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For Charlie and Lucas
Acknowledgements
This book represents my attempt to articulate several ideas concerning emotions which have occupied me over the last four or so years. During that time the material has undergone significant revision and restructuring, often in the light of detailed comments and criticisms from a range of sources. Of particular note have been the numerous conversations about themes in philosophy of emotion and mind with Julien Deonna, Alex Grzankowski, Jean Moritz Müller, Peter Poellner, Joel Smith, and Fabrice Teroni, all of which have had a significant impact on how I think about the issues discussed here. I would also like to acknowledge the Mind Group at the University of Manchester (Philosophy), which has been an invaluable forum for testing my ideas over the last three years. Similarly, I presented and received detailed feedback on key chapters of the manuscript at the Thumos group (spearheaded by Julien, Fabrice, and Magalie Schor) at the University of Geneva, which has always been a welcoming venue. I would also like to thank Stéphane Lemaire, Marta Cabrera Miquel, and Christine Tappolet for their detailed written comments on the manuscript, along with three anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press.
The support and influence of Peter Poellner on my philosophical development has been second to none. His encouragement and interest in my work—from the PhD onwards—has always been a great help. And further to this, his own work in phenomenology and the emotions, including countless conversations about related themes, has served as a significant inspiration for many of the ideas developed here. Something would also be amiss if I did not mention Peter Goldie’s influence. While I did not know Goldie personally, his enigmatic book The Emotions (Oxford University Press) was a source of inspiration, demonstrating how to grapple with the topic of emotions in a way that while rigorous and philosophical, does not lose sight of their richness and variety. I hope there is much in these pages that he would have found congenial to his approach.
The material in Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 6, while occasionally drawing on ideas present in my previous work, is new. Chapters 3 and 5 are based on my previously published papers, although much of the material has been revised; Chapter 3 draws on material from the paper ‘Pre-Emotional Value Awareness and the Content Priority view’ in Philosophical Quarterly, and chapter 5 draws on material from the paper ‘The Bodily-Attitudinal Theory of Emotion’ in Philosophical Studies, although the latter chapter broaches ideas that are original to this book.
I would also like to thank the British Academy for their support of my research, without which I would not have had the time or resources to complete the manuscript, and Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press, for taking the project up.
Introduction
The Approach
Emotions are a pervasive feature of human life, and much of what we take to be meaningful and significant is inextricably linked with our capacity to experience emotions. Consider how impoverished our lives would be without love, hate, jealousy, joy, happiness, despair, anger, sadness, regret, hope, admiration, reverence, fear, horror, and doom. Great writers of literature have a knack for capturing emotional experiences in all their richness. For example, consider one of Proust’s descriptions of Swann’s jealous love in In Search of Lost Time:
But then at once his jealousy, as though it were the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening – and which now, perversely, mocked Swann and shone with love for another – of that droop of the head, now sinking on to other lips, of all the marks of affection (now given to another) that she had shown to him. And all the voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, so to speak, but so many sketches, rough plans like those which a decorator submits to one, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, aflame or faint with passion, which she might adopt for others.1
Alternatively, consider Dostoevsky’s description of Raskolnikov boiling over with repulsion and loathing in Crime and Punishment:
He desperately wanted to find some distraction, but he had no idea what to do, what to attempt. With every minute that passed, a new and
1 Proust 1992: 382.
irresistible feeling took an ever firmer hold on him – a boundless, almost physical revulsion towards everything he saw and everything around him, a stubborn, angry sense of loathing. Everyone he met repelled him – their faces, their walk, their movements. He would actually have spat at anyone, perhaps even bitten anyone who spoke to him.2
Philosophy of emotion aims to tell us what emotions such as Swann’s jealousy or Raskolnikov’s loathing amount to in more general and fundamental terms. Indeed, the question ‘what are emotions’ is the most fundamental issue in the philosophy of emotion. This book aims to answer that question, albeit with a specific focus on emotions as experiences, as things we undergo or which happen to us, in the way that jealousy takes hold of Swann, or loathing overcomes Raskolnikov (I precisify and justify this focus on emotional experiences in detail below).
It is customary in philosophical studies of emotion for initial chapters to document past and current theories, from the somatic-feeling theories of James and Lange, through the various stripes of cognitivism, up to contemporary varieties of Perceptualism and (most recently) Attitudinalism. While there is something dialectically satisfying in approaching the topic in this way, and ‘setting up one’s stall’ only after one has shown everyone else’s stall to be somewhat wanting, in this book I pursue a different approach. Rather than initially guiding the reader through various theories of emotion, I set out by making explicit my framework for theorizing about experiences and their contents. I then systematically develop an original view of emotional experiences as feelings-towardsvalues, critiquing past and contemporary views along the way as they arise as relevant in the course of an analysis of what I take to be the central issues of importance in developing a theory of emotional experience. Let me say something in justification of this approach and why I take it to be an attractive route. A perennial problem in philosophical discussions of emotion is delimiting, for any given author or study, the object of inquiry. For example, say one’s theory is primarily concerned with specifying the automatic and non-conscious psychological processes that
2 Dostoevsky 2017: 99–100.
underlie—and are often claimed by psychologists to cause—emotional feelings or experiences. If that were the case then one’s approach, the constraints applicable to it, and the topics of central importance, will be significantly different from those of an approach primarily concerned with providing an account of those emotional feelings or experiences themselves. Indeed, if one’s approach is more along the former lines, then the analysis may take a functionalist (cum-evolutionary) line, or perhaps appeal might be made to computational models of the mind, seeking to understand emotions in terms of affective processes that are realized at the subpersonal level. Comparatively, the latter approach, as concerned with the emotional feelings or experiences themselves—or the ‘manifest image’ of emotion, as we might put it3—will be an analysis couched at the personal level; what Daniel Dennett calls ‘the explanatory level of people and their sensations and activities’, rather than in terms of psychological constructs and subpersonal processes.4 In a similar vein, Peter Goldie describes the personal point of view as ‘the point of view of a conscious person, capable of thoughts and feelings, and able to engage in theoretical and practical reasoning’.5 What constrains a personal-level account of the manifest image of emotion, of emotional experiences (which are the focus of this study), and the topics of central importance therein, are significantly different from accounts whose interest in emotion lies elsewhere. Given such disparities, it is easy to see how if the relevant object of inquiry, and the broader framework in which that inquiry is pursued, is not made explicit at the outset one is likely to invite a degree of confusion and misinterpretation, and the guiding constraints will not be as clear as they might otherwise be. Note, to forestall misinterpretation, the above points are not intended to deny there are connections between accounts of emotions at the personal and subpersonal levels, and that we should be sensitive to issues of how emotion is processed at the latter level. Nevertheless, we can hardly investigate such questions before knowing what emotions are as emotional experiences at the personal level.
3 See Sellars (1997: 35–78) on the distinction between the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’.
4 Dennett 1969: 93. 5 Goldie 2000: 1–2.
So, it is with the aim of delimiting the object of inquiry for this study, that this book begins by setting out a philosophical framework. Namely, that of treating emotions as kinds of experiences, more specifically as occurrent episodes, usually of relatively short duration, enjoyed by individuals at particular times.6 As such, emotions, as I understand them here, are first-person states that have a what-it-is-likeness; there is something-it-is-like to be the subject of episodic fear, jealousy, love, shame, regret, or admiration, to experience feelings of fear, jealousy, love, shame, regret, and admiration. Emotional experiences are, therefore, conscious experiences with a phenomenology, and it does not take much reflection to reveal that emotions in this sense are an integral part of our everyday lives and engagement with the world. And while someone might deny that emotions per se are necessarily feelings or are necessarily felt, it strains credibility to claim that emotional experiences are not felt, although talk of ‘feelings’, indeed ‘emotional feelings’, is merely a placeholder for a more detailed account of the phenomenology of emotional experience.
Let me now say something about the affective domain as a whole and how it relates to the project pursued here. There are a range of occurrent mental states or experiences which philosophy and psychology classify as affective.7 Included in this category are pains, pleasures, moods, and emotions. Further to this, there are emotional dispositions and character traits—these non-occurrent or non-experiential states undoubtedly figure in our affective explanations of people, and their sensations and activities.8 There are systematic and essential connections between emotional experiences and these other affective states, an analysis of which would be couched at the personal level. In light of this, it is important not to think of the personal level and personal-level explanations as exclusively the domain of experiences. For example, appealing to character
6 Goldie (2000: ch. 2) has a broader use of the term ‘emotion’ as contrasted with an emotional experience or episode. He thinks of emotions proper as being embedded within a more complex narrative structure which implicates a range of related states (both occurrent and dispositional), such as moods and character traits.
