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Emotion expressions convey information. One important kind of information, from a communicative perspective, is information about what is demanded of the recipients of the expression. Compared to the vast body of research that focuses on whether, and to what degree, emotion expressions convey information about inner states, there is surprisingly little systematic research on the information emotion expressions convey about what the expresser wants the recipient to do. The present research documents for the first time the set of appeals associated with the expressions of anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and disgust. In two studies, we found that (a) generally, for each emotional expression, a core appeal is perceived as being made on recipients, but also a range of complementary demands, and that (b) context matters, as is the case for social perception of emotions in general. In this case, who caused the emotion expression affects the mapping between emotional expressions and appeals. Finally, (c) recipients report intentions to comply with these appeals, as can be expected from a functional point of view. Overall, these findings put the focus squarely on the imperative dimension of emotional expressions and lend support to the view that emotional communication entails an attempt to influence recipients rather than simply to inform them about how expressers feel or what they may do next. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism? ispartof: Nature Human Behaviour vol:5 issue:7 pages:816-820 ispartof: location:England status: published

In his early work, LeDoux distinguished between implicit emotions (defined as motive states) and explicit emotions (defined as states of consciousness). He has recently suggested that emotion terms like “anger” and “fear” should only be taken to refer to feelings, and that motive states are better captured by a new theory of survival circuits. In this commentary, I reject this proposal, and articulate a New Basic Emotion Theory (BET) which suggests that emotion terms should only be taken to refer to motive states, which may or may not involve feelings. Despite these differences, I will argue that there are significant similarities between LeDoux’s theory of survival circuits and my own New BET.

In this article I articulate the Theory of Affective Pragmatics, which combines insights from the Basic Emotion View and the Behavioral Ecology View of emotional expressions. My core thesis is that emotional expressions are ways of manifesting one’s emotions but also of representing states of affairs, directing other people’s behaviors, and committing to future courses of actions. Since these are some of the main things we can do with language, my article’s take home message is that, from a communicative point of view, much of what we can do with language we can also do with nonverbal emotional expressions.

Self-control has been understood since Ancient Greece as reason winning in the battle with emotion. This is an idea that contemporary “divided mind” accounts of self-control take for granted, assuming that emotions are a threat to one’s ability to do what one judges best, all things considered. This historically influential picture neglects the emotions’ potential as tools for self-control. This chapter argues that emotions can help self-control by virtue of how they motivate, by virtue of how they feel, and by virtue of how they evaluate the self. At the same time, each of these three channels can also lead emotions to undermine self-control. Thus, whereas a “divided mind” account recommends fostering self-control by preventing emotions from interfering, the author recommends fostering self-control by developing affective strategies that harness the distinctive powers of emotions to work for self-control rather than against it.

The main purpose of this article is to consider two of the most popular arguments offered in support of the view that emotions do not cause actions. One argument suggests that emotions come after actions and therefore cannot cause them ( argument from timing). The other argument suggests that emotions are not necessarily followed by actions and therefore cannot cause them ( argument from imperfect association). I argue that neither of these two arguments is compelling. At the same time, some of the concerns of causation skeptics can help us better understand what a theory of the causal connection between emotions and actions should explain.

It is widely accepted that emotional expressions can be rich communicative devices. We can learn much from the tears of a grieving friend, the smiles of an affable stranger, or the slamming of a door by a disgruntled lover. So far, a systematic analysis of what can be communicated by emotional expressions of different kinds and of exactly how such communication takes place has been missing. The aim of this article is to introduce a new framework for the study of emotional expressions that I call the theory of affective pragmatics (TAP). As linguistic pragmatics focuses on what utterances mean in a context, affective pragmatics focuses on what emotional expressions mean in a context. TAP develops and connects two principal insights. The first is the insight that emotional expressions do much more than simply expressing emotions. As proponents of the Behavioral Ecology View of facial movements have long emphasized, bodily displays are sophisticated social tools that can communicate the signaler's in...

I want to sincerely thank my commentators for their critical analyses of my work. I have learned a lot from their commentaries, both about the virtues and about the flaws of my theory of affective ...

I first distinguish between five ways to express emotions: through involuntary muskoskeletal displays, through involuntary autonomic displays, through intentional bodily displays, through instrumental actions and through displaced actions. I then summarize my Theory of Affective Pragmatics (TAP), introduced in Scarantino (Psychol Inq 28(2–3):165–185, 2017a), and explain how it applies to these five domains of emotional expressions. The take-home message of my chapter is that emotional expressions, whether they are involuntarily expressed by means of bodily movements or intentionally expressed through speech acts, are a means of manifesting what’s inside, representing what the world is like, directing other people’s behavior, and committing to future courses of action. Since these are the main illocutionary acts made possible by language, TAP draws a key analogy between what can be said about the world and what can be shown about the world.

