Emotional Knowing: the Role of Embodied Feelings in Affective Cognition

The emotions play a crucial role in our apprehension of meaning, value, or significance — and their felt quality is intimately related to the sort of awareness they provide. This is exemplified most clearly by cases in which dispassionate cognition is cognitively insufficient, because we need to be emotionally agitated in order to grasp that something is true. In this type of affective experience, it is through a feeling of being moved that we recognize or apprehend that something is the case. And that is why our emotions are epistemically indispensable: namely, because they give us access to significant truths. In this essay, I explain how the phenomenally felt character of an emotion is intimately linked with its intentionality. Intellectual activity divorced from affective feeling is profoundly lacking — not only in its qualitative feel, but also in its epistemic import, or its ability to inform us about matters of significance. A better appreciation of how the living body is involved in affective experience should help us to understand the distinctive kind of embodied cognition that emotional responses involve. It also ought to resolve confusions about phobic responses and other “recalcitrant” emotions, which are not divorced from cognition as many have claimed.

1. Max Scheler (1973, 62-63).

2. As Jon Elster does: see (1999, 248).

3. On the way in which “bodily feelings” can be “themselves world-directed, or at least intimately caught up into a world-directed state of mind,” see Mark Wynn (2013, 31-32).

4. Contra Jesse Prinz’s contention that only a “non-cognitive theory of the emotions” can explain why a “bodily disruption” would be involved in feeling guilt, his own formulation in an informal study asks subjects to imagine “the feeling you have when you think about the fact that you haven’t written back” to an old friend: see Prinz (2007, 59-60).

5. Cf. Linda Zagzebski (2003, 117): “it is possible that there are psychic states that are both cognitive and affective,” in such a manner that “the cognitive aspect of the state cannot exist apart from the affective aspect,” and vice versa. Here, I am claiming that this is indeed the case.

6. William James (1884, 201).

7. James (1884, 195).

8. Jenefer Robinson (2004, 41-42).

9. Peter Goldie (2000, 22-37 & 76-78); David Hume (1978, 148).

10. Robert C. Roberts (2003, 90). See also Michael Stocker (1996, 38-39).

11. Prinz (2004, 23). The passage about fear of spiders is from Deonna and Teroni (2012, 54). Arguments of this kind are frequently connected with dubious appeals to evidence from neuroscientific research, in particular Joseph LeDoux’s previous contention that cognition and emotion ought to be classified as separate functions, based on the “quick and dirty” nature of an affective reaction such as being startled by a loud noise, and other fairly unintelligent reflex-like responses: see, e.g., LeDoux (1996, 68-69). Yet see LeDoux’s more recent work (2014, 318–319): here, he notes that his work has been widely misunderstood and aligns it with “cognitive theories of emotion” rather than with non-cognitive accounts.

12. On knowing “perfectly well,” see Patricia Greenspan (1988, 23) and Roberts (2003, 89-91). On the evidence indicating that phobics often hold “idiosyncratic cognitions” or beliefs, see Thorpe and Salkovskis (1995, 805).

13. See André T. Miller et al. (1998); Bethany A. Teachman et al. (2008); and, Mairwen K. Jones and Menzies (2000). It seems that Cheshire Calhoun is right to find problematic the alleged “belief that spiders are harmless” in someone who fears spiders (1984, 335). The empirical literature showing that phobias involve an increased expectancy of harm is surveyed in Stefan Hofmann (2008).

14. Roberts (1988, 195-197). On the “cognitive aspect” of our perceptual and affective experience, and on its phenomenology, see Raja Bahlul (2015, 118).

15. Jenefer Robinson (2005, 23).

16. Roberts (2003, 84-85). By contrast, Matthew Ratcliffe notes that “accepting a proposition” is “not sufficient for a sense of conviction” (2008, 184).

17. See, e.g., Sabine Döring (2014, 125): she can see no reason why anyone would hold “that the judgment which supposedly defines the emotion is somehow unconsciously held and thus not acknowledged by the subject,” in cases where conscious beliefs conflict with felt emotions.

18. Calhoun (1984, 338). Cf. Martha C. Nussbaum (2001, 36): “The mind has a complex archaeology, and false beliefs, especially about matters of value, are hard to shake.”

19. Eugene Gendlin has observed that embodied “felt meanings,” or affective feelings, can be quite precise: they are “not indeterminate,” only “capable of further symbolization.” (1997, 145–146).

20. The phrase “full blooded belief” is from Michael Stocker (1987, 59-60). As he points out, some instances of fear involve uncertainty, or the thought that something might be a threat. See also Nussbaum (2001, 40-41): a person for whom the significance of a loved one’s death “sink[s] in” will feel “disturbed”; thus, not to feel moved would indicate that this death has not entirely registered in one’s awareness.

21. This is what distinguishes “the emotional commotion of real fear” from dispassionate acceptance of the fact that danger looms, as Richard Shusterman points out (2008, 149). On the intentionality of somatic feeling in such cases, see also Peter Goldie (2000, 58-60): he describes this in terms of “feeling towards.”

22. Shakespeare, Othello, III.iii.384.

23. See, e.g., Uhlmann and Cohen (2007).

24. Quite sensibly, LeDoux makes the observation that “phobic objects” such as “snakes, spiders, heights,” and so on, “are often legitimately threatening, but not to the extent believed by the phobic person.” (1996, 130).

25. Rainer Reisenzein (2009, 220).‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

26. Richard Lazarus, for instance, stipulates that “certain patterns of appraisal cause particular emotions” (1991, 172–173). William Lyons makes a similarly misleading claim, viz., that an emotional state involves “an evaluation which causes abnormal physiological changes.” (1980, 57–58 & 88). Prinz concedes that “a judgment [that] one’s lover has been unfaithful” may provoke the “embodied appraisal” of jealousy (2004, 98–99). Yet typically, he thinks, the causal sequence is the other way around, and cognitions occur after feelings of bodily responses. He assumes that one or the other must come first. So does Robinson, who argues that “cognitive monitoring and labelling of emotions occurs subsequent to an initial gut reaction,” which itself involves only “non-cognitive” physiological changes (2005, 414). Similar problems exist with multi-component and “hybrid” theories, in my opinion: namely, they tend to assume that emotions incorporate discrete aspects that are not unified, and a form of intentional awareness which itself falls short of rational cognition. However, research by Klaus R. Scherer provides some evidence in favor of component process models, or componential appraisal theories, of emotion: see, e.g., Scherer and Ellgring (2007). Their emphasis on appraisal is consistent with my account.

27. Prinz (2012, 8). On “attributing irritability [or] edginess” to a sensation in the chest or gut, although such states are “attributable to a whole person” only, not to parts of a body, see Bahlul’s helpful analysis (2015, 106–107).

28. Husserl (2001, 66-68). On the ways in which emotions involve “cognitive interpretation” or “seeing-as,” see also Nussbaum (2001, 5 & 127-129).

29. Tamar Szabó Gendler (2008, 663).

30. Marcel Proust (1982, 783-787).

31. Samuel Beckett (1957, 26-28). Emphasis in original.

32. Ratcliffe (2008, 132). Following James, Prinz argues that emotions are perceptions of “bodily states” that are “reliably caused” by things in the environment (2004, 68–69). However, reliable causation does not amount to intentionality. A state that is caused need not carry any information about what has caused it.

33. Fiumara writes (2001, 79–80) that, if we had not realized this before, “we learn from anger that someone has offended us, and we even learn about [our] vulnerability” too.

34. Jean-Paul Sartre (2004, 72-73). See Ratcliffe (2008, 27): characteristically, the feeling of somatic agitation “is the emotional apprehension of a situation; the intentionality and bodily nature of the emotion are entangled.”

Authors and Affiliations

1. Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO, USA

   Rick Anthony Furtak

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Correspondence to Rick Anthony Furtak.

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