The Ontology of Emotions

Today's post is written by Hichem Naar and Fabrice Teroni. In this post, Hichem and Fabrice present their new edited volume The Ontology of Emotions, recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Hichem Naar is Assistant Professor in philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen, a member of the Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics Research Group, and an associate member of the Thumos research group, the Genevan research group on emotions, values and norms hosted by the CISA, the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. Hichem currently works on the nature, value, and normative significance of various attitudes, including emotions.

Fabrice Teroni is Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Geneva and co-director of Thumos. He works in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. He is also interested in the nature of emotions elicited by fiction, in the involvement of the self in emotions as well as in the phenomenology of memory. 

What kind of thing is an emotion? No one will seriously doubt that it is a psychological entity of some sort. There is also widespread agreement among philosophers regarding some of the features that are exemplified by emotions – they are felt, relatively short-lived, and directed to the world.

Recent work on the nature of emotions has almost exclusively focused on identifying their necessary features. Are emotions necessarily related to motivation? Do they necessarily have an object? What is the relationship between the phenomenal character of an emotion and its representational content? Are emotions themselves in addition, say, to the beliefs that may cause them or the actions that they themselves promote – assessable as justified, appropriate or rational?

While important in their own right, these questions have been so prominent in recent debates that, regrettably, very little attention has been devoted to identifying the general ontological category to which emotions belong.

Are emotions kinds of events? Their being short-lived may suggest so. But emotions are perhaps kinds of processes. Saying so would at least allow one to do justice to the idea that emotions have components or stages. Yet another possible position is that emotions are dispositions of some sort, suggesting a specific way of explaining their link with behaviour. 

I Err, Therefore I Think

Today's post is by Krystyna Bielecka (pictured above), assistant professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. For her PhD, Krystyna investigated the concept of mental representation and its use in philosophy and cognitive sciences. Her PhD thesis entitled, Błądzę, więc myślę. Co to jest błędna reprezentacja? (in English, “I err, therefore I think. What is misrepresentation?”), was awarded the Jerzy Perzanowski Prize by Jagellonian University (Poland) for the best PhD Thesis in Cognitive Science in 2016.

Recently Krystyna has obtained a research grant from the the National Science Centre (Poland) to pursue her research interests in the application of the concept of mental representation to certain psychopathologies. In the project, she asks whether certain mental illnesses, such as OCD, psychoses, or certain symptoms of mental disorders, such as confabulations or cognitive and emotional impairments of empathy, are necessarily representational and when it is reasonable to explain them without using the concept of mental representation.

Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists discuss the nature of thoughts, how they acquire content, and what it means that thoughts correspond to reality. The modern debate over contentful thoughts, or mental representations, is dominated by the question of how to naturalize content. For example, Daniel Hutto and Eric Myin are skeptical whether any naturalistic theory of mental representation could ever naturalize contents understood as satisfaction conditions (which is what they dub “The Hard Problem of Content”).

In my book Błądzę, więc myślę. Co to jest błędna reprezentacja? (I err, therefore I think. What is misrepresentation?), I argue for the significance of the possibility to make representational errors. In contrast to philosophers for whom the possibility of misrepresentation is a problematic (such as Donald Davidson, Gilbert Harman, Jerry Fodor) or even an unnecessary (Mark Perlman) feature of mental representation, I argue that the possibility to make errors detectable by the cognitive system itself is a sign that the cognitive system has access to the contents of its mental representations. 

The detectability of errors is a necessary condition for the further possibility to correct them, which is fundamental for learning. Furthermore, the argument for the possibility of misrepresentation is based on the premise of overall rationality of cognitive agents - only if they can have access to the content of their mental states, they can recognize their mistakes in order to correct them.

The Misinformation Age: how false beliefs spread

       

        

Today's post is written by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall. In this post, they present their new book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, edited by Yale University Press.

Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. 

James Owen Weatherall is a philosopher of physics and philosopher of science. He is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science.   

Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformation and false beliefs have come to play in major political decisions in Western democracies. (What we have in minds are beliefs such as that vaccines cause autism, that anthropogenic climate change is not real, that the UK pays exorbitant fees to the EU that could be readily redirected to domestic programs, or that genetically modified foods are generally harmful.)

One common line of thought on these events is that reasoning biases are the primary explanation for the spread of misinformation and false belief. To give an example, many have pointed out that confirmation bias – the tendency to take up evidence supporting our current beliefs, and ignore evidence disconfirming them – plays an important role in protecting false beliefs from disconfirmation.

In our recent book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, we focus on another explanation of the persistence and spread of false belief that we think is as important as individual reasoning biases, or even more so. In particular, we look at the role social connections play in the spread of falsehood. In doing so we draw on work, by ourselves and others, in formal social epistemology. This field typically uses mathematical models of human interaction to study questions such as: how do groups of scientists reach consensus? What role does social structure play in the spread of theories? How can industry influence public beliefs about science?

Throughout the book, we use historical cases and modeling results to study how aspects of social interaction influence belief. First, and most obviously, false beliefs spread as a result of our deep dependence on other humans for information. Almost everything we believe we learn from others, rather than directly from our experience of the world. This social spread of information is tremendously useful to us. (Without it we would not have culture or technology!) However, it also creates a channel for falsehood to multiply. Until recently, we all believed the appendix was a useless evolutionary relic. Without social information, we wouldn’t have had that false belief.