Hursthouse (J Philos 88(2):57–68, 1991) argues that arational actions—e.g. kicking a door out of anger—cannot be explained by belief–desire pairs. The Humean Response to Hursthouse (Smith in Human action, deliberation and causation. Springer, Netherlands, pp 17–41, 1998; Goldie in The emotions: a philosophical exploration. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000a; Goldie in Mind 109(433):25–38, 2000b) defends the Humean model from Hursthouse’s challenge. We argue that the Humean Response fails because belief–desire pairs are neither necessary nor sufficient for causing emotional actions. The Emotionist Response is to embrace Hursthouse’s conclusion that emotions provide an independent source of explanation for intentional actions. We consider Doring’s (Philos Q 53(211):214–230, 2003) feeling-based Emotionist account and argue that it fails to explain arational actions. Finally, we develop our own Emotionist account, grounded in the Motivational Theory of Emotions one of us has developed. On our account, arational actions form a non-homogeneous class, some members of which must be understood as instrumental actions and some members of which must be understood as displacement behaviors of the kind animals display when their motivations are thwarted or in conflict.

• We offer a new definition of functional reference that highlights the role of contextual cues.

Adolphs and Andler’s methodological functionalism recommends that affective science focuses on what emotions do rather than on what emotions are physically constituted by or how emotions feel. In addition, it is suggested that the functional roles of emotions should be extrapolated from a set of “features” emotions intuitively appear to have. In this brief commentary, I discuss both prescriptions, focusing on the concept of function and on the role folk psychological platitudes should play in a functionalist theory of emotions.

The central contention of this article is that the classificatory scheme of contemporary affective science, with its traditional categories of emotion, anger, fear, and so on, is no longer suitable to the needs of affective science. Unlike psychological constructionists, who have urged the transition from a discrete to a dimensional approach in the study of affective phenomena, I argue that we can stick to a discrete approach as long as we accept that traditional emotion categories will have to be transformed in order to do any scientific work. I conclude by articulating some general rules for turning traditional emotion categories into suitable scientific tools.

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value.

Philosophical cognitivists have argued for more than four decades that emotions are special types of judgments. Anti-cognitivists have provided a series of counterexamples aiming to show th...

How should UNOS deal with the presence of scientific controversies on the risk factors for organ rejection when designing its allocation policies? The answer I defend in this paper is that the more undesirable the consequences of making a mistake in accepting a scientific hypothesis, the higher the degree of confirmation required for its acceptance. I argue that the application of this principle should lead to the rejection of the hypothesis that 'less than perfect' Human Leucocyte Antigen (HLA) matches are an important determinant of kidney graft survival. The scientific community has been divided all along on the significance of partial antigen matches. Yet reliance on partial matches has emerged as one of the primary factors leading blacks to spend a much longer time than whites on the waiting list for kidneys, thereby potentially impacting the justice of the kidney allocation policy. My case study illustrates one of the legitimate roles non-epistemic values can play in science and calls into question the ideal of a value-free science.

Since the cognitive revolution, it’s become commonplace that cognition involves both computation and information processing. Is this one claim or two? Is computation the same as information processing? The two terms are often used interchangeably, but this usage masks important differences. In this paper, we distinguish information processing from computation and examine some of their mutual relations, shedding light on the role each can play in a theory of cognition. We recommend that theorists of cognition be explicit and careful in choosing notions of computation and information and connecting them together. Much confusion can be avoided by doing so.

Computation and information processing are among the most fundamental notions in cognitive science. They are also among the most imprecisely discussed. Many cognitive scientists take it for granted that cognition involves computation, information processing, or both - although others disagree vehemently. Yet different cognitive scientists use 'computation' and 'information processing' to mean different things, sometimes without realizing that they do. In addition, computation and information processing are surrounded by several myths; first and foremost, that they are the same thing. In this paper, we address this unsatisfactory state of affairs by presenting a general and theory-neutral account of computation and information processing. We also apply our framework by analyzing the relations between computation and information processing on one hand and classicism, connectionism, and computational neuroscience on the other. We defend the relevance to cognitive science of both computation, at least in a generic sense, and information processing, in three important senses of the term. Our account advances several foundational debates in cognitive science by untangling some of their conceptual knots in a theory-neutral way. By leveling the playing field, we pave the way for the future resolution of the debates' empirical aspects.

According to the Veridicality Thesis, information requires truth. On this view, smoke carries information about there being a fire only if there is a fire, the proposition that the earth has two moons carries information about the earth having two moons only if the earth has two moons, and so on. We reject this Veridicality Thesis. We argue that the main notions of information used in cognitive science and computer science allow A to have information about the obtaining of p even when p is false.

