
Deonna and Teroni's position seems different. They speak not
only of feelings (of action readiness) but also of (bodily) awareness.
In addition to this, what they find in the body is not localized in this
part or that - it is rather global. However, it is not clear if 'local' and
'global' make any difference here. Aching all over is 'global', whereas
having a headache is 'local'. Nevertheless, this makes no difference to
their being, equally, kinds of bodily sensation.
The hybridism which characterizes Whiting's position is to be
found here also. Emotion is said to be an awareness of something the
body is doing. Not any old thing, though, such as sweating or
shivering, the kinds of things which James would have been happy to

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cite. Rather, emotion is supposed to be an awareness of the body as
taking an attitude, adopting a stance, or being poised to act.
But 'stance' and 'body' go together as much as 'irritable' and
'feeling', which is to say, not very much. The activities being spoken
of here are primarily attributable to the whole person, rather than his
or her body. It is true that being poised to strike requires one to have
a body, but this is quite different form the impression of one as a
spectator in a physical drama where one experiences one's body
taking attitudes, or being poised to do things. Such 'bodily' doings are
more psychic than physical. Pending a solution to the mind-body
problem, it is unfair to move them over to the physical side of the
fence.
The tendency to cleave to the physical in order to explain
emotion is also evident in Prinz's view of the role of somatic signals
in emotion. 'Smile and see if you feel a little bit happier', one is told.
But smiling is not a matter of facial muscles contracting in a certain
shape or form, something which we can do on command. So what
can the request for one to smile mean? Saying 'cheese' in front of the

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camera does not cause happiness, or amusement. What might
accomplish this is the contemplation of a silly request to say
'cheese', when cheese has nothing to do with the business at hand.
Furthermore, it is far from clear that the connection between smiling
and feeling happy is causal, as suggested by Prinz's 'and see if'.
Referring to a facial expression as 'smiling' implicates affectivity as
a matter of conceptual necessity. It is not contingent relation that
may or may not hold.
Cognitivists typically argue that one of the main problems with
identifying emotions with sensations of bodily condition is that
bodily sensations are not intentional, that is, they are not 'about
something' (as emotions are). As one writer humorously put it, one
experiences pain at the dentists, not at the dentist (Gosling 1965,
487). But it could be argued that intentionality is not an adequate
ground for distinguishing between emotions and sensations of
bodily condition. It is not implausible to attribute intentionality to
bodily sensations. They have an 'object' in the bodily part which
they typically refer to. This is obvious in the case of phantom limb

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pain, where one feels pain in a non-existent limb. It is not much less
obvious in the more usual cases of bodily sensation. Here we also
have the failure of substitutivity characteristic of intentional
contexts.The hunter, aiming at the dark spot yonder, does not know
that he is taking aim at his father. Similarly, a person who places his
hand on his left chest need not know that it is his heart which he
feels pounding.
But if intentionality is not an adequate ground for distinguishing
between bodily sensations and emotions, what can the difference be
then? The difference, it may be suggested, is the simple fact that the
'feelings' invoked are not affective. Neither the feeling of quickened
heart-beat, cold sweat, shallow breathing, nor the three of them
occurring as part of a systemic bodily condition, yield the distinctive
affective qualities which we associate with fear and other emotional
states. To see the distinctness of the affective, consider a patient
who feels and notes the aforementioned sensations carefully while
undergoing treatment. He need not be experiencing fear. On the
contrary, he could be affectively comfortable in the knowledge that

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he is being taken care of. But if he were to suddenly realize that he
is in danger of losing his life, there would be a new arrival on the
feeling scene of his consciousness - a feeling of fear which was not
there just a short while ago. In other words, there would be a
change, an addition to the (bodily) feelings which were there all the
time.
Affectivity, it may be thus suggested, is what cognitive theories
of emotions have to deal with adequately, if they are to improve on
what feeling theories have to offer. Yet it is far from obvious that
they are able to accomplish this.
The notion on which many cognitive theories of emotion are
based is that of belief, judgment, construal, or appraisal. According
to Robert Solomon, '[Judgment is] not a marginal fact about (some)
emotions but the essence of all of them' (Solomon 2004, 77). The
matter does not stop at placing emphasis on judgment. Some
cognitivists seem willing to identify emotion with judgment. At one
point Solomon says that 'my anger is my judgment that John has
wronged me' (Solomon 1980, 257). According to Martha Nussbaum,

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in the telling title her book, emotions are Upheavals of Thought
(2001). In another place, Nussbaum avers that one does not first
believe that one has suffered a great loss and then feels sad as a
result. 'The real, complete recognition of [the terrible] event is the
upheaval' (Nussbaum 2003, 282).
To the uninitiated, it must sound strange to say that emotions are
judgments. So they must be told that the judgments in question are
not the ordinary run-of-the-mill judgments that we make every
waking hour. The judgments in question are of the evaluative type. A
person experiences fear in the context of judging that she is in
danger, which is an evaluative judgment (appraisal) of a kind.
Similarly, one experiences sadness in the context of judging that one
has suffered a loss. As Nussbaum puts it, citing an ancient Stoic
position, 'emotions are forms of evaluative judgment that ascribe
great importance to things and persons outside ones control'
(Nussbaum 2003, 273). This leads her to say that one cannot affirm a
judgment of serious loss without going through the emotion of
grief, as is evident from her rhetorical question: 'Can I assent to the

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idea that someone tremendously beloved is forever lost to me, and
yet preserve emotional equanimity?' (Nussbaum 2003, 280).
But many writers have entertained the possibility of 'assenting' to
evaluative judgments of great importance without losing emotional
equanimity. One writer has argued for the reasonableness (hence the
possibility) of not feeling regret over a moral wrong which one has
done, even while fully recognizing its wrongfulness (Bittner 1992,
256-6). Robert C. Roberts has also raised a question about the person
who very much desires to be morally upright: could he culpably err
and not feel guilty? Robertss answer is that this is psychologically
possible, but not likely (Roberts 1988, 198).3
The fact that sheer judgment (belief) is not sufficient to account
for emotion has been noted by many philosophers who are otherwise
sympathetic to the cognitivist view. Thus many of them have
attempted to supplement the cognitive element of belief with
something which fills the affective gap in the cognitivist account.
Examples of such attempts at repair can be found in the works of the
late Peter Goldie, Robert C. Roberts, and P. S. Greenspan.

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For his part, Goldie distinguishes between mere belief and
emotional belief, as can be seen from this example:

Imagine you are in a zoo, looking at a gorilla grimly loping from left to
right in its cage. You are thinking of the gorilla as dangerous, but you do
not feel fear, as it seems to be safely behind bars. Then you see that the door
to the cage has been left wide open. [S]uddenly your way of thinking
of the gorilla as dangerous is new; now it is dangerous in an emotionally
relevant way for you. The earlier thought, naturally expressed as 'That
gorilla is dangerous', is different in content from the new thought, although
this new thought, thought with emotional feeling, might also be naturally
expressed in the same words (Goldie 2000, 61).4 (Emphasis added)

Goldie seems to think that a change in feeling entails a change in

content; that if you believe something without feeling, then it ceases
to be the same when feeling enters the picture. But the example
which Goldie offers does not make a good case for the idea that we
have two thoughts here, one before, and a new one after realizing that
the door is open. It is not as though the indexical expression 'that
gorilla' has changed its reference, or that the word 'dangerous'

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changed its meaning. A thought which is thought with or without
emotional feeling is still the same thought. Thinking it with feeling
does not change its content, any more that writing something in red
changes the meaning of what is written. The affect that we are after
cannot be a matter of different content.5
Another angle at Goldie's view may be obtained by considering a
term which he uses to express the idea of a thought that is 'thought
with emotional feeling': 'feeling towards'. 'Feeling towards is thinking
of with feeling' (Goldie 2000, 58). The term shifts focus from content
(what we think) to attitude (how we feel about it). Thus it hints at an
adverbialist account which may be more perspicuously referred to by
another term-- 'thinking feelingly'. Viewed in this manner, Goldie's
account joins ranks with two other apparently 'adverbialist accounts'
offered by R.C. Roberts and P.S. Greenspan.
For Roberts, emotion is a 'serious concern-based construal' of
one's condition (Roberts 1988, 191). To experience an emotion is to
construe one's situation 'concernfully', it could be said. For
Greenspan, emotion requires 'thoughts held in the mind by

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intentional states of comfort or discomfort' (Greenspan 1992, 293).
The mere holding of a thought in mind by one intentional state or
another does not amount to emotion; what is required is intentional
states of comfort or discomfort.
Similar criticisms can be directed at both attempts at repair.
Consider Robertss idea of concernful construal first. Initially, the
idea of 'concernfulness' seem to invite Stocker's objection that

[T]here are both feeling-laden and feelingless forms of care, concern

and interest. The feeling cannot be located simply by care, concern and
interest, but only by feeling-laden instances of them (Stocker 1983, 13).

Stocker surely has a point here, but it must be allowed that the
relation between concerns and felt concerns is not accidental.
Concerns that are or have never been felt are not concerns that we
can easily understand. A charitable reading of Robert's 'concernful
construal' might allow emotional experiences to involve felt
concerns, rather than just concerns.

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Still, this does not yield a satisfactory cognitive theory of emotion.
One wonders: what is it to have a concernful construal of my
situation as being in danger of falling off a cliff? The opposite of a
concernful construal is (presumably) one that is characterized by
indifference. Someone who is indifferent to life and death could
construe himself as being in danger of falling off a cliff, but his
construal would not be 'concernful', or feeling-laden, to use Stockers
words. It is plausible to think that lack of 'concernfulness' stands for
absence of fear, sadness or other modes of feeling through which
concernfulness is typically instanced. There is no such thing as
concernfulness, or 'feeling-ladenness', pure and simple, of no kind in
particular. 'Concernfulness', it could be argued, functions as a mere
schema that is made meaningful only by the (conceptually necessary)
availability of particular emotion words.6
If this is true, then the proposal to explicate emotions in terms of
concernful construals (construing one's situation 'concernfully') is an
abbreviated way of saying that to undergo an emotional experience is
to construe one's situation in an emotional way-- fearfully, joyfully,

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sadly, indignantly, angrily, or whatever. Fear, to take a particular
example, might turn out to be, quite tautologically, a matter of
fearfully construing oneself as being in danger of falling off a cliff.
Greenspan's idea of states of comfort and discomfort seems to
replace concernfulness with valence, the commonly accepted idea
that emotional states lie on one side or the other of a pleasantunpleasant continuum. Of course, the comfort and discomfort in
question here are not the same as physical pain or pleasure. For
physical pain is compatible with the kind of 'comfort' which we take
Greenspan to mean, as when a severely injured person realizes that
she is being rescued. Similarly, bodily pleasure is compatible with
discomfort in the present sense, as when a person feels a good deal of
guilt as he participates in a pleasurable activity which he considers to
be morally wrong. Emotionally relevant comfort and discomfort
must be viewed as 'psychic' affairs, even though they may be
understood by analogy to physical pain and pleasure.7
But when we think of the 'valence' which our emotional states
have we find that it is never sheer, undifferentiated quality. Just as

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concernfulness is instantiated as fear, sadness, anger, joy etc.,
emotional valence will have a character of sorts. Jealousy, fear,
anger, sadness are uncomfortable feelings in a sense which we all
understand. We may view then as ways of being 'psychically
uncomfortable', as it were.
We must not think that humans start out their lives with inchoate,
shapeless, contentless comfort/discomfort affect-stuff which gets to
be fashioned into emotions through the use of language, social
conditioning, or rational criticism. Rather, what happens is that
emotions come to exist, change and evolve. Emotional valence, like
concernfulness, always comes with a story to tell, even if the story is
simple and unelaborated as stories are wont to be in early life.
Because valence and concernfulness seem to bring in emotions
once again, to define emotion as concernful or valenced cognition
does not seems to advance the issue much. We are led to ask: why is
it that when we seek to understand emotion in terms of cognition and
feeling we find ourselves using the concept of emotion once again?

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Could we doing the wrong thing by trying to understand emotions in
terms of cognition and feeling?

3. Perception and emotion

Experiencing an emotion is not the same as making an evaluative
cognition. It is also not the same as experiencing a feeling that is
devoid of content. Nor is it the same as making an evaluative
cognition with feeling (feelingly).What else can it be then?
A fairly popular path taken by philosophers in recent times has
been to make use of perception as a general concept under which
emotional experiences can be subsumed. This is not surprising, for
perception has two features which many philosophers claim to find
in emotion as well, namely intentionality and phenomenality
(Salmela 2011, 1). In perception as well as emotion, there is a
'contentful' representation of the world as being thus-and-so. But in
addition to content, there is something it is like to be having the
experience in questionbe it an experience of seeing, or feeling
afraid. Could my feeling of fear be my 'perception' of the danger that

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I am in? More generally, could affect be understood as a perception
of values that are exemplified in the environment?
Along these lines, Julien Deonna has suggested that emotions
'track how the world is evaluative for one in a sense similar to the
way perceptions track how the world is perceptually for one'
(Deonna 2006, 37). Ruth Millikan also has suggested that evaluative
aspects of the environment may be thought of as attitudinal
secondary properties. They are powers to produce in us responses
that are attitudes of fear, sadness, etc. (Millikan 1995, 198). More
explicitly than perhaps most philosophers, Mark Johnston speaks of a
'sensory encounter with value' (Johnston 2001, 183) where we are
attracted to, or repelled by 'sensuous goods and bads' (190).
According to Johnston,

This is part of how things are manifest to us: part of their appearing or
presenting is their presenting to us in determinate ways and to various
degrees as appealing or repulsive. On the face of it, appeal is as much a
manifest quality as shape, size, colour and motion (Johnston 2001, 188).

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Such views of emotion as perception of value do not exhaust all
that is on offer under this heading. The view advocated by Jesse
Prinz (briefly discussed in the previous section) can be understood as
saying that emotions are mediated perceptions of value. The
mediation takes the form of bodily changes (and subsequent
awareness thereof) in response to changes in organism-environment
relations. For this reason some writers take Prinz's view to be an
indirect perception theory of emotion (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 72).
According to Prinz, emotions represent that which they have been
set up to be set off by (Prinz 2007, 61). Thus fear represents danger,
which regularly sets it off, and is reliably indicated by it. The same
applies to sadness and loss. But fear does not count as a perceptual
experience of danger the way a visual experience counts as a
perception of colour. Rather, what happens is that, finding oneself in
danger sets of bodily responses (as in the Jamesian view) which we
feel as emotion. The emotion 'registers' the bodily feelings, but, in
addition (now going beyond James), it represents the danger which
set off the bodily changes in the first place. In Prinz's own terms,

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Each emotion is both an internal body monitor and a detector of dangers,

threats, losses, or other matters of concern. Emotions are gut reactions;
they use our bodies to tell how we are faring in the world (Prinz 2004,
69).8

Since Prinz understands observability in terms of representation, and

since this latter is understood in terms of reliable indication, it may
be concluded that a creature that 'detects' the danger it is in is a
creature that 'perceives' the danger it is in (Salmela 2011, 5-6).
Now the idea that in emotion we 'perceive' how we are faring in
the world is susceptible to two interpretations (at least). According to
the first, dangers and losses (for example) are objects of perceptual
experience. They are not colours and shapes, of course; they are
more like kinds of objects, or Gibsonian 'affordances'features of
the environment which 'afford' creatures ill or well. The other,
somewhat more modest interpretation, is to say that emotion such as
fear 'detects' dangers the way a barometer detects bad weatherit is
a reliable indicator of it.

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To take up the first interpretation first, a fairly popular objection
to the perceptual analogy is that we have no dedicated sense organs
through which we become aware of the dangers, losses, insults, or
wrongs that we encounter. It is just not obvious how, in fearing, we
'perceive' the danger we are in.
An adequate discussion of this objection requires dealing with
what has been aptly called the 'thin view' of perceptual experience,
the view that perceptions in the strict sense are just basic, minimal
perceptions which do not carry much information about perceived
objectsnothing beyond colour, shape, texture, and spatial lay-out
(Masrour 2011, 1). Many arguments have been presented in support
of this view of perception, which we cannot discuss here. None of
them seems to be conclusive against the commonsensical view that
we see not only green, or pink, but green trees and pink ice cubes. As
Masrour has argued, the attributes of being a cactus and the attribute
of being green are each subject to being mistaken for something else.
Also, the experiences of seeing as of green, or as of a cactus, can be
equally indubitable to the subject of them, while the possibility of

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error is given in both cases. And there are times when a judgment of
either kind is inferential, and other times when it is not. Thin and
thick (or thicker) properties seem on par in all essential respects
(Masrour 2011, 6ff).
Similar reasoning applies to so-called affordances, features of the
environment which bode us ill or well. The existence of seemingly
unlearned fears among creatures, big and small, linguistic or not,
argues for the fact that in some way or other, animals are often able
to see dangers. The art of designing a good trap is based on the
assumption that the quarry can see which things in the environment
should or should not be avoided. The trapper designs a trap in such a
way that the animal is fooled into seeing it as something which is not
to be avoided.
Thus it is not obvious that the perceptual analogy is overthrown
by the idea that evaluative aspects of our environment are not proper
objects of perception. But this is not the real source of trouble for the
perceptualist view of emotion. On a thick view of sense experience,

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we can grant that dangers are often perceived, but that still would not
mean that fear is a perception of danger.
For suppose a person perceives the danger he is in. Let us say he
is holding a ticking bomb, and (on some generous understanding of
seeing) he sees the bomb, and sees that it is a bomb. Now if we were
to say that he is afraid of the danger he is in, that would be an
additional thing to say about his state of mind. We would be saying:
he sees the danger he is in and he is afraid of it. It is conceivable that
he could be seeing the danger, and not be in a state of fear. He could
be drugged, or he could be indifferent to life and death. Presumably,
the suicide bomber sees the danger he is in, but it is quite possible
that the fear is not there on account of factors that have to do with
beliefs and motivations. All of this follows from a fairly plausible
view to the effect that the basic job of perception is to put us into
contact with the world- to let us discover how things (including
ourselves) are (faring). To fear (or to like) what we find out does not
fall within perception's job description.

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How else can fear be said to be a 'perception' of danger? Perhaps
fear does not represent danger the way a visual experience represents
a red tomato. According to Geach and Anscombe (1961, 95), a
sensation of X is like a painting of X, except that it is in no medium!
Furthermore (it could be said), there is a clear sense in which
dangerous, fearsome objects do not look any different from other
objects. (Bared teeth are just teeth exposed in a certain way, for those
who care to notice.) But suppose there is a nomic connection
whereby losses and dangers, for example, are associated with
emotional responses of sadness and fear- would we not then be
entitled to think that sadness represents loss by being an indicator, or
a detector of it? There is a well-known concept of representation,
defended by Dretske (1988), with roots in Peirce (1955, 108-9),
according to which something represents another by being a reliable
indicator of it ('index' is the term Peirce uses). This is the concept
which Prinz employs in his theory of emotion.9 Thinking in terms of
natural selection and function, Jesse Prinz says it was advantageous
to our ancestors to detect losses of loved ones, failures of

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achievement, or rejection by a lover. 'Sadness evolved as a response
to losses writ large' (Prinz 2007, 62). In short, sadness is a loss
detector.
Despite initial plausibility, there are at least three objections than
can to be raised. To do this, let us first distinguish between the
person (or cognitive system) that experiences an emotion, and the
person (or cognitive system) that makes judgments as to what
emotion was experienced, and what, if anything, indicates
(represents) what. The 'two' persons could be one, of course, if one
were to engage in introspection or self-observation. Nothing hangs
on this, but to keep matters tidy, we can assume this is not the case.
Suppose I am an observer, or a (would be) scientist. I recognize a
nomic connection between episodes of loss and episodes of sadness
in subjects who suffer loss. Observing you being sad, I infer that you
must have sustained some kind of loss. (This is not to say that I do
not often go wrong in making such inferences.) In doing this I follow
the same practice as when I, sitting in my air-conditioned room, infer
a rise in the temperature outside. There is a thermometer in the

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garden, which I can see from my room. To me, a rise in thermometer
reading indicates a rise in temperature. To a bird, it indicates nothing
of the kind.
This can be applied to the case of emotion in a more or less
straightforward manner. To me, your sadness indicates that you have
sustained a loss. I gain knowledge about the fact of your loss without
being witness to it. But now let us look at the matter from your point
of view. Surely, you do not wait to feel sad in order to know that you
have sustained a loss. When you 'detect' (that is to say, when there is
'indication') that the beloved mother-in-law is no longer, this
knowledge does not come from a feeling of sadness. Rather, you
see, hear, infer, or somehow use your senses and your powers of
reasoning, to know that the beloved one is no longer. It is not clear
that your feeling of sadness plays a role of detector, as far as you are
concerned. To an outsider, perhaps yes, but not to you, the subject of
the emotion. As many philosophers have insisted, 'indication' is a
tertiary relation that requires not only a 'sign' and an object, but also

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an interpreter for whom something is to be a sign of something
else.10
Worse than this: it is sometimes the other way around. We need
other, non-emotional knowledge before we can 'detect' what emotion
we are feeling. Suppose I and my colleague are up for promotion.
She gets it but I do not. I find myself in a weird emotional state
which I want to describe. It is negatively valenced, let us say, and
there is definitely a 'concernful construal' of how I am faring in the
world. But we want a more exact description. Could it be that I am
experiencing envy? Jealousy? Or resentment?11 The answer is not
obvious on the face of it. To 'detect' (which is to say, to identify) the
emotion I am having, I may need to do a lot of soul searching. For
example, if it turns out that I believe that I am more qualified than
her, then perhaps I am responding to an injustice, and my emotion
could be viewed as resentment. But if it turns out that all I really care
about is staying ahead in the race, then perhaps the emotion is one of
jealousy or envy. Far from detecting how I am faring in the world, it
is the emotion itself that stands in need of being detected!12

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Finally, it could be asked, is it a good idea to explicate the
representationality of emotion in terms of detection? This is far from
obvious. Take the example of consecutive thermometer readings
which indicate that the temperature is rising. To use a term employed
by Charles Travis, higher readings factively mean that the
temperature is rising. But factive meaning is not representational at
all:

Factive meaning is, crucially, something utterly different from

representation. The most obvious point is this: if A factively means B,
then since (if) A, B. If Sid did not lose his job, then his drunkenness does
not mean that. By contrast, if B is not so, that is no bar to something
having represented it as so. Just that makes room for representing falsely,
so for representing things as so at all. (Travis 2004, 66).

Dretske disagrees. He invites the reader to

Think of radar misrepresenting an aircraft approaching from the east.

There is a slowly moving blip that when things are working rightis

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the kind of blip an aircraft produces. In this case, though, no such aircraft
exists. The radar still 'says' there is. (Dretske 2003, 69)

This is an interesting, and rather subtle, type of disagreement to

adjudicate in a brief space. But one may wonder whether the kind of
talk that has the radar 'saying' something as complicated as 'there is
an aircraft approaching from the east', can be justified. We seem to
be attributing intentionality to an inanimate object by having it
'express' falsehoods, such as saying that there is a plane, when there
is not one. The problematic nature of such a take on what the radar is
doing can be seen when we compare this to a bona fide case of
representing falsely. A flight controller wrongly believes, and says to
us, that there is a plane approaching from the east. He represents
things to us and to himself as being thus and so. He represents
falsely. But the radar with its blip moving this way and that does
nothing of the kind. Considered in themselves, its movements do not
refer to anything, much less anything beyond themselves, as the

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flight controller's thoughts obviously do. In other words, it is not
plausible to impute intentionality in such cases.13
The conclusion to draw from all of this is that emotions, like
thoughts, are best viewed as representing things as being thus and so,
as opposed to detecting that things are thus and so. To view them as
detectors is to place them in the company of perception and reason as
agents of discovery. Emotions are not in business of discovering how
things are. They are representations of how thing are. But, as we
shall in the next section, this is not all that can be said about them.

4. Emotion as patheception
Now that we have seen that emotion is neither a kind of feeling, nor a
kind of judgment, nor an act of perceiving or detecting an evaluative
aspect of the environment, let us start afresh by looking at a typical
emotional experience. We shall take the experience just as strikes us,
without any preconceived idea as to what it proper analysis must be.
Imagine someone has an only child whom he loves dearly. The
child becomes seriously ill and dies. The father is sad to no end over

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the loss of his child. His well-being is affected-- he is not faring well
in the world. Now there are a number of things which we can
distinguish in this situation. Firstly, we assume that the father has
sustained a loss. We may not be able to define 'loss' in terms of other
notions, and there is no call for us to give definitions of such
concepts as loss, danger, aggravation, and others, which may turn out
to be disjunctive, or which may entangle descriptive and evaluative
elements in an irrevocable way. Secondly, let us assume that the
father understands that he has sustained a loss in the death of his
child. He is in possession of the concept loss, and he is able to
subsume the death of his child under this concept. He can think the
proposition 'The death of my child is a great loss to me'. Thirdly, we
can grant that father not only understands that he has sustained a loss,
but also that he perceived his loss, that he had a perceptual
experience of it. For he saw the child become more and more ill, and
he finally witnessed the death of the child. And he has empirical
knowledge of the meaning of life and death-- he knows, for example,

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that dead children do not come back to life. Fourthly, we assume that
he is sad over the death of his child.
Our previous discussions have led us to believe that sadness is not
the same as perception of loss, nor the same as understanding, or
judging, that one has sustained a loss. We can grant that perceivings
and conceivings are representations of loss. They all say: 'I have
sustained a loss'. But this is not the same as feeling sad. What can
this feeling which we call sadness be?
By way of leading up to the answer I want to recommend in what
follows, one thing may be noted: it is customary to speak of losses as
being suffered, rather than being perceived or conceptually grasped.
Now, typically, part of what it means to say that someone has
suffered a loss is that she has undergone a certain change in her
relation to the world, a change which she may have seen or
understood as a loss. But suffering a loss is not just this. Ordinary
usage also typically refers to the subjective quality of the experience,
not just its ontological ground (the actual changes which constitute
the loss).

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Suffering, in normal usage, attaches to losses, injuries, harms,
wrongs and other occurrences of a negative nature. But to
accomplish our theoretical purpose we want a term that can be
applied more generally -- not just to losses, dangers and other 'bads',
but also to gains, successes, and other 'goods' as well- in short, to all
'creature/environment relations' that bear on well-being. Gains,
successes, narrow escapes from misfortune, and other types of
'goods' are also 'undergone' in an experience with a subjective
character of a certain kind. There is something which experiences,
good and bad, have in common which is not well-served by the
current restrictive use of 'suffer'.
What we want can be found in reviving an older usage of the term
'emotion', whereby emotions were understood as 'passions'. 'Passion'
brings to mind the Latin pati (to suffer), as well pathos (suffering)14.
Passions, in this usage, were supposed to be things with regard to
which we are patients rather than agents. This applies to the person
who endures an injustice and gets to feel resentful, as much as it does
to the person who wins a great victory and is 'overcome' with joy.

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Guided by this older usage, we can stipulatively expand and
neutralize the meaning of 'suffer' so as to say that losses and gains
are all 'suffered' in this neutral, inclusive sense.
But with an eye to being able to encompass the qualities that can
be thus 'suffered', as well as the particular way in which they are
suffered, we can do better. We shall choose a neologism whose usage
has not be pre-empted in anyway: sadness, anger, fear, joy, etc., we
shall say, are patheceptions of loss, offence, danger and (say)
success. These evaluative features themselves we shall refer to as
pathetic qualities. Thus if something is dangerous then it has the
pathetic quality of being dangerous. It is a quality that we may not
only be able to perceive or conceive (of), but also patheceive.
Patheceiving, of course, sounds like perceiving and conceiving.
But in saying that someone patheceives the danger she is in we are
not saying that she perceives it, much less that she subsumes what
she perceives under the concept dangerous. Patheception of danger
can happen when one perceives danger, as well as when one simply
understands that one is in danger. It can even be experienced in

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situations where only imagination is mainly operative, as when one
watches a sad movie, or merely imagines the death of a loved one
who is now merely ill.
But if patheceiving is neither perceiving nor conceiving, what is it
then? I submit that it is best viewed as a third kind of animal, one
that is distinct from these two more familiar kinds. It is distinct, but it
is not completely dissimilar. Like perception and conception,
patheception has content. Nevertheless, it differs from both of them
in being a necessarily affective affair as well. The important thing we
need to emphasize is that cases of patheception are unitary processes
that do not break down into feeling and content components.
This may sound highly unmotivated in view of what we have just
implied, namely, that patheception is both cognitive and affective.
Are these not our old friends, cognition and feeling, as disunited as
ever? If this is indeed the case, then no advance has been made. We
are still caught between the Scylla of cognitivism and the Charybdis
of feeling theories. This is a serious difficulty which needs to be
addressed. For starters, an analogy might help.

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Consider the notion of understanding a statement, in the sense of
just thinking it, as opposed to doubting it, or taking some other
attitude towards it. Here is a 'garden-path' sentence which readers
unacquainted with English grammatical games and diversions will
probably not understand on a first reading: 'The boy the man the girl
saw chased fled.'15 The sentence is about a certain boy, Johnny, who
was being chased by a man, Mr. Smith. A girl, Mary, saw the man.
What is being said is that Johnny (who was being chased by Mr
Smith, who, in his turn, was seen by Mary), fled. After initial
incomprehension, something happens in the reader's mind: she
understands, grasps, or thinks a certain thought, however perversely
expressed the thought may have been. Doubting the proposition, or
taking any other attitude towards it, is not yet in the picture. The
reader might fall dead before she has had a chance to form an
opinion on the matter.
Now consider what it is to doubt a statement, instead of just
thinking it. In doubting a statement, we think it, of course, for one
cannot doubt what one does not think or understand. But this is not

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the whole of what we do. What else do we do? Is doubting a
statement the same as grasping what it means plus something else
(other than doubting) which somehow completes the job, and adds up
to doubting? I do not think so.
Doubting a proposition may happen as we grasp it, or (if we are
unable to give the matter more thought) it may happen later. But
once doubt takes hold of our minds with respect to a certain
proposition, it does not do this in two stagesfirst grasp, and then ...
what? It is certainly not grasping plus feeling uncertain, or wavering,
with respect to the proposition, for this is doubting all over again.
Nor is it flip-flopping between belief and disbelief, for these are
distinct states that neither separately nor jointly amount to doubting.
Doubting does not build on a foundation of grasping. It implies
grasping, but it is not analyzable into grasping plus something else.
In short, the claim is that nothing short of doubting will do the work
of doubting. Doubting is like being red. The latter implies being
coloured, but we do not get red by adding something to being
coloured.

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So it is with fearing, and patheceiving in general. Fear may take
hold of our minds the very instant we see (or grasp) the situation we
are in, or we may behold our situation for a moment before fear
succeeds contemplation. (The latter can happen, with comical effect,
to those who are not very smart or perceptive, as Tom often is in
Tom and Jerry cartoons.) But once fear sets in it does not do this in
two stagesfirst, we see (or grasp) that we are standing on the
window ledge, and then we have a certain feeling which in itself is
somehow less than, or other than fear.
The view which we are trying to steer clear of refuses to attribute
genuine unity to emotion. Here is a particularly lucid example of this
type of view, as expressed by Larry Herzberg, explaining a view
which he attributes to R. S. Lazarus. It shows precisely what we do
not want to end up doing.

For instance, if an event is cognitively appraised in terms that can

properly be summarized as a demeaning offense to me or mine, this
judgment normally causes an affective response of anger, a felt impulse

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associated with particular physiological conditions. This affective
component immediately combines psychologically with the eliciting
cognition to yield an emotion with object-identifying content, one that
typically guides the impulse towards the offender (Herzberg 2012, 76).

'An appraisal that causes an affective response which immediately

combines with ': this is a discourse of temporal stages and
ontologically separate elements, held together in causal relationship,
where time is of the essence (because causation takes time). But it is
not clear that anger is caused by appraisal.16 It is even less clear how
feelings combine with appraisals. Many people reject the idea that
anger is a dumb feeling that does not in itself constitute an emotion;
that it has to combine with something else before an emotion comes
into being. (Why call it 'anger' in the first place?) Causes, moreover,
take time, however small, to produce their effects, and combining,
too, takes time. Causal connections can be interrupted, and
combining can be halted. What if you make an appraisal, which
causes 'anger', but then (somehow) the combining does not happen?
Are you angry or not? According to the statement quoted above, we

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can say that you are angry, for the anger has been caused, and it
exists in you. Presumably, the anger will be 'dumb' and objectless,
because it has not combined with the 'guiding' cognition. (You judge
that you have been insulted, and you are angry, but you do not know
whom to lash out at.) Nevertheless, according to very same
statement, we can say that no emotion of anger exists, because the
combining has been halted. None of this seems very convincing.
In arguing against the notion that anger is an appraisal of offence
plus something else, we do not merely mean to deny a temporal
succession of stages which culminates in an emotion. The unity of
emotion is not just a matter of there being no such temporal division.
Another way to insist on the unity of emotion is to say that anger,
fear, joy, and other forms of patheception do not allow for a
conjunctive, or a genus-differentia type of analysis.
One cannot, in the nature of the case, prove that it is impossible to
produce such analyses. But it is helpful to see this analytical project
in the context of similar, and apparently unsuccessful projects to
analyse fundamental concepts in other areas of philosophy.

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Especially worthy of mention are attempts to understand knowledge
as a species of belief differentiated by truth, justification, and (since
the Gettier problem) right causation. The causal theory of perception
has suggested to many philosophers that seeing and hallucinating can
be understood in terms of 'neutral' common factors and causal
ancestry. Last, but not least, one can mention 'thick' moral concepts
which have been supposed to reduce to a purely descriptive content
that can be disentangled from an evaluative aspect. Emotions were
supposed to follow suit. As we saw in the preceding sections,
cognitivists have tended view them as judgments or appraisals of a
certain type, whereas feeling theorists have thought they could be
reduced to feelings that occur under certain conditions.
The pattern to be seen in many such analyses, as Timothy
Williamson captures it for the case of knowledge, has been, first, to
get hold a certain condition, one that seems necessary for a certain
fundamental concept (as belief is necessary for knowledge). Then
one sets off on a journey to find other conditions which will, together
with the first, prove to be sufficient for the fundamental concept

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under examination. But this expectation, Williamson claims, is based
on a fallacy. 'If G is necessary for F, there need be no further
condition H, specifiable independently of F, such that the
conjunction of G and H is necessary and sufficient for F' (Williamson
1994, 542).17
Williamson illustrates the fallacy by reference to the concept of
being red and the (necessary) condition of being coloured, where it is
obvious that nothing short of being red will get us what we want. But
we saw particularly clear examples of this in the idea that emotions
could be viewed as 'concernful construals' of one's condition, or
'thoughts held in the mind by intentional states of comfort or
discomfort'. Filling in the blanks in Williamson's statement we may
say:
If construal (thought) is necessary for emotion, there need be no further
condition such as concernfulness, (being held in mind by intentional states
of comfort or discomfort), specifiable independently of emotion, such that
the conjunction of construal (thought) and concernfulness (being held in
mind by intentional states of comfort or discomfort) is necessary and
sufficient for emotion.

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Our claim has been precisely that concernfulness and being held in
mind by intentional states of comfort or discomfort cannot be
understood without reference to emotion.
It may be instructive to compare emotion to two other
fundamental concepts which seem equally complex, but which prove
hard to break down into constituent elements. The unity of emotion
may then cease to seem strange after all, when it turns out that unity
is a feature to be found elsewhere in the realm of the mental. The two
concepts are those of pain and perception. We choose to discuss pain
and perception because these two are in some ways akin to emotion.
They give rise to similar challenges, and it may be that success at
understanding one will translate into success at understanding the
other two.
Consider perception first. Perception has a cognitive aspect, as
well as a sensuous aspect that is to be met with nowhere else. When
you see a dog running down the street, you straight away learn
something about the world, which, clearly enough, is a cognitive

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achievement. But I could have given you the same piece of
information with your eyes closed, and, in a way, it would have been
the same as far as your stock of knowledge is concerned. In a way
the same, but (obviously) not in another. Now, is it really helpful to
say that, when you saw for yourself a dog running down the street,
you formed a 'sensuous belief' of a dog running down the street,
whereas when you took my word for it, you formed the very same
belief, but non-sensuously? It is not as if 'sensuousness', which is the
hallmark of perceptual experiences, is a mere side-show that
accompanies an emerging belief.18 No more than is the feeling of
anger a sensation that accompanies an emerging judgment of
demeaning offence to me or mine. (It does not matter if we were to
have causation, because causation involves accompanying.) Rather, it
is just that you see a dog running down the street. Content and
sensuousness come in one package. We call that package seeing, or
perceiving.
Or consider pain, which provides another, perhaps more
instructive variation on the same theme. Pain, it is commonly

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acknowledged nowadays, requires us to talk about it in sensoryinformational as well as affective terms. If you can muster enough
philosophical curiosity to introspect as you hop around in pain after
stubbing your toe, this is what you will probably find. First, there is
the pain, described by Pitcher (1970) in terms of a homely but very
meaningful word, 'awfulness'. It is that which makes you wince, hop,
nurse, and seek help. It is 'aversive' - linked to avoidance and the
desire for this not to happen again. But this is not all. In addition to
awfulness, your experience has a sensory-informational dimension
which gives you information about what happened: location (it
happened in the big toe of your left foot), extent (more than the tip of
the toe was involved), intensity (it was a hard bump), how long the
impact lasted, and what kind of impact it was (collision, not crushing,
or piercing).
These two aspects of the pain experience, the sensoryinformational and the affective, are distinguishable. The 'awfulness'
of a pain experience can be compared to the sensuousness of a sense
experience, and to the affective aspect of an anger experience. The

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awfulness isn't there just for the ride with the sensory-informational
aspect. The 'awfulness' tells the story of the stubbed toe in great
detail, because it 'wraps' itself around the collision, in the toe,
extending this much, for so long. It is not a dumb, undifferentiated
awfulness. It is an awfulness of this kind. (For the variety of
dimensions along which 'awfulness' can be experienced, see Clark
2006, 182). Even in the case of phantom limb pain, where there is no
big toe to throb with pain, and no flat of a foot to be tingling with
pins-and-needles type of pain, the pain has to tell a story of where
and what like. There is simply no pain without a story to tell, no
matter how vague it is (as when one 'aches all over'), just as there is
no anger without a story to tell, and no perceptual experience which
does not say how things seem.
In all three cases of emotion, perception, and pain we seem to be
dealing with something that has a peculiar kind of unbreakable
complexity. It is not just that we get to know about a dog running
down the street, or a toe that has been stubbed, or a loss that has been
suffered. There is, one is tempted to say, something additional: the

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sensuousness, the awfulness, and the feeling. The problem is just
this: the sensuousness (of seeing), the awfulness (of pain), and the
feeling (of sadness) are not really 'additional'. The very act of having
them implicates content as a matter of conceptual, rather than causal
necessity. This is probably what we need to reconcile ourselves to if
we are to begin to understand what emotion is.

