In the context of answering the question what emotions really are, there are two camps of theorists. The first camp insist that emotions are essentially cognitive states. The second camp, which includes William James and Carl Lange, state that emotions are noncognitive, which means that emotions necessarily comprises or are caused by bodily changes, rather than thoughts or reasons.
James-Lange theory, as a representative of the non-cognition theories, says that emotions are feelings of the body, which they call “somatic feelings”. More specifically, for Lange, emotions correspond to vascular changes. For James, they are responses to more complex bodily states. In support of this theory, they offer us a subtraction argument that goes as follows. Imagine feeling an emotion as vividly as you can, and then subtract away each part of the feeling that owes to a bodily change.
- P1: If emotions are more than bodily changes, then after the subtraction is complete, there should still be something left that would be recognized as the emotion.
- P2: After the subtraction is complete, there is nothing left that would be recognized as the emotion.
- Conclusion: Emotions are no more than bodily changes[1].
My response to the James-Lange theory is a direct objection to the subtraction argument--- premise 2 is in fact false. When we take away all body associated features of emotions, we may still have something left. Imagine a zombie that has nothing but bodily parts. If a scientist is able to completely capture what happens in our body when we feel sad, and successfully replicate all the bodily features onto that zombie, we still would not agree that the zombie is feeling sad that the way we do. So, emotions must be more than the summation of bodily constituents.
Though, to avoid completely falling into the camp of cognitive emotions, I also have to emphasize that the emotions are indeed no longer the same when we imagine taking away all the bodily part of it. Use the example mentioned by Prinz: the fear we experience when seeing a snake. Our shiver, sweaty palms and weak legs are all part of the experience of being in fear. Had these symptoms been taken away, we would have been left with a different feeling.
As Prinz has shown, it has been proven difficult to fully be in the noncognition camp of emotions. In addition to the embodied appraisal theory, I think another solution on the side of James and Lange, is to go the other direction---rather than trying to see what constitutes emotions, we can first carve out a solid ground for physicalism. If we can show that even thoughts have a physicalist bases, then it no longer matters whether emotions are induced by thoughts, since then there will only be physicalism all the way.
Reference
Prinz, Jesse. “Emotion, Psychosemantics, and Embodied Appraisals.” Philosophy and the Emotions, n.d., 69–86
[1] The difference between James-Lange claims, that says emotion are feelings of the body, is slightly different from the conclusion we draw here. The conclusion here from the subtraction argument is slightly stronger.
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