This paper suggests that art cannot be defined in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Instead, we propose that there are several sufficient conditions for something's being art, and that a successful definition will consist of a disjunction of minimally sufficient conditions. Our proposal owes much to the insights of Berys Gaut's "Art" as a Cluster Concept' but offers a much simpler logical formulation, which, in addition, is immune to the objections that have been raised to Gaut's account. This paper agrees with Gaut's claim that there are borderline cases of art, and suggests that they arise from indeterminacy about the content of some of the minimally sufficient conditions. It is argued that this disjunctive account is superior to classical theories, resemblance-to-paradigm theories, and prototype theories of art.

Lionel Robbins’s (1932) An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (henceforth, Essay) is one of the two most important works on economic methodology of the twentieth century, together with Milton Friedman’s classic ‘‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’’ (1953). The fundamental legacy of the Essay is having forcefully championed a conception of economic science as axiomatic, value-free, and primarily concerned with scarcity—a conception that is today widely, even though not universally, accepted. Robbins (1932) presented his position as if it captured what was at the time a broadly shared understanding of economic science. As it turns out, Robbins’s Essay was met by largely negative reactions in academic journals. The main purpose of this paper is to describe and assess the nature of the negative reactions to Robbins’s work in the 1930s, primarily with respect to the value-freeness of economics. Some interpreters have argued that the hostility to Robbins’s work was mostly based on a misunderstanding of his position (e.g. Peston and Corry 1972; Masini Forthcoming). Robbins himself supported this interpretation, arguing that, with respect to his work on methodology, ‘‘I have never succeeded in making my views immune from misunderstanding’’ (Robbins 1963, Preface to his Politics and Economics, p. vii). Even though some reactions to the Essay did originate from failure to appreciate the subtleties of Robbins’s views, I want to argue that a great many were based on a substantive disagreement over the very possibility and desirability of keeping values outside of economic science. Recent developments in the debate on the role of values in science show that Robbins’s critics, although clumsily, pointed to genuine weaknesses of the thesis that economic science should be value-free. I will reconstruct and evaluate what I take to be the most insightful lines of criticisms leveled against Robbins from 1932, when the Essay was published, to

Cohen and Meskin 2006 have recently proposed a novel counterfactual account of information. I argue that it is a step down from its intended target, namely Dretske's 1981 theory of information. Thinking of the information carried by signals in terms of counterfactuals leads to falsely diagnosing bona fide instances of information transmission as not being instances of information transmission at all, with major loss of explanatory power.

I examine the central theoretical construct of ecological psychology, the concept of anaffordance.In the first part of the paper, I illustrate the role affordances play in Gibson's theory of perception. In the second part, I argue that affordances are to be understood as dispositional properties, and explain what I take to be their characteristic background circumstances, triggering circumstances and manifestations. The main purpose of my analysis is to give affordances a theoretical identity enriched by Gibson's visionary insight, but independent of the most controversial claims of the Gibsonian movement.

In this brief reply, which cannot do justice to all of the valuable points my commentators have raised, I defend the view that the notion of natural kind I have introduced satisfies the ontological independence criterion and is in keeping with the commitments of realism. I also further clarify the scope of my argument against basic emotion theory, and reiterate that we should stop looking for universal theories of discrete emotions.

I argue that Machery stacks the deck against hybrid theories of concepts by relying on an unduly restrictive understanding of coordination between concept parts. Once a less restrictive notion of coordination is introduced, the empirical case for hybrid theories of concepts becomes stronger, and the appeal of concept eliminativism weaker.

How should UNOS deal with the presence of scientific controversies on the risk factors for organ rejection when designing its allocation policies? The answer I defend in this paper is that the more undesirable the consequences of making a mistake in accepting a scientific hypothesis, the higher the degree of confirmation required for its acceptance. I argue that the application of this principle should lead to the rejection of the hypothesis that 'less than perfect' Human Leucocyte Antigen (HLA) matches are an important determinant of kidney graft survival. The scientific community has been divided all along on the significance of partial antigen matches. Yet reliance on partial matches has emerged as one of the primary factors leading blacks to spend a much longer time than whites on the waiting list for kidneys, thereby potentially impacting the justice of the kidney allocation policy. My case study illustrates one of the legitimate roles non-epistemic values can play in science and calls into question the ideal of a value-free science.

Lindquist et al. have assumed that functional specialization requires a one-to-one mapping between brain regions and discrete emotions. This assumption is in tension with the fact that regions can have multiple functions in the context of different, possibly distributed, networks. Once we open the door to other forms of functional specialization, neuroimaging data no longer favor constructionist models over natural kind models.

This chapter describes a perspective on emotion, according to which emotions are: 1. Designed to function in a social context: an emotion is often an act of relationship reconfiguration brought about by delivering a social signal; 2. Forms of skillful engagement with the world which need not be mediated by conceptual thought; 3. Scaffolded by the environment, both synchronically in the unfolding of a particular emotional performance and diachronically, in the acquisition of an emotional repertoire; 4. Dynamically coupled to an environment which both influences and is influenced by the unfolding of the emotion We draw heavily on ‘transactional’ accounts of emotion proposed by some contemporary psychologists. Although these authