My discussion below is an highly abbreviated version of a paper in preparation for a conference on innateness . I allow for both types of influence but suggest that more attention should be paid to mechanisms of social transfer of emotions, as a possible innate source of plasticity in moral learning via emotions - and hence of cultural variation in moral codes.

Emotions are an extremely salient and important aspect of human mental life. However, until recently they have not attracted much attention in cognitive science. Despite this neglect by cognitive scientists, other investigators have been actively studying emotions and developing theoretical perspectives on them. These theoretical perspectives raise a number of important questions that cognitive scientists will have to address as they bring emotions into their purview: (1) Is it the physiological or the cognitive aspects of an emotional (...) experience that primarily determine which emotion is being experienced? (2) Are emotions culturally specific or widely shared across cultures? (3) Are either emotions themselves or the causes that elicit them innate in one or more of that word's several senses? I will address these issues in the course of surveying the different theoretical perspectives that have directed research on emotions. (shrink)

Innate emotional bases of ethics have been proposed by authors in evolutionary psychology, following Darwin and his sources in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Philosophers often tend to view such theories as irrelevant to, or even as tending to undermine, the project of moral philosophy. But the importance of emotions to early moral learning gives them a role to play in determining the content of morality. I argue, first, that research on neural circuits indicates that the basic elements or components (...) of emotions need not be limited to what psychologists think of as basic emotions. But in that case, innate mechanisms of social transfer of emotion, such as infants’ tendency to facial imitation, gaze-following, and emotional contagion or empathy, provide a source of plasticity in developing the basic elements that lets emotions incorporate cultural influence from early on. This leaves room later for cognitive components of adult human emotions and hence for the further role of language in conveying cultural influence. We can thus see how moral judgment might depend on innate emotional capacities that are both modifiable by culture and capable of registering objective values. I use Rawls’s treatment of the development of moral sentiments to illustrate the kind of supportive role that emotions can play in a principle-based account – though my own account involves modifications I go on to indicate. (shrink)

Rolls's mechanistic account of emotion can help to bridge a rift within the field of evolutionary psychology. One side of the rift emphasizes the importance of innate psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve specific problems encountered in the ancestral environment. The other side emphasizes learning, development, and culture as open-ended evolutionary processes in their own right. Rolls shows how these two views can be reconciled, allowing a productive middle ground to be explored.

Introduction -- Part I: The lie that we are not good enough as we are -- Where the lie came from and why we bought it -- Trying to meet the criteria for good enough -- Perpetuating the striving and the lack -- Part II: Dead ends and what they teach us -- Money/stuff -- Appearance -- Religion -- Food -- Drugs/alcohol -- Sex/romantic love -- Accomplishment/education/notoriety -- Busyness -- Part III: The truth : we are innately good -- Evil (...) is an alternative, not our nature -- Lighting our darkness to let go of fear, false beliefs, and all negative -- Emotion -- Looking at our essence, which is love, or everything good -- Being who we are ... it means overcoming our separateness -- Invoking love -- Aligning with love -- Being love innately more than we ever dreamed of being. (shrink)

Emotions, Values, and the Law brings together ten of John Deigh's essays written over the past fifteen years. In the first five essays, Deigh ask questions about the nature of emotions and the relation of evaluative judgment to the intentionality of emotions, and critically examines the cognitivist theories of emotion that have dominated philosophy and psychology over the past thirty years. A central criticism of these theories is that they do not satisfactorily account for the emotions (...) of babies or animals other than human beings. Drawing on this criticism, Deigh develops an alternative theory of the intentionality of emotions on which the education of emotions explains how human emotions, which innately contain no evaluative thought, come to have evaluative judgments as their principal cognitive component. The second group of five essays challenge the idea of the voluntary as essential to understanding moral responsibility, moral commitment, political obligation, and other moral and political phenomena that have traditionally been thought to depend on people's will. Each of these studies focuses on a different aspect of our common moral and political life and shows, contrary to conventional opinion, that it does not depend on voluntary action or the exercise of a will constituted solely by rational thought. Together, the essays in this collection represent an effort to shift our understanding of the phenomena traditionally studied in moral and political philosophy from that of their being products of reason and will, operating independently of feeling and sentiment to that of their being manifestations of the work of emotion. (shrink)

It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may conflict with those of higher-level cognitive processes. Whilst the structure (...) of the adaptive responses is innate, the contents of the system which triggers them are largely learnt. The circuits subserving the adaptive responses are probably located in the limbic system. This theory of emotion is directly applicable only to a small sub-domain of the traditional realm of emotion. It can be used, however, to explain the grouping of various other phenomena under the heading of emotion, and to explain various characteristic failings of the pre-scientific conception of emotion. (shrink)

A principal theme of our article is that emotions, including what are called basic emotions, cannot be exhaustively categorized as “innate” or “acquired.” Instead, we argue that basic emotions are more realistically viewed as emergent phenomena, the result of complex interrelations of environmental and organismic factors at all levels of organization. While the commentators apparently accepted the proposed developmental paradigm, they took exception to aspects of our treatment of basic emotions and made a number of (...) helpful comments, to which we respond below. (shrink)