7 One may question the rationale for the categorization; what does an episode of fear share with a searing headache, or an anxious mood with an orgasm? See Mitchell (2019b) for an attempt to answer this question.
8 See Deonna and Teroni (2012: ch. 9) for an overview.
traits or affective dispositions in the explanation of behaviour, while certainly a personal-level explanation is not (or at least not directly) an appeal to a certain kind of experience. Experiences are therefore one (albeit particularly significantly) explanatory ‘item’ at the personal level. However, while I will occasionally have something to say on the aforementioned affective states, and how they connect to emotional experiences, they will not be my primary focus (and I will have nothing to say on unconscious emotions if there are such). Providing a comprehensive theory of emotional experiences as such is my aim.
Without prefiguring what comes in the following chapters too much, I now highlight the questions that will be of central importance in relatively non-technical terms. Our emotional experiences are often thought to connect us with or tell us something important about our environment, and all manner of things within it, including ourselves; fear, love, hate, pity, anger, admiration, and reverence, for example, connect us in some non-trivial way with that which we fear, love, hate, pity, admire, and revere. As Goldie puts it, ‘when we have an emotion, we are engaged with the world, grasping what is going on in the world, and responding accordingly’.9 But what is the nature of this connection? How are we to better understand the so-called intentionality of emotions? Can this intentionality be modelled after the kinds of intentionality philosophers are more familiar with, like that of cognitive states or perceptual experiences, or is it in some important sense distinctive to emotions? Further to this, do emotional experiences have a connection to special kinds of properties that go beyond the natural fare of sense-perceptible properties, such as colours and shapes? Indeed, how much sense can be made of the idea, which is a guiding theme of this study and many discussions of emotions, that there is an essential connection between emotions and evaluative properties (e.g. the fearsome, loveable, offensive, admirable, and beautiful)?
Related to the above, and as already discussed, emotions, as emotional experiences, feel a certain way. To be in the throes of lust, to feel pangs of guilt, to be overwhelmed by pride, stewing in resentment, overcome with embarrassment, enthralled in admiration, paralysed in
9 Goldie 2000: 48.
terror, is to be undergoing a kind of felt affection—it is to be moved or affected in some way. As such, an account of the manifest image of emotional experiences is unavoidably an account of emotions’ phenomenology. But what better sense can be made of this phenomenology? Is this phenomenology distinctive to emotion (as a proprietary phenomenology), and is it essentially a bodily kind of phenomenology? Alternatively, do emotions enjoy a distinctive non-bodily phenomenology connected to their being reactions, and what are we to make of cases of emotion in which there seems to be no bodily phenomenology? Further to this, how is this talk of phenomenology and feeling connected to the intentionality of emotions, that is, their putative directedness towards things in our environment? How do phenomenology and intentionality connect in emotional experiences (if they do)?
Building on these questions, which are foundational for a study of emotional experiences, there is a pre-theoretical importance to the connection between experiencing an emotion and being in some sense motivated to respond, be that in action or perhaps less demandingly by adopting a specific stance towards ‘the world’. But what is the nature of this connection between our emotional experiences, and their motivational and attitudinal aspects? Is being moved by what one’s emotion is concerned with to be moved to action, or is there a more fundamental sense in which emotions are responses or reactions? Do emotional experiences prime us for action in some distinctive way that other experiences do not, or is it better to understand emotions as distinct from motivation? Further to this, is it the case that the ‘objects’ of our emotional experiences—what in the world they seem to be concerned with—make distinctive ‘demands’ in a way which is disanalogous from other kinds of experiences; does what we fear ‘call for’ a specific response, or does what we revere ‘demand’ a certain kind of recognition? If they do, then how are we to better make sense of this feature?
Importantly, emotions are the kinds of states for which we are, at least to a certain extent and in specific ways, rationally assessable and which therefore connect to complex epistemic and normative notions. We criticize those whose emotions are out of step: ‘he should not fear that, it’s harmless’; ‘you are wrong to despise her, you should admire her, look at all the good work she does for the needy’. Further to this, we often
take ourselves to be justified in responding emotionally, invoking notions of ‘warrant’ and ‘merit’: ‘I was justified in being offended, did you hear how he spoke to me?’; ‘his anger was warranted given how rude she had been’. Yet, how can we better understand these epistemic and normative aspects of emotions, and disentangle notions of correctness, justification, appropriateness, warrant, and the like, which we deploy in our everyday discourse?
Finally, and connected to the above, consider the intelligibility of emotion—the way our emotions are said to, at least sometimes, make sense. Is this something with which we are experientially familiar? Even more suggestively, can we defend the claim that we somehow feel our emotions to be appropriate while undergoing them, such that they possess a kind of normative phenomenology, that is, a kind of normativity at a level more fundamental than merely judging them to be appropriate? And what, by way of contrast, would it be like to feel like one’s emotion was somehow inappropriate? Would this be a case of recalcitrant emotion, where one’s emotion persists even though one judges that it is inappropriate in some respect or other? Or is there a different, and stronger, kind of alienation from one’s emotional response, such that the very emotion is experienced as inappropriate (without the necessity of any judgement to that effect)? If this is a psychological possibility, how would an account of emotional experiences deal with such cases?
These are the central questions and issues that will occupy me here— sufficient to warrant a book-length study.10 My overarching goal is to present an original theory, the feeling-towards-value view, which can answer these questions and deal with related issues in a way that is philosophically rewarding, plausible, and coherent. Along the way, I will critique alternative theories of emotion. Indeed, sections of relevant chapters include discussions of the most plausible competitors to the feeling-towards-value view. But, as noted, such theories are best discussed in the context of the relevant issues as introduced above.
10 One topic that I will not be discussing is expressions of emotion or emotionally expressive behaviour. A thorough discussion of this topic and the problems it raises, especially concerning the perception and experience of others emotions, would require a book-length study in its own right. See Goldie (2000: ch. 5) for an introduction to the topic, and Abell and Smith (2016) for a range of essays from various perspectives.
Before detailing the structure of the book, let me make a final point. My approach here is such that the positive view is nuanced and developed as the book proceeds. While sufficient justification is given for the caveats, qualifications, and complications added to the basic outline of the theory, such developments are steps that go beyond it. As such, those who may be unconvinced by specific developments and complications may resist certain moves in favour of others. While the account of the feeling-towards-value view which emerges over the course of the book represents my best attempt to make sense of the range of problems documented above, I recognize that some of the claims made will strike certain readers as more or less controversial. I hope my way of presenting this material encourages readers to take on board what they find convincing in my analysis and understanding of emotional experience, without feeling that they have to commit to every claim put forward. In this spirit, the book also includes discussions and analysis of various issues concerning emotional experience that those who are not convinced by the feeling-towards-value view may nonetheless find interesting, and hopefully insightful.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1, ‘Experiential Modes and Face Value Contents’, details the framework that I will utilize throughout the study to theorize about emotional experiences. This chapter will articulate the idea of ‘experiential modes’ and the notion of face value content. The notion of intentional content is a technical notion in contemporary philosophy of mind and is apt to mislead. Here I spell out how I intend to understand it. This conception of face value content is then connected to notions of accuracy, epistemic exploitability, phenomenal character, action, and introspection, explaining central roles that this notion of intentional content plays in relation to experience. Finally, the chapter provides commentary on related notions of ‘representation’ and the ‘metaphysics of content’, clarifying what will be relevant for the present study.
Chapter 2, ‘The Evaluative Content of Emotional Experience’, provides a detailed defence of the view that the content of emotional
experience is evaluative. The chapter begins by charting out a basic sense of the intentionality of emotional experiences, in relation to what are called their particular objects. More specifically, the view that emotional experiences inherit some of their content from the intentional states on which they are based (what I call the content-dependency claim) is shown to be plausible. After introducing emotions as evaluative phenomena, the evaluative content view (ECV) is clarified and then defended. It is shown that the ECV provides convincing explanations of a range of important notions.
Chapter 3, ‘The Content-Priority View’, critiques a significant competitor to the ECV. This alternative view claims that there is a nonemotional evaluative state prior to the emotion, which motivates it—as an evaluative antecedent. As such, it would be the content of this prior state which is evaluative, rather than the emotional experience. This chapter shows that the view encounters several problems and so further establishes that the ECV should be preferred as an account of the content of emotional experience.
Chapter 4, ‘The Nature of Emotional Experience’, articulates and defends the feeling-towards-value view. Building on the ECV defended in Chapter 2, it is argued that we should understand emotional experiences as sui generis non-doxastic experiences of value, where the valuerepresenting component is a felt valenced attitude. This felt valenced attitude is directed toward the emotion’s particular object, which is represented as possessing the relevant evaluative properties. The chapter begins by offering a critique of Perceptualism. It then develops puzzling comments made by Peter Goldie on the notion of feelings towards and explicates this notion along the lines of a non-bodily valenced attitudinal component in emotional experience. The feeling-towards-value view is then defended against a range of objections.
Chapter 5, ‘The Role of the Body and Action-Readiness’ primarily addresses the body’s role in emotional experience partly with reference to a recent theory of emotion, namely the bodily-attitudinal view as defended by Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni.11 While there is much of interest in this proposal, and important points of connection with the
11 See Deonna and Teroni 2012; 2015; 2017.
feeling-towards-value view, there are significant objections which undermine its plausibility. It is claimed we do better to think of the attitudinal component of emotional experience as outlined in Chapter 4, that is, as a predominantly non-bodily felt valenced attitude. However, it is suggested that bodily feelings, of the action-ready kind, can in some instances serve as phenomenological enrichments of non-bodily felt valenced attitudes, which leads to an interesting development and qualification of the feeling-towards-value view. Finally, it is argued that in many cases the phenomenology of felt action readiness is a matter of the objects of emotional experience seeming to possess what emotion psychologist Nico Frijda calls ‘demand character’, as calling for specific responses, and so as a feature of the content of emotions.12
Chapter 6, ‘The Intelligibility of Emotional Experience’, addresses the sense in which emotions are intelligible. The notion of emotional intelligibility is developed in terms of the intrinsic and immediate intelligibility of emotional experience. These ideas are then framed in terms of what I call the values-as-powers view, which involves the idea that the attitudinal component of emotions is experienced as a ‘response’ to a ‘demand’ of the relevant value, such that the value has a ‘power’ over us. Cases of emotional recalcitrance and the phenomena of affective persistence are also discussed, and it is argued that the aforementioned view of emotional intelligibility explains the phenomenon of affective persistence we find in cases of recalcitrance. Finally, a specific kind of pathological emotion is discussed in which a degree of intelligibility goes missing, and it is shown that the values-as-powers view can make good sense of what happens in such cases.
Finally, Chapter 7 provides a detailed summary of the feeling-towardsvalue view, charting out the central claims and developments of the view throughout the study, recapping the central constraints outlined at the outset and showing how the view meets them.
In closing these introductory remarks, it should be noted that, as with any study, the topics focused on might appear somewhat arbitrary, or at least partial in important respects, highlighting specific issues at the expense of others. Indeed, the approach to emotions and emotional
12 See Frijda 2007.
experiences pursued here has as its background issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and phenomenology, which leads to a specific focus (e.g. issues concerning intentionality, content, and phenomenal character). Of course, there is much to be said about the connection between emotions and a range of important philosophical topics in morality and politics that I do not touch on here. Nevertheless, I hope that even for those whose interests in emotion lie primarily elsewhere than mine, there is enough rich discussion for this book to be of use.
1
Experiential Modes and Face Value Contents (a Framework)
1.1 Experiential Modes
By way of sketching out a framework in the philosophy of mind that will be helpful in the following chapters concerning emotional experience, I first want to say something about the notion of an experiential mode. One point of entry into this discussion is by reference to the so-called intentional attitudes, also sometimes called the propositional attitudes. Familiar candidates are belief, desire, supposition, wonder, hope, conjecture, and judgement. In these cases, the attitudes take the relevant propositions as objects or are directed towards (or perhaps related to) propositional contents, specified in terms of the objects under aspects, say as having relevant properties (e.g. the belief that <the sun is 73 per cent helium>). However, the class of intentional modes is not exhausted by propositional attitudes. There are also the intentional modes of senseperception (i.e. vision, audition, gustation, olfaction, and touch), visual imagination, episodic memory, and affectivity. Let us call these the experiential modes since these modes refer to determinate types of experience.1
1 See Crane 2000: 1–11; 2001: 139; 2009a: 474–91; see also Searle 1983: 4–6, 12; 1992; 129–32. Chalmers (2004) calls this feature the ‘manner of representation’ of the experience and Husserl (2001) calls it the ‘act-quality’. Let me briefly clarify the relation between the nonpropositional and experiential. It might be said that we can distinguish the ‘experiential modes’ from the ‘non-experiential’ in terms of the propositional vs non-propositional distinction. Propositional states would be non-experiential, non-propositional states would be experiential. This is problematic for various reasons. For example, if perceptual experiences turned out to be in some sense propositional then they would have to be classed as non-experiential modes, which is not correct. Contrastingly, consider the idea that there are states which enjoy a cognitive phenomenology. Presumably such states are propositional states in some sense (e.g. occurrently judging that so and so is the case), yet given the above taxonomy we could not hold open the possibility that such states are experiences. As such, an experience or state being in an
Building on the above, it helps to distinguish between the mode (or attitude) and content of intentional states. For propositional attitudes like ‘S believes that P’, we can distinguish between the attitude or mode, in this case believing, and the content, <P>. This distinction is important, in part, because if we can individuate content separately from attitude, then the same content can arguably be entertained by different attitudes. For example, we can say ‘S believes that P’, but also ‘S desires that P’, where the (propositional) content remains the same. More concretely, we can say ‘Joel believes that Jill is at the party’, whereas ‘Bill desires that Jill is at the party’, where Joel and Bill entertain different attitudes towards the same (propositional) content. Alternatively, while ‘Joel believes that God exists’, ‘Bill conjectures that God exists’, such that both bear different attitudinal relations to the same (propositional) content.
In the case of the experiential modes, the distinction still applies. We can distinguish between the content of a visual experience and its being a visual experience, rather than an auditory one, or a haptic one. So, for experiential modes, as for intentional states more broadly, we can distinguish between the content and the mode (the attitude-content or modecontent distinction).2 It is more controversial whether the ‘same content different mode’ claim also applies in the case of the experiential modes, as contrasted with the non-experiential modes. For example, it is contentious whether one can imagine exactly the same scene of which one had a visual experience, such that the content is identical. This issue will be important in the later chapters when we consider emotional experience in detail, but we do not need to say more about it here. However, what bears emphasizing is that in contrast to at least some of the propositional attitudes, experiential modes are determinate types of experience.
Consider the intentional mode or attitude of belief. More specifically, Fred’s belief that the earth is round. Fred need not be consciously entertaining this belief. Nonetheless, it makes sense to attribute it to him
experiential mode does not necessarily imply that it is non-propositional. See discussion in Section 1.2 for more on these issues.
2 Importantly, intentional modes should not be confused with modes of presentation which are one way of theorizing the aspectual dimension of intentional content (see Section 1.2), although the distinction between different sense modalities is sometimes drawn in terms of different modes of presentation.
given that he is disposed to do such things as assent to it if questioned, use its content as a premise in an argument, argue against those who claim it is false, and generally behave in such a way as seems premised on its truth. He has an intentional state in the mode of belief with a specific content. Contrastingly, when debating a ‘flat-earther’, Fred explicitly entertains an occurrent thought that the earth is round; he brings that content ‘before the mind’, and explicitly assents to it, either in inner thought or speech. He has an intentional experience, in the experiential mode of occurrent judgement with a specific content; he has a determinate type of cognitive experience.3
Consider also that we often talk in general terms of sense-perceptual experience, or perceiving on the basis of the senses. We might think that sense-perceptual experience is a determinable, of which the determinate experiential modes are (at least), vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Of course, paradigmatic sensory experience is multimodal, but this should not occlude the point that there are determinate types of senseperceptual experience. Arguably something similar might be said for the general term affective experience. We might think that affective experience is a determinable, of which the determinate experiential modes are emotion, mood, pain, and pleasure.
Further to the above, consider that the experiential modes, as determinate experience types, possess a phenomenology, such that there is something-it-is-like to enjoy experiences in those modes. This is certainly not the case for the mode of dispositional belief. And even in the case of occurrent judgement, matters are controversial—it is a point of debate whether conscious occurrent judgements or thoughts have a phenomenology, specifically a cognitive phenomenology. However, whatever stance we take on this issue, clearly for the vast majority of (at least noncognitive) experiential modes there is something-it-is-like to be enjoying an experience in one of those modes. For example, there is something-itis-like to be enjoying a visual experience, an auditory experience, an affective experience, or an episodic memory.
3 NB: from an intentional state being occurrent it does not necessarily follow that it is an experience. There might be all kinds of representational states of the visual system that are ‘presently occurring’, but are (as states of the visual system) non-experiential.
That there is something-it-is-like to be enjoying an experience in a specific experiential mode, needs distinguishing from the additional claim that the experiential mode in itself contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience in a way which outstrips the experience having whatever content it has.4 That would be a substantive claim for which we would need to consider further arguments with reference to specific cases. For now, let us bracket this issue, and maintain that experiential modes are determinate types of experience which, as such, have a phenomenology. With this in mind, we can move on to consider the content side of the mode–content distinction.
1.2 Particular Objects and Face Value Content
What does it mean to talk of the content of an experience, and in what contexts is it legitimate to introduce this notion in characterizing experiences?
One starting point on these issues is the thought that there are a range of experiences, call them intentional experiences, which exhibit directedness towards something. Amongst the category of intentional experiences are plausibly sense-perceptual, imaginative, memory, and bodily experiences, at least some affective experiences such as emotions, pains, and pleasures, and perhaps also cognitive experiences, such as occurrent thoughts. In a reasonably non-committal way, one might say intentional experiences have or take objects as what they are about (as it is often put). The notion of ‘object’ in play needs to be sufficiently broad to include not just concrete or physical particulars, but also persons, animals, events, and states of affairs involving these things. Let me, therefore, introduce the notion of the particular objects of intentional experiences. Think of an imaginative experience in which I daydream
4 The distinctive claim of the view we might call Mode Intentionalism is that what determines the phenomenal character of an intentional experience is both that it has the intentional content it does and that it is the relevant type of experience it is—that it is in this intentional mode, rather than a different one. There is the further claim made by Crane that the structure of intentional states is fundamentally relational, insofar as one is related to an intentional content on the basis of the relevant mode (see Crane 2001: 28–33; 2003: 7–11; cf. Searle 1983: ch. 1).
about the vagaries of a past society; the particular object of my imaginative experience is that past state of affairs. Alternatively, consider the auditory experience I enjoy when listening to an orchestra play the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde; the particular object of my auditory experience is that musical event. Finally, consider an occurrent thought about Odysseus returning to Ithaca disguised as a beggar; the particular object of my thought is a fictitious event involving a fictitious person. As reflected in these examples, the particular object of the experience would be given in answers to questions like ‘what is your experience about’ or ‘what is your mind directed toward’ (or more specifically, ‘what are you listening to’ or ‘what are you thinking about’).
The notion of a particular object is broad enough to cover such things as fictional events and states of affairs that refer to the past or may have not yet come to pass. In that sense, it aims to capture the thought— familiar from the theory of intentionality—that intentional experiences can be about non-existents. The notion of a particular object of an intentional experience is therefore metaphysically neutral.5 This is preferable if we think it plausible that we can enjoy, for example, imaginative experiences directed towards states of affairs that will never come to pass (e.g. imagining oneself flying through the sky by flapping one’s arms) or fears of non-existent and impossible things (e.g. a child’s fear of ghosts). Note, the notion of a particular object should not be confused with, or taken to entail, the idea of specificity, either in terms of the intentional experience necessarily targeting a single thing or something that satisfies a definite description. For example, John may fear someone is a spy while having no specific individual in mind. Nonetheless, the idea of a particular object is supposed to capture the thought that the intentional experience is about something, albeit in this case something indeterminate.
Building on the above, it is often claimed that intentional experiences tell us or have ‘something to say’ about their particular objects. More specifically, they are said to represent those particular objects as having
5 We can also remain neutral on more complex issues concerning so-called Intentional Objects, i.e. whether they are objects in the ordinary sense (see Searle 1983: 18, 117), or whether we need some intentional inexistence claim (see Crane 2001: 13–18 and 2013 for discussion).
certain apparent features, properties, and qualities, and so represent them as being thus and so. Take the case of a visual experience. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to conceive of a visual experience of a particular object where that object fails to look somehow or someway to the subject (even if that way is somewhat indeterminate).6 Likewise, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to conceive of an auditory experience of a particular object where that object fails to sound somehow or someway to the subject. The stronger claim is that it is not possible to enjoy intentional experiences which represent their particular objects shorn all of their properties, or with no properties at all, as so-called bare particulars. Determining whether that is the case need not concern us here.7 Suffice it to say, this is not paradigmatically the case. Typically, the particular objects of visual experience, for example, will appear to have specific colours and shapes, as properties of the relevant particular objects, and the particular objects of auditory perception will appear to have certain pitches, tones, and timbres. In one way of talking, these are the (relatively) determinate aspects under which the particular objects ‘show up’ or ‘manifest’ in the relevant experiences; the road sign looks yellow and triangular, the music sounds loud and high-pitched.8 Reflecting a similar point, Sydney Shoemaker says, in the visual case, ‘if I see something, it looks somehow to me’, and Fred Dretske writes that ‘in a certain sense, D must look some way to S . . . in order for S to see D’.9 The relevant particular objects, therefore, are represented as possessing the relevant apparent properties and features. These considerations generate the following condition on intentional experiences: intentional experiences represent their particular objects as being a certain way. This condition allows us to introduce a notion of the intentional content of an experience.
6 There is controversy over the use of the term ‘looks’ in connection to the idea that visual experiences have intentional contents (see Chisholm 1957; Travis 2004; Siegel 2010: 59–63). ‘Looks’, here, is intended in the phenomenal sense.
7 Some authors claim that we can enjoy intentional states that are directed towards ‘unbound properties’ which do not qualify any object. See Mark Johnston’s (2004: 113–83) discussion of brain grey for an example of an unbounded colour property. Angela Mendelovici (2013: 135–57) argues for a similar view in the case of objectless moods.
8 John Searle (1983: 12–13, 52; 1992: 155–7) calls this the ‘aspectual shape’ of the intentional experience (see also Crane 2000: 3; 2001: 18–22; 2003: 7–8).
9 Dretske 1969: 8; Shoemaker 1975: 299.
In a maximally general formulation, the intentional content of an experience is the particular object represented as being a certain way. In certain cases (paradigmatically perception), some authors prefer ‘presentation’ to ‘representation’, given worries about the latter term’s connotations. These worries are mainly discharged in what follows (see Section 1.4), but notwithstanding that discussion, if the reader prefers to talk of ‘presentation’ that is fine.
This notion of intentional content is that of the face value content (FVC) of an experience.10 Take a simple case of sense-perception. Say a subject enjoys a visual experience of a blue ball: their visual experience represents to them a ball (the particular object), and the ball is given to them in the experience as being blue (as having this property). The FVC of the experience, conveyed to the subject, might, therefore, be approximately displayed as <ball as blue>. Note, given this notion of FVC there need be no commitment to the claim (i) that the particular object of the visual experience, what is perceived, has the structure of a proposition. Moreover, this is the case whether we are talking about what is perceived in itself—as the metaphysical nature of the particular object—or relative to how what is perceived manifests itself in experience.11 Further to this, and connected to it, there is no commitment to the claim that (ii) all intentional experience fundamentally consists in a propositional attitude,12 or put otherwise that all intentional experiences consist in an attitude towards a FVC understood as a proposition, at least if we take the latter claim to be more than merely a notational variant of the claim that intentional experiences have FVC, in which a particular object is represented as being a certain way (as having specific properties).13
10 NB: the introduction of FVC should not be confused with a commitment to Externalist Representationalism, which offers a specific view of the content-determining relation between the metaphysics and the phenomenology (see Section 1.4 for discussion).
11 Cf. McDowell (1994) whose conceives of facts as true propositions, and as concrete possible objects of perception.
12 Siegel (2010: 29) calls this the ‘strong content view’ in the case of visual experience.
13 See Crane 2009b: 452–69. There is a weaker sense of propositional content associated with merely a content which presents its object as being somehow or someway. This notion of propositional content would make it similar to my notion of FVC (see Mitchell 2019d for discussion of this weak sense of propositional content in connection with emotional experiences).