Second, given our dependence on others for information, we have to use heuristics in deciding whom to trust. These heuristics are sometimes good ones – such as trusting those who have given us useful information in the past. Sometimes, though, we ground trust on things like shared identity (are we both in the same fraternity?) or shared belief (do we both believe homeopathy works?) As we show, the latter in particular can lead to persistent polarization, even among agents who seek for truth and who can gather evidence about the world. This is because when actors don’t trust those with different beliefs, they ignore individuals who gather the very evidence that might improve their epistemic state.

Epistemic Innocence and the Overcritical Juror

In this post, Katherine Puddifoot, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University, discusses her paper “Re-evaluating the credibility of eyewitness testimony: the misinformation effect and the overcritical juror,” recently published in Episteme.

Should we trust eyewitnesses of crimes? Are jurors inclined to trust eyewitnesses more than they should? People tend to adopt a default position of trust towards eyewitness testimony, finding it highly convincing. However, as has now been widely acknowledged, eyewitnesses are subject to memory errors, which make them susceptible to error. These two observations have pointed many researchers towards the conclusion that jurors do trust eyewitnesses more than they should.

However, in a recent paper, I argue that jurors are susceptible to being overcritical, assigning too little credence to eyewitness testimony, due to the presence of memory errors. How can this be so?

Jurors might adopt a default position of trust towards eyewitness testimony, but they are also prone to assuming that an eyewitness is generally unreliable due to noticing individual errors in their testimony. For example, mock jurors are unlikely to base a judgement of guilt or innocence on testimony containing inconsistencies, even if the inconsistencies relate to trivial information that would not determine guilt or innocence (Hatvany and Strack 1980; Berman and Cutler 1996; Berman et al. 1995).

These individuals infer from the presence of errors in some trivial details to general unreliability of the testimony. My suggestion is that often inferences of this sort will be incorrect: people will make errors in their eyewitness testimony but the errors will not indicate general unreliability, instead being due to the ordinary operation of reliable cognitive mechanisms. Not only this, the errors will indicate the presence of ordinary, well-functioning cognitive mechanisms, which in fact facilitate people being good, trustworthy eyewitnesses.

What Beauty Demands: An Interview with Heather Widdows

Today I have the pleasure to post an interview with my colleague Heather Widdows, John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham, who talks to us about her research interest in beauty and her very successful monograph, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal.

LB: Your project examines beauty from a new angle. How did you first become interested in beauty as an ethical ideal?

HW: That’s a difficult question to answer as my passion for researching beauty crept up on me. Before working on beauty I was a fairly typical moral philosopher working in global ethics and justice. My main topic was defining global ethics as an multidisciplinary approach to philosophy, taking the real world and empirical evidence seriously. More broadly, I have worked on areas such as women’s rights, reproductive rights, genetic ethics and bioethics.

I guess my interest in beauty emerged from this long standing interest in gender justice. I recognised that something was happening in visual and virtual culture which was different, profoundly moral and no less connected to justice than other issues of health and wealth I had been working on. 

The challenges of body image anxiety as a global epidemic is an issue of global concern. Likewise, the extent to which the modified body is becoming regarded as normal, and even natural, challenges our understandings of what human beings are, and of the self, at least as much as advances in genetic technology or the emerging possibilities of Artificial Intelligence do. 

Such profound changes about our understanding of human beings, brought on by the emerging dominant beauty ideal, are not well recognised or researched. Perhaps it’s because beauty is seen as trivial, a matter of taste, or a ‘woman’s issue’ that we don’t take it seriously. But in a visual and virtual culture beauty matters, and it matters fundamentally. It provides our values and we judge ourselves, and others, according to it.

LB: In your recent monograph, Perfect Me, you argue that pressure on women to be perfect has increased and is now ‘more global’. What do you think is the reason for this increased pressure, and what makes you say that the preoccupation with beauty is more than a ‘first-world problem’?

HW: In Perfect Me I set out why the current beauty ideal – characterised by thinness, smoothness, firmness and youth – is now an emerging global ideal. This does not mean we all have to look the same, or even similar, but we do have to fall within a certain range. And while diversity might be locally true, globally it is not. Globally, the range of acceptable appearance norms for the face and the body narrows and becomes more demanding.

So while it might seem there is more diversity – more shades and colours of skin, and more shapes and sizes of models are visible – this is diversity within a very small range. To be beautiful – or just good enough – you must conform to most of the features of the beauty ideal. You can be big, and very big, only if you are also firm and smooth.

Yet firm curves are more demanding than thinness alone. And you can be hairy – look at Januhairy – but can you be both? Can you be fat and hairy and saggy and old? You cannot! As I say in Perfect Me ‘muffin tops’ and ‘love handles’ are not features of any version of thinness.

Evidencing the global nature of the ideal is the main focus of Chapter 3, ‘A New (Miss) World Order?’. In this chapter I document the narrowing of the normal range everywhere and the emergence of a global mean. The global beauty ideal is one of thinness in some form (catwalk thin, thin with curves), firm (buff, shapely, athletic), smooth (hairless, with golden, bronze or coffee-coloured skin) and young-looking. 

This is not a mere expansion of Western ideals, but a global ideal, which is demanding of all racial groups. No racial group is good enough without ‘help’ – all need to be changed or added to. Everybody needs body work – diet and exercise, surgical and non-surgical technical fixes – to be ‘perfect’, or just ‘good enough’. While not all can, or afford to engage – all can aspire to. Poverty is no barrier to aspiration and I use the evidence of engagement in affordable trends (such as seeking thinness or using skin-lightening cream) as indicating engagement and aspiration, and supporting the global trend.