Spoken language is an innate ability of the human being and represents the most widespread mode of social communication. The ability to share concepts, intentions and feelings, and also to respond to what others are feeling/saying is crucial during social interactions. A growing body of evidence suggests that language evolved from manual gestures, gradually incorporating motor acts with vocal elements. In this evolutionary context, the human mirror mechanism (MM) would permit the passage from “doing something” to “communicating it to (...) someone else.” In this perspective, the MM would mediate semantic processes being involved in both the execution and in the understanding of messages expressed by words or gestures. Thus, the recognition of action related words would activate somatosensory regions, reflecting the semantic grounding of these symbols in action information. Here, the role of the sensorimotor cortex and in general of the human MM on both language perception and understanding is addressed, focusing on recent studies on the integration between symbolic gestures and speech. We conclude documenting some evidence about MM in coding also the emotional aspects conveyed by manual, facial and body signals during communication, and how they act in concert with language to modulate other’s message comprehension and behavior, in line with an “embodied” and integrated view of social interaction. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 99-110, April 2022. Researchers often disagree as to whether emotions are largely consistent across people and over time, or whether they are variable. They also disagree as to whether emotions are initiated by appraisals, or whether they may be initiated in diverse ways. We draw upon Parallel-Distributed-Processing to offer an algorithmic account in which features of an emotion instance are bi-directionally connected to each other via conjunction units. We propose that such (...) indirect connections may be innate as well as learned. These ideas lead to the development of the Interactive Activation and Competition framework for Emotion which allows us to specify when emotions are consistent and when they are variable, as well as when they are appraisal-led and when they are input-agnostic. (shrink)

Saltzstein and Kasachkoff (2004) critique the social intuitionist model (Haidt, 2001), but the model that they critique is a stripped-down version that should be called the “possum” model. They make three charges about the possum model that are not true about the social intuitionist model: that it includes no role for reasoning, that it reduces social influence to compliance, and that it does not take a developmental perspective. After I defend the honor of the social intuitionist model, I raise two (...) areas of legitimate dispute: the scope and nature of moral reasoning, and the usefulness of appealing to innate ideas, rather than to learning and reasoning, as the origin of moral knowledge. I present three clusters of innate moral intuitions, related to sympathy, hierarchy, and reciprocity. (shrink)

Munch-Jurisic’s book thoroughly describes several cases of severe distresses reported and expressed by perpetrators of tremendous acts such as mass murders. Arguing against a simplistic reading according to which these signs of distress are straightforward manifestations of some innate moral nature, and against the optimistic reading according to which they will lead to prosocial behaviors, Munch-Jursic offers compelling reasons to adopt a more complex theory of emotion. In this commentary, I aim to stress the implications of her book for (...) the debate on moral enhancement and for emotion theory in general. However, while I concur with Munch-Jurisic that emotion theory must make room for complexity and indeterminacy, I challenge her claim that motivational theories of emotion are ill-equipped to face the challenges she poses. (shrink)

This book examines the role and importance of reason and emotion in justice and the law. Eight lawyers and philosophers of law consider law's basis in the universal human need for society, our innate sense of justice, and many other powerful inclinations and emotions, including the desire for fairness and even for law itself. Human beings are deeply social creatures, inspired by social and other emotions, which can ennoble, support, or undermine the law. Law gains legitimacy and (...) effectiveness when reason recognizes and embraces human emotions for the benefit of society as a whole. This volume explores the power and purposes of reason and emotion in the law. (shrink)

Psychopaths appear to be ‘creatures apart’ – grandiose, shameless, callous and versatile in their violence. I discuss biological underpinnings to their pale affect, their selective inability to discern fear and sadness in others and a predatory orienting towards images that make most startle and look away. However, just because something is biologically underpinned does not mean that it is innate. I show that while there may be some genetic determination of fearlessness and callous-unemotionality, these and other features of the (...) personality may arise from developmental failures in the interpersonal reception of their emotions, needs and their sense of self. One is unlikely to be able to own inner experiences if shamed for having them, or if, having them, one does not know how to regulate and soothe. So psychopaths may learn to attend away and suppress them. Rather than a fully inherited difficulty, they may have become unable to reflect on inner states, so meta-emotions and self-reflective emotions like guilt and shame do not fully arise. They retain enough sensitivity to know their difference, and hide. I suggest that psychopaths are characterised by a nested sense of self, arising from the surprising effect of shame on these seemingly shameless characters. They do not have an integrated sense of self across context or across time or in relation to a generalised social other. With a nested sense of self, diminished intensity and scope of affective experience (in both directly experienced and vicarious forms) they lack textured access to a personal, owned and integrated past. Thus they lack the kind of access to the past required for a motivationally compelling planning of the future. They lack the emotional investment in the future that enables us to overcome the motivation to act opportunistically and myopically. These individuals live strangely in time. They have a fugitive sense of self and live nimbly among many pasts. They present an elegant and coherent mask to the person they are addressing in the moment and generate possible futures without conviction. (shrink)

It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may conflict with those of higher-level cognitive processes. Whilst the structure (...) of the adaptive responses is innate, the contents of the system which triggers them are largely learnt. The circuits subserving the adaptive responses are probably located in the limbic system. This theory of emotion is directly applicable only to a small sub-domain of the traditional realm of emotion. It can be used, however, to explain the grouping of various other phenomena under the heading of emotion, and to explain various characteristic failings of the pre-scientific conception of emotion. (shrink)

In honoring Carroll Izard’s contributions to emotion research, we discuss infant facial activity and emotion expression. We consider the debated issue of whether infants are biologically prepared to express specific emotions. We offer a perspective that potentially integrates differing viewpoints on infant facial expression of emotion. Specifically, we suggest that evolution has prepared infants with innate action readiness patterns, which are crucial for early infant–caregiver social interaction, and in the course of social interaction specific facial configurations acquire functional (...) significance, becoming associated with specific emotions. Research has not confirmed the presence of innate neurophysiological action patterns that map onto discrete emotions but evidence indicates that the possibility has not been ruled out. (shrink)

