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What is it to imagine an emotion?

Today's post is by Radu Bumbăcea on his recently published paper "Imagining Emotions" (Erkenntnis).


Radu Bumbăcea


We all want to understand other people, and a central part of this understanding involves imagining their emotions ‘from the inside’. A key idea in the philosophy of emotions is that an emotion modifies the emoter’s experience of its object, that the emotion ‘colours’ the world: someone who is afraid of a dog experiences that dog as fearsome. In imagining an emotion E, therefore, the imaginer is supposed to gain some access into how the world is coloured by emotion E without having E oneself.

So far, the main approach to imagining emotions has been the simulationist one. According to such an approach, imagining an emotion is essentially having that emotion offline. In further metaphorical terms, we can say that imagining an emotion would involve building in one’s mind a copy of that emotion that is somehow marked as not-the-real-thing. 

This idea is often but not necessarily related to the broader view that we can run usual mental processes offline, and that many mental states have simulated equivalents. While a normal mental process involves believing that there is chocolate on the table, desiring chocolate, getting it and then feeling happy about this, the offline version would involve s-believing that there is chocolate, s-desiring it, having some representation of our getting it and then experiencing s-happiness.

I have a few worries about the simulationist view of imagining emotions. First, the mental state of simulating an emotion, as it is typically construed by simulationists, is very similar to that of having the emotion. Indeed, some go as far as to claim that simulated emotions just are emotions directed at an imagined scenario. 

Yet very often, for instance when we imagine an emotion of someone very different from us, we do not evaluate the world according to that emotion. I can imagine admiration for a dictator, but without taking the dictator as admirable. It follows that in imagining an emotion, we experience that emotion as ‘distant’ from us, and so the state of imagination is not too similar, let alone identical, to the state of that emotion. A second worry is that if we try to simulate the emotion of another person X, we essentially first build a copy in us and then attribute it to X. But this sounds incorrect: the attribution of the emotion to X is part of the mental state not an ulterior decision – we imagine the emotion E as X’s.

Rejecting simulationism about imagining emotions, I put in its stead the thesis that, rather than being a copy of an emotion E, imagining E is a representation of that emotion. The challenge is to show how this allows to understand the emotion ‘from the inside’. To start with, we need to distinguish between thin and thick representations. A thin representation merely refers to an object – think of the word ‘cat’ or of a belief about a cat. 

By contrast, a thick representation gives some access to the qualities of the represented object – here, think of a picture of a cat or a mental image of the cat. My claim is then that we can extend this to representations of mental states: I can form a belief about an emotion (‘X has emotion E’), but I can also form a thick representation of that emotion in my mind. This representation allows me to gain access to the phenomenal properties of E while experiencing E as not-my-emotion, as kept at a distance, as it were.
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