5. Conclusion
The main burden of my discussion has been to recommend the view
that, despite our ability to distinguish conceptually between affect
and cognition in emotion, this ability does not reflect a division at the
level of reality. Emotion is experienced as a unity, and repeated
failures at analysis should convince us to think of it as such.
Patheception, we have suggested, may be compared to perception,
conception, and nociception. These are different capacities which we
have. They should be viewed as co-ordinate with, rather than
subordinate to, each other. This does not gainsay the fact that they

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are similar in many different and interesting ways (which explains
the constant attraction of reductive projects).
Instead of analysing these different capacities into one another, it
may be philosophically more enlightening to look for patterns,
relations, and structural similarities. This will be a kind of
'descriptive phenomenology' a step (if one so wishes) on the way to
what Strawson called 'descriptive metaphysics', which aims 'to lay
bare the most general features of our conceptual structure.' (Strawson
1959, 9).

Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of
Democracy, for a grant that enabled him to start working on the subject of
(political) emotions. Thanks are also due to the editor and anonymous referees of
this journal for many constructive remarks and suggestions for improvement.

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Notes
1

For a recent defense of 'feeling' theories of emotions, see Demian Whiting

(2009). In an earlier paper (2006, 261) Whiting recognizes what many people will
agree with, namely, that no contemporary philosophers have been willing to defend
the view that 'emotions are nothing more than types of feelings'.
2

For an overview of perceptualist theories of emotion see M. Salmela (2011, 129)

3

Nussbaum's attempt to deal with the problem of emotion-free evaluative

judgments is not convincing. Years after a sad event, feelings of sadness subside,
but people continue to make the same evaluative judgments as before. Nussbaum
speaks of the 'freshness' (novelty, newness) of the evaluative judgment that can
properly be identified with an emotion. Such a judgment has power to affect our
attitude towards other propositions. She even suggests that passage of time may
bring about a change in estimate of value. But as Roberts suggests (1999, 797-8), a
difference in 'freshness' in not a difference in judgment proper, nor does grieving
consist in one proposition affecting our attitude towards other propositions, nor is a
change in estimate of value necessary for the subsiding of emotion.
4

Cf. also Michael Stocker (1983, 21): 'having fallen on the ice, the very same

knowledge of (and wish to avoid) the dangers of walking on ice are ''emotionally
present'' to me.' To speak of 'the very same knowledge of the dangers' suggests
that there is no change in content before and after

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York Gunther (2004, 49) seems to go farther than Goldie, holding that there is

change in content if and only if there change in feeling ('emotional

phenomenology'). Thus if you find the joke less funny after hearing it for the fourth
time, then the content is not the same, even though it may be expressed in the
same words. According to the author, 'we lack the linguistic resources to
differentiate' (50). The claim is supported by reference to a comparison with
'red', which can refer to different levels of grain. But grain has no clear meaning in
the context of a joke's content. It might have some meaning in the context of
amusement at a joke's content, as the author seems to suggest. Amusement does
come in degrees. But this seems to drag attitude into content-- attitude becomes
part of content, instead of being attitude towards it.
6

Cf. Deonna and Teroni, (2012, 78): 'there is no reason to think that [a] general

attitude has psychological reality over and above that of its determinate
instances'
7

As Greenspan rightly says (1992, 293), discomfort (like pain) is a 'general state

of feeling of a sort one would naturally want to get out of'.

8

The understanding which Deonna and Teroni (2012, 72), and Larry Herzberg

(2012, 76) seem to have of Prinz's view is very much based on this statement.

Page 58 of 65

According to Prinz, 'Dretskes independently motivated theory of representation

delivers a very satisfying answer to the question about what sadness represents. It
simply falls out of Dretskes theory that sadness represents loss.' (Prinz 2007, 62).
10

Peirce is foremost among such philosophers. As Ramsey (2007, 22) reads him,

'there can be no meaning or representational content unless there is something or

someone for whom the sign is meaningful.'
11

This example, calling for cognitive involvement in order to distinguish between

envy and resentment, is suggested by Richard Norman's discussion (2002).

12

Prinz practically acknowledges this point when he says that 'somatic signal [s]

of the same bodily pattern can have distinct meanings on different occasions
depending on the mental mechanisms that caused that pattern to form.' (Prinz 2007,
66). The somatic signals, registering as this emotion or that, are disambiguated by
reference to our knowledge of what caused them (in our example, was it a
perception of injustice, or seeing someone get a head of me in the race?)
13

Cf. Ramsey's conclusion about 'receptors' (his term for mechanisms, or

features, which nomically detect, indicate, or respond to distal stimuli): 'When we

look at the role of receptors inside of cognitive systems, as described by cognitive
theories that employ them, we see that the role is better described as something like
a reliable causal mediator or relay circuit which, as such, is not representational in
nature.' (Ramsey 2007, 149).

Page 59 of 65

14

This older meaning of 'passion' is well-preserved in the special-purpose

religious use of the term 'the Passion of Christ'.

15

This example is made used of by David Pit (2004, 27) in the context of

discussing cognitive phenomenology, or 'what it is like to think that P.'

16

Recall Solomon's statement, quoted earlier, 'my anger is my judgment that John

has wronged me.'

17

For a similar opposition to a dismembering analysis of seeing, see John Hyman

(1992, 291); for the case of 'thick' ethical concepts, see Bernard Williams (1973).
18

Cases of blindsight may suggest that there could be 'perceptual contact with the

world unyoked to conscious portrayal' (Sturgeon 2008, 114). It is not clear if

'perceptual contact' amounts to a kind of perception. It is probably clearer that
blindsight is not a kind of sight or seeing. What matters to us is that sensuousness
('conscious portrayal', in Sturgeon's terms), much like pain, or anger, 'portrays'
things as being a certain way. Portrayal is of the essence.

Notes on contributor
Raja Bahlul is Professor of Philosophy at UAE University. He has publications in
the areas of metaphysics (identity of indiscernibles, universals), Islamic philosophy
and theology (Ghazali, Avicenna) and contemporary Islamic social and political
thought (democracy, secularism). He writes in English and in Arabic.

Page 60 of 65

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