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. On this view, what differs in emotional and non-emotional states is the kind of inputs that are processed by a (...) general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide non-conscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Introduction Connectedness to nature is a concept that reflects the emotional relationship between the self and the natural environment, based on the theory of biophilia, the innate predisposition to the natural environment. However, the biophobic component has largely been ignored, despite, given its adaptive functional role, being an essential part of the construct. If there is a phylogenetic component underlying nature connectedness, biophilic, and/or biophobic, there should be evidence of this record from early childhood. The main aim of this (...) study is therefore to describe the emotional attributions identified in 5 years old. Methodology Two studies were conducted. In the first, 94 children expressed their concept of nature and made basic emotional attributions to a set of 30 images of natural, using a software designed for the study. In the second, 39 children repeated the procedure and provided explanations for their responses. Results The main results show that, in general, children use both positive and negative emotions, which may be related to a three-dimensional model of emotional attributions to nature. The most widely attributed emotion is happiness. However, fear is the second most common attribution. The role of happiness could be explained by a feeling of security and familiarity, while the importance of fear in nature could show an adaptive response of the fear of wild nature in children. This interpretation could be confirmed when analyzing specifically the emotional attributions, classifying the images according to biological and ecosystemic criteria. Thus, for example, more emotional attributions are explained by the “pleasantness” attributed to primary producers and landscapes (e.g., flora), versus attributions of “harm” to the images of secondary and tertiary consumers (e.g., hunters). Conclusion These results provide evidence in favor of a didactic procedure to study emotional attributions to images of nature in preschool children. They suggest the incorporation of biophobia as an important adaptive factor in connectedness to nature and a tripartite emotional hypothesis based on the valences of the attributed emotions. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ De l'avis de plusieurs, il existe une tension entre le modèle « naturaliste » des émotions qui inspire les psychologues évolutionnistes et le modèle des constructionnistes sociaux. D'un côté, il semble que les émotions sont innées, rigides et panculturelles ; de l'autre, elles sont conçues comme des artefacts culturels, changeant au gré des arrière-plans culturels. Nous examinons chacune des deux approches et montrons que l'approche naturaliste n'est pas incompatible avec une forme de constructionnisme faible, en ce que la première (...) peut tenir compte d'un certain degré de plasticité. Nous soutenons qu'en fait les deux courants devraient être vus comme offrant des points de vue différents, mais complémentaires, sur les mêmes phénomènes. Cependant, une part du domaine des émotions étudiée par les constructionnistes échappe aux efforts d'intégration. Une façon de remédier à la situation est de proposer un réaménagement conceptuel du domaine. Par exemple, Griffiths propose que la solution passe par l'élimination du concept d’« émotion ». Quoique notre investigation des différentes formes d'émotions suggère un certain scepticisme concernant l'utilité théorique du concept d’« émotion », nous croyons qu'il est trop tôt pour en annoncer la mort. ABSTRACT According to many, there is an incongruity between the naturalist's model of emotions that inspired the evolutionary psychologists and the social constructionist's model. In brief, the naturalists propose that emotions are innate, rigid and pancultural ; whereas the social constructionists believe that emotions are cultural artefacts without any biological reality. We examine each approach and show that the naturalists' view is not incompatible with a weak form of constructionism. We argue that in fact the two positions should be considered as offering different but complementary views of the same phenomena. However, a part of the domain of emotions studied by the social constructionists escapes the attempt at integration. One way to solve this problem is to reconfigure the domain. Griffith proposed to do so by eliminating the concept of “emotion”. Our investigation of different forms of emotions suggests that if scepticism concerning the theoretical utility of the concept of “emotion” is grounded, it is still too early to proclaim its death. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists discuss new collaborative work in moral philosophy that draws on evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in (...) moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 1 discuss recent work on the evolution of moral beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include a version of naturalism that avoids supposed fallacies, distinct neurocomputational systems for deontic reasoning, the evolutionary psychology of moral sentiments regarding incest, the sexual selection of moral virtues, the evolution of symbolic thought, and arguments both for and against innate morality. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value for both philosophy and psychology of collaborative efforts to understand the many complex aspects of morality. Contributors William Casebeer, Leda Cosmides, Oliver Curry, Michael Dietrich, Catherine Driscoll, Susan Dwyer, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, Debra Lieberman, Ron Mallon, John Mikhail, Geoffrey Miller, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, Michael Ruse, Hagop Sarkissian, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Valerie Tiberius, John Tooby, Peter Tse, Kathleen Wallace, Arthur Wolf, David Wong. (shrink)

The present paper argues that what the phenomenon of autism may really represent is not, as has been argued by some, a window into the hidden mechanisms involved in a theory of mind, but rather a window into the conceptual problems involved in Cartesianism that lead one to postulate the need for a theory of mind. Far from constituting an anomaly for the Cartesian view of social cognition and empathy, autism actually exemplifies it. After reviewing the main themes in the (...) Cartesian view of emotions, which underpin the view that the ability to understand facial expressions of emotion must be innate, the paper considers how recent advances in dynamic systems research have laid the groundwork for a non-Cartesian view of this capacity. Such a non-Cartesian view of emotional experience then leads to a new understanding of the factors that place a child at risk of developing autism. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the contrasting predictions of the evolutionary and decision-theoretic approaches to deontic reasoning. Two experiments embedded a hazard management (HM) rule in a social contract scenario that should lead to competition between innate modules. A 3rd experiment used a pure HM task. Threatening material was also introduced into the antecedent, p, of a deontic rule, if p then must q. According to the evolutionary approach, more HM responses (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000) are predicted when p is threatening, (...) whereas decision theory predicts fewer. All 3 experiments were consistent with decision theory. Other theories are discussed, and it is concluded that they cannot account for the behavior observed in these experiments. (shrink)

The problem of variability concerns the fact that empirical data does not support the existence of a coordinated set of biological markers, either in the body or the brain, which correspond to our folk emotion categories; categories like anger, happiness, sadness, disgust and fear. Barrett (2006a, b, 2013, 2016, 2017a, b) employs this fact to argue (i) against the faculty psychology approach to emotion, e.g. emotions are the products of emotion-specific mechanisms, or “modules”, and (ii) for the view that (...) emotions are constructed from domain-general “core systems” with the aid of our folk concepts. The conjunction of (i) and (ii), she argues, heralds a paradigm shift in our understanding of emotion: emotions aren’t triggered but made. In this paper, I argue such a shift is premature for a faculty psychology framework can accommodate the neurobiological variability of emotion. This can be done by treating emotions as developmental modules: non-innate systems which behave like modules, but form as a product of ontogenetic development. (shrink)

Synthesizing decades of influential research and theory, Michael Lewis demonstrates the centrality of consciousness for emotional development. At first, infants' competencies constitute innate reactions to particular physical events in the child's world. These "action patterns" are not learned, but are readily influenced by temperament and social interactions. With the rise of consciousness, these early competencies become reflected feelings, giving rise to the self-conscious emotions of empathy, envy, and embarrassment, and, later, shame, guilt, and pride. Focusing on typically developing (...) children, Lewis also explores problems of atypical emotional development. (shrink)

Yoga practitioners have been using meditation practices for millennia. These practices have evolved as tools for improving health, healing emotional imbalance, and connecting with one's purpose and direction in life. Meditation provides a transcendence of ordinary mental activity into the realm of what is spiritually described as connecting you with pure consciousness. In colloquial terms it could be called finding your "genius," the aspect of yourself that is full of intuition and creativity, insight and purpose, an innate brilliance. Yogis (...) consider it finding the whole of who you are. (shrink)

The biophilia hypothesis posits an innate biological and genetic connection between human and nature, including an emotional dimension to this connection. Biophilic design builds on this hypothesis in an attempt to design human-nature connections into the built environment. This article builds on this theoretical framework through a meta-analysis of experimental studies on the emotional impacts of human exposure to natural and urban environments. A total of 49 studies were identified, with a combined sample size of 3,201 participants. The primary (...) findings indicated that exposure to natural environments had a medium to large effect on both increasing positive affect and decreasing negative affect. This finding supported the anticipated emotional dimension of the biophilia hypothesis and lends credibility to biophilic design theory. Evidence was revealed in support of the affective/arousal response model. Immersion in environments indicated a larger effect size than laboratory simulation of environments. Methodological recommendations for future experimental research were few, however the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule outcome measure was recommended as a measure of both positive and negative affect for further studies. A combination measurement of stress related outcome variables was proposed to further explore the affective/arousal response model and its potential relationship to the biophilia hypothesis. The meta-analysis provides evidence for fundamental theories regarding human-nature connection, while revealing gaps in current knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Interpersonal and Emotional Beginnings of Understanding: A Review of Peter Hobson’sThe Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of ThinkingShaun Gallagher (bio)Hobson's book (2002) is extremely accessible, interestingly interdisciplinary, and knowledgeable in all the right ways. He pulls together work in psychiatry, experimental psychology, and psychoanalysis in a framework that is relevant to issues in the philosophy of mind. We are told much of this in the preface, and (...) it is true. I think it is an excellent book for students and for theorists who have an interest in, but who are not working in the specific areas of, cognitive development. I recommend it highly for those audiences. For those who are already working in these areas, and for those who are already familiar with Hobson's work, there are no surprises. As someone who has learned a good deal from Hobson and who is in substantial agreement with many of his conclusions, I read the first six chapters of the book looking for something new and exciting, but did not find it. The reader will nonetheless find clear and careful discussions of contributions from evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, and psychopathology to our understanding of the mind.Hobson does tackle the difficult question of why we should include psychoanalysis as part of the investigation. He views psychoanalysis as a kind of experimental procedure. Like the experimentalist, the psychoanalyst "sets up an unusual situation that allows him to observe things that would otherwise remain hidden" (p. 19). What the psychoanalyst looks for in these arrangements are patterns of relationship that shape all of the patient's behavior and thought, relations with others and with herself. The analyst has to engage in something like a second-person phenomenology, examining not only the subjective [End Page 253] patterns of the patient, but also the effects (specifically the emotional effects) those patterns have on the analyst himself. The outcome of analysis, for purposes of the research project that Hobson is engaged in, is twofold. First, the psychoanalytic procedure reaches certain dimensions of thought and social relationships that seem unavailable to experimental approaches. "We find that the mind works in ways that are more complex than common sense or even experimental psychology would suggest. In particular, there are ways of thinking and relating to people that appear to be more primitive and less rational than we might suppose" (pp. 21-2). Second, psychoanalysis shows that what happens within an individual's mind is essentially related to what happens in her social relationships. The latter point, as Hobson notes, is a central theme of his book.This is all well and good, the experimental psychologist might say, but it seems overly subjective. After all, if the data include the emotional effects that a patient might have on the investigator, how precisely can we make that scientifically objective? I think that the right answer to that question is embodied in Hobson's approach, and perhaps in who Hobson is. Hobson is himself an experimental psychologist, as well as a practicing psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. He balances the claims that he bases on psychoanalysis with results from studies (including many of his own studies) in experimental psychology and psychiatry. To put it precisely, the task is not to turn the subjective or intersubjective data from psychoanalysis into objective data, but to explore subjectivity (which is certainly part of what we want to explain) by means of a method that gets at things from a different perspective, but that is also consistent with and balanced by the more objective results of experimental science. My own doubts about psychoanalysis are somewhat mitigated by the balance that Hobson maintains throughout this book.Chapters 2 through 6 summarize a large number of studies that ultimately make the case for the importance of intersubjectivity in the development of mental abilities. Chapter 2 explores the necessary prerequisites for the emergence of thought in infancy. Evidence found in experiments on and observations of the interaction between infants and caregivers, early imitation, and emotional relatedness supports the picture of a mix of innate and acquired aspects that move the child toward thought. Significant emphasis is devoted to the role of perception and... (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Body Awareness to Recognize Feelings: The Exploration of a Musical Emotional Experience” by Alejandra Vásquez-Rosati. Upshot: The enactment view echoes the deeper biology and chemistry of emotion. Music resonates innately because emotional evaluation is the evolutionary grandfather of all senses.

Is morality biologically altruistic? Does it imply a disadvantage in the struggle for existence? A positive answer puts morality at odds with natural selection, unless natural selection operates at the level of groups. In this case, a trait that is good for groups though bad for individuals can evolve. Sociobiologists reject group selection and have adopted one of two horns of a dilemma. Either morality is based on an egoistic calculus, compatible with natural selection; or morality continues tied to psychological (...) and biological altruism but not as a product of natural selection. The dilemma denies a third possibility—that psychological altruism evolves as a biologically selfish trait. I discuss the classical treatments of the paradox by Charles Darwin and Robert Trivers, focusing on the role they attribute to social emotions. The upshot is that both Darwin and Trivers sketch a natural-selection process relying on innate emotional mechanisms that render morality adaptive for individuals as well as for groups. I give additional reasons for viewing it as a form of natural, instead of only cultural, selection. (shrink)

This article explores emotions and their relationship to ‘somatic responses’, i.e., one’s automatic responses to sensations of pain, cold, warmth, sudden intensity. To this end, it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of the first-hand experience of eight basic emotions, briefly exploring their essential aspects: their holistic nature, their identifying dynamic transformation of the lived body, their two-layered intentionality, their involuntary initiation and voluntary espousal. The fact that the involuntary tensional shifts initiating emotions are irreplicatable voluntarily, is taken (...) to show that all emotions have an innate core, a conclusion corroborated by their strong similarities to somatic responses in dynamics, hedonic tone, and topology. The fact that emotions may be culturally reworked, is shown to be explicable in terms of their complex nature: their dependence on belief, their voluntary espousal, and their ready social transmittability. Finally, it is argued that emotions may plausibly be deemed the evolutionary descendants of somatic responses. (shrink)

This new edition of Darwin’s work is due, says the introduction, to the interest felt in the new science of kinesics, viz., the non-verbal aspects of human communication. Darwin felt that the genetic approach to the problem should throw light on the emotional expressions to be observed in animals, children, the insane and normal adults and he crystallized his findings in a number of definite laws. More recent attention to these problems however shows the danger of dogmatism in this department. (...) For scientific knowledge concerning emotion is neither comprehensive nor overly exact; the nature of emotions, their meaning, their physiological aspects and external manifestations are still obscure. When knowledge of the situation to which the emotion is a response is withheld, there is little agreement among observers as to what specific emotion is being depicted, e.g., in a photograph. When that knowledge is supplied the agreement grows; it further helps the observer to be acquainted with the person depicting the emotion for it appears that the individual has only two or three expressions which appear in the great majority of his responses to widely different situations. And many of these responses are acquired rather than innate, social rather than emotional in character, as can be seen in the manner in which they vary from one people to another. (shrink)

Music impinges upon the body and the brain and has inductive power, relying on both innate dispositions and acquired mechanisms for coping with the sounds. This process is partly autonomous and partly deliberate, but multiple interrelations between several levels of processing can be shown. There is, further, a tradition in neuroscience that divides the organization of the brain into lower and higher functions. The latter have received a lot of attention in music and brain studies during the last decades. (...) Recent developments in neuroimaging techniques, however, have broadened the field by encompassing the study of both cortical and subcortical processing of the sounds. Much is still to be investigated but some major observations seem already to emerge. The domain of music and emotions is a typical example with a major focus on the pleasure that can be derived from listening to music. Pleasure, however, is not the only emotion that music can induce and the mechanisms behind its elicitation are far from understood. There are also mechanisms related to arousal and activation that are both less differentiated and at the same time more complex than the assumed mechanisms triggering basic emotions. It is tempting, therefore, to bring together contributions from neuroscience studies with a view to cover the possible range of answers to the question of what pleasurable or mood-modifying effects music can have on human beings in real-time listening situations. (shrink)

In this article, we aim to describe the crucial role of the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) in the interaction between what we term the ‘emotional imperative’ and the interference of reason during the decision-making process in António Damásio’s work Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Firstly, we examine the interaction between reasoning, emotions, and human action, with emphasis on the cognitive processes underlying decisionmaking. Next, we explore the influence of emotional and biological factors on SMH, going beyond (...) cost-benefit analysis, highlighting the relevance of memory and mental representations in the decision-making process. Subsequently, we address the influence of SMH, emotions, and feelings on decisions, especially in scenarios of risk and immediate reward, emphasizing the need to consider immediate and future implications. Following this, we investigate somatic markers in neural terms, discussing whether they are innate or acquired and their influence on social behavior and brain lesions. Finally, we analyze the relationship between brain processes, such as the prefrontal cortices, and the interpretation of bodily sensations, emotional responses, and decisionmaking, accentuating the importance of these regions in assimilating somatic markers and their influence on thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors. We conclude that SMH is seen as a biological mechanism that integrates emotional and cognitive information, shaping evaluations and choices. -/- . (shrink)

How good gets better and bad gets worse: measuring the face of emotion Given the history of the past, black South African students from different settings face unique academic and emotional climate. Using the Differential Emotions Scale which focuses on ten discrete emotions, and building upon Boyle's seminal work, this study reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for individual items across raters. The findings further indicate that majority of the DES items are sensitive indicators of the different (...) innate and universal facial expressions. However, the construct requires revision so that it offers the examiner maximum flexibility in assessment at diverse levels, in terms of more extensive norming and programmatic replication. In brief, the DES potentially has much to offer provided that it is adequately developed for use in non-Western nations or contexts. (shrink)

Williams Syndrome provides a striking test case for discourses on disability, because the characteristics associated with Williams Syndrome involve a combination of “abilities” and “disabilities”. For example, Williams Syndrome is associated with disabilities in mathematics and spatial cognition. However, Williams Syndrome individuals also tend to have a unique strength in their expressive language skills, and are socially outgoing and unselfconscious when meeting new people. Children with Williams are said to be typically unafraid of strangers and show a greater interest in (...) contact with adults than with their peers. This apparently keen social knowledge is a counterexample to the discussion of disability among academic philosophers, especially philosophers of the early modern period. Locke infamously used the example of disability to claim that Descartes’ arguments in favor of innate ideas were incorrect. On the contrary, Williams Syndrome may stand as an example of innate social knowledge; something that could benefit current discourse in philosophy, disability theory, and medical ethics. (shrink)

In the face of land confiscations and other forms of imperialism characteristic of the 19th century in Aotearoa/new Zealand, the second Maori King Tawhiao devised a number of sayings that seem at first glance to be entirely mythical. Highly metaphorical and poetic, they appear to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a language that is emotional, innately tied to a static mooring of pre-rational thought. Yet, in this paper we argue that a Maori (...) metaphysics complicates the delineations between primordial and novelistic language. Indeed, there is in a Maori worldview the notion that a term contains to it both postcolonial and mythical traces at once. Thus each apparently primordial term is tinged with the realities of colonised experience, even if they seem concrete and self-referential. In this paper we address those multiple voices in light of Bakhtin’s philosophies on heteroglossia, and argue that the accusation of ‘myth’ in relation to Tawhiao’s sayings is possible yet does not accommodate the metaphysics founding the sayings. We speculate that there is a form of freedom in Tawhiao’s words that exists regardless of our interpretation but that calls to be unearthed through an open reading. Sir Robert Mahuta, prominent Tainui leader, is one who has already indicated the need for a heteroglossic reading of Tawhiao. We then move to a description of the Waikato-Tainui College for Research and Development as it attempts to carry out this heteroglossic reading of Maori political and metaphysical text and utterance. (shrink)

"This work is designed to be an introduction to abnormal psychology. The problems considered, however, belong equally to normal psychology. The present volume consists of selected lectures (with the exception of four) from courses on abnormal psychology delivered at the Tufts College Medical School (1908-10) and later at the University of California (1910). These again were based on a series of papers on the Unconscious published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1908-9) of which they are elaborations. Since the lectures (...) were delivered a large amount of new material has been incorporated and the subject matter considered in more detail and more exhaustively than was practical before student bodies. The four additional lectures (X, XI, XII and XIII) appeared in abbreviated form in the same Journal (Oct., Nov., 1912) under the title "The Meaning of Ideas as Determined by Unconscious Settings." As the subconscious and its processes are fundamentals both in the structure of personality and in the many mechanisms through which personality, normal and abnormal, finds expression, the first eight lectures are devoted to its exposition. Indeed, the subconscious is not only the most important problem of psychology, it is the problem. The study of its phenomena must be preliminary to that of the functioning mechanisms of both the normal mind and of those special pathological conditions--the psycho-neuroses--which modern investigators are tracing to its perversions. It ought to be possible to construct the theory of the subconscious by inductive methods on the basis of facts of observation just as any theory of the physical sciences is constructed. This task I have set before myself as well as that of giving precision to our conception of the theory and taking it out of the domain of philosophical concepts. With this purpose in view I have endeavored to apply the method of science and construct the theory by induction from the data of observation and experiment. I have divided the subconscious into two classes, namely (1) the unconscious, or neural dispositions and processes, and (2) the coconscious, or actual subconscious ideas which do not enter the content of conscious awareness. In these lectures I have also endeavored (Lectures XIV-XVI) to develop the phenomena of the emotional innate dispositions which I conceive play one of the most fundamental parts in human personality and in determining mental and physiological behavior. Experimental methods and the well-known clinical methods of investigation have been employed by me as far as possible. The data made use of have been derived for the most part from my own observations, though confirmatory observations of others have not been neglected. Although a large number and variety of subjects or cases have been studied, as they have presented themselves in private and hospital practice, the data have been to a large extent sought in intensive studies, on particular subjects, carried on in some cases over a period of many years. These subjects, because of the ease with which subconscious and emotional phenomena were either spontaneously manifested or could be experimentally evoked, were particularly suitable for such studies and fruitful in results. It is by such intensive studies on special subjects, rather than by casual observation of many cases, that I believe the deepest insight into mental processes and mechanisms can be obtained. The favorable reception which was given to the first edition of this work has tempted me in preparing a new edition at the request of the publishers to incorporate four additional chapters dealing with the general principles underlying the structure and dynamic elements of human personality (Lecture XVII) and a study of a special problem in personality in which these principles are involved, namely, the psychogenesis of multiple personality as illustrated by a study of the case known as B.C.A. (Lectures XVIII-XX)." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The present study investigates the way infants express their emotions in relation to parental feelings between maternal and paternal questions and direct requests. We therefore compared interpersonal engagement accompanying parental questions and direct requests between infant–mother and infant–father interactions. We video-recorded spontaneous communication between 11 infant–mother and 11 infant–father dyads—from the 2nd to the 6th month—in their home. The main results of this study are summarized as follows: (a) there aresimilaritiesin the way preverbal infants use their affections in spontaneous (...) interactions with their mothers and fathers to express signs of sensitivity in sharing knowledge through questions and direct requests; and (b) the developmental trajectories of face-to-face emotional coordination in the course of parental questions descend in a similar way for both parents across the age range of this study. Regarding the developmental trajectories of emotional non-coordination, there is evidence of a linear trend in terms of age difference between the parents’ gender with fathers showing the steeper slope. The results are discussed in relation to the theory of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

A motivational system approach to avoidance behavior is presented. According to this approach, a motivational state increases the probability of relevant response patterns and establishes the appropriate or “ideal” consummatory stimuli as positive reinforcers. In the case of feeding motivation, for example, hungry rats are likely to explore and gnaw, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with the reception of consummatory stimuli produced by ingestion of palatable substances. In the case of defense motivation, fearful rats are likely to (...) flee or freeze, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with consummatory stimuli produced by flight from a dangerous place. Defense system activation is distinct from alarm reactions. The latter prepare the animal for probable noxious events, involve relatively intense negative affect and extinguish rapidly in situations where the noxious event no longer occurs. In contrast, defense system activation potentiates innate and modified defense reactions, thus preparing the animal for possible, but not necessarily probable, noxious events; it involves little or no negative affect and extinguishes very slowly when the noxious event no longer occurs. With these assumptions and the resulting model we attempt to resolve several long-standing problems in avoidance learning, including the low correlation between negative affect and avoidance performance, differential rates of extinction for avoidance performance and conditioned emotional responses, and evidence that some avoidance responses are much more easily learned than others. In addition, the model has implications for the study of parallels between appetitive and aversive motivation, sign tracking in aversive conditioning, and orientation of flight responses. Historical antecedents and alternative approaches are discussed. (shrink)

The thesis investigates the implications for moral philosophy of research in psychology. In addition to an introduction and concluding remarks, the thesis consists of four chapters, each exploring various more specific challenges or inputs to moral philosophy from cognitive, social, personality, developmental, and evolutionary psychology. Chapter 1 explores and clarifies the issue of whether or not morality is innate. The chapter’s general conclusion is that evolution has equipped us with a basic suite of emotions that shape our moral (...) judgments in important ways. Chapter 2 presents and investigates the challenge presented to deontological ethics by Joshua Greene’s so-called dual process theory. The chapter partly agrees with his conclusion that the dual process view neutralizes some common criticisms against utilitarianism founded on deontological intuitions, but also points to avenues left to explore for deontologists. Chapter 3 focuses on Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer’s suggestion that utilitarianism is less vulnerable to so-called evolutionary debunking than other moral theories. The chapter is by and large critical of their attempt. In the final chapter 4, attention is directed at the issue of whether or not social psychology has shown that people lack stable character traits, and hence that the virtue ethical view is premised on false or tenuous assumptions. Though this so-called situationist challenge at one time seemed like a serious threat to virtue ethics, the chapter argues for a moderate position, pointing to the fragility of much of the empirical research invoked to substantiate this challenge while also suggesting revisions to the virtue-ethical view as such. (shrink)

Olfaction has recently been highlighted as a sense poorly connected with language. Odor is difficult to verbalize, and it has few qualities that afford mimicry by vision or sound. At the same time, emotion is thought to be the most salient dimension of an odor, and it could therefore be an olfactory dimension more easily communicated. We investigated whether sounds imitative of an innate disgust response can be associated with unpleasant odors. In two experiments, participants were asked to make (...) a forced choice between a pseudoword including a disgust sound and a neutral pseudoword, for pleasant and unpleasant odors. Overall, participants chose more disgust pseudowords than neutral pseudowords for unpleasant odors, but this was not the case for pleasant odors. This effect was not driven by a general association between unpleasant sounds and unpleasant odors, but specifically the sounds [x/χ] and [f], thought to reflect physical responses to disgusting odors, as seen in the Polish fu! or the English ugh!. In line with growing evidence that language can encode odor, we provide the first experimental evidence for an association between the sound of a word and odor valence. (shrink)

Our innate capacity for voice is with us from the beginnings of life. The concept of voice is a complex issue rooted in the core of the self. Once we become aware of ourselves, we realize our capacity for self-expression. Self-expression is part of the cooperative network of communication between the self and others as we share emotions, thoughts, and ideas. Voice facilitates a connection between the world of one individual and the world of another. The purpose of (...) this article was to explore and discover the processes, influences, attitudes and beliefs that affect a woman's ability to define her menopausal voice. A woman's voice expresses her knowledge, set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices in the form of language. Voice becomes a manifestation of the essence of self, and when listened to, breaks the silence of non-existence. A menopausal woman's voice is the voice that expresses the entirety of her existence at that particular stage in life. Post-menopausal women were asked to define their menopausal voices. They were interviewed in depth and their information was collected through semi-structured interviews. This approach used a qualitative methodology with a focus on meaning of their voices rather than measurement. The format was narrative research using life stories and thematic analysis. As a result, five themes: The Voice of Wisdom, The Voice of Aging, The Voice of relationship, The Voice of Spirit, and the Voice of Knowledge emerged after analyzing the women's stories. Each theme represents the complexities that influenced the participants? competence to ascribe meaning to their voices. This article identifies the meanings that menopausal women associated with the concept of voice and how it changed during menopause. (shrink)

The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. ( 2014 ) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment—a complexity theory—of the role of virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder. In both accounts the brain operates to (...) minimize FE aroused by sensory impingements—including interoceptive impingements that report compliance with biological imperatives—and constructs a representation/model of the causes of impingement that enables this minimization. In Friston's account (variational) FE equals complexity minus accuracy, and is minimized by increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. Roughly the brain (or model) increases accuracy together with complexity in waking. This is mediated by consciousness-creating active inference—by which it explains sensory impingements in terms of perceptual experiences of their causes. In sleep it reduces complexity by processes that include both synaptic pruning and consciousness/virtual reality/dreaming in REM. The consciousness-creating active inference that effects complexity-reduction in REM dreaming must operate on FE-arousing data distinct from sensory impingement. The most relevant source is remembered arousals of emotion, both recent and remote, as processed in SWS and REM on “active systems” accounts of memory consolidation/reconsolidation. Freud describes these remembered arousals as condensed in the dreamwork for use in the conscious contents of dreams, and similar condensation can be seen in symptoms. Complexity partly reflects emotional conflict and trauma. This indicates that dreams and symptoms are both produced to reduce complexity in the form of potentially adverse (traumatic or conflicting) arousals of amygdala-related emotions. Mental disorder is thus caused by computational complexity together with mechanisms like synaptic pruning that have evolved for complexity-reduction; and important features of disorder can be understood in these terms. Details of the consilience among Freudian, systems consolidation, and complexity-reduction accounts appear clearly in the analysis of a single fragment of a dream, indicating also how complexity reduction proceeds by a process resembling Bayesian model selection. (shrink)

A widespread conception of anger both within and outside academia proposes to interpret it (along with other emotions) as an adaptive response to certain recurrent problems in our evolutionary past, which implies interpreting anger as a discrete, basic, innate and adaptive emotion. In view of the crisis that the Basic Emotions thesis is going through, and taking into account a number of important objections that have been raised to the idea that anger represents a discrete emotion, I (...) will suggest that the definitive abandonment of the concept of anger (and its close relatives, rage and indignation) has important hermeneutical advantages, including the possibility of approaching the problem of the phylogenesis of our sense of justice from a perspective that avoids the rupturist and continuist extremes that rely on a discrete conception of the emotions. (shrink)

What motivates the voluntary suffering of training for a long-distance run – or any other difficult athletic skill? Long-term pleasure cannot adequately explain this seemingly masochistic activity. On the contrary, I argue that pleasure, or “reinforcement,” is not the only ultimate motivator of behavior. Each of the emotion systems defines its own intrinsic values, including an innate “play” system and an innate “exploratory drive” that is included in what neuropsychologist Jaak Panksepp calls the “SEEKING system” of the emotional (...) brain. Panksepp’s description of the conscious dimension of SEEKING is remarkably similar to Otto Rank’s descriptions of his “love of life” dimension of motivation, which actually conflicts with the pleasure principle. The desire for pleasure is a desire to reduce consummatory drives, which means reducing the energy level of our bodily systems. Complete reduction would be death. If there were no competing motivation in the other direction, there would be nothing to keep us alive. The SEEKING system is what does that. It motivates a higher energy level. In the case of athletic training, we do not have to “force ourselves” to this higher energy level. The SEEKING system is an innate natural drive. If we were to deliberately try to just sit on a couch indefinitely, at some point we would fail. (shrink)

This paper defends a cognitive theory of those emotional reactions which motivate and constrain moral judgment. On this theory, moral emotions result from mental faculties specialized for automatically producing feelings of approval or disapproval in response to mental representations of various social situations and actions. These faculties are modules in Fodor's sense, since they are informationally encapsulated, specialized, and contain innate information about social situations. The paper also tries to shed light on which moral modules there are, which (...) of these modules we share with non-human primates, and on the (pre-)history and development of this modular system from pre-humans through gatherer-hunters and on to modern (i.e. arablist) humans. The theory is not, however, meant to explain all moral reasoning. It is plausible that a non-modular intelligence at least sometimes play a role in conscious moral thought. However, even non-modular moral reasoning is initiated and constrained by moral emotions having modular sources. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, philosophy (...) of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

Flanagan (1991) was the first contemporary philosopher to suggest that a modularity of morals hypothesis (MMH) was worth consideration by cognitive science. There is now a serious empirically informed proposal that moral competence is best explained in terms of moral modules-evolutionarily ancient, fast-acting, automatic reactions to particular sociomoral experiences (Haidt & Joseph, 2007). MMH fleshes out an idea nascent in Aristotle, Mencius, and Darwin. We discuss the evidence for MMH, specifically an ancient version, “Mencian Moral Modularity,” which claims four (...) class='Hi'>innate modules, and “Social Intuitionist Modularity,” which claims five innate modules. We compare these two moral modularity models, discuss whether the postulated modules are best conceived as perceptual/Fodorian or emotional/Darwinian, and consider whether assuming MMH true has any normative ethical consequences whatsoever. The discussion of MMH reconnects cognitive science with normative ethics in a way that involves the reassertion of the “is-ought” problem. We explain in a new way what this problem is and why it would not yield. The reason does not involve the logic of “ought,” but rather the plasticity of human nature and the realistic options to “grow” and “do” human nature in multifarious legitimate ways. (shrink)

This paper was published in an issue of the ANTW, Dutch General Journal of Philosophy, dedicated to the work of Paul Churchland. It criticizes Churchland for neglecting the relationships of animals to their environments and their innate subjectivity, which guides them through their environment. The concept of an emotional a priori is introduced, 'the innate structures of experience', analogue to Kant's cognitive a priori. Subjectivity is an evolved property which enables organisms to adapt their genetic interests to a (...) particular environment. (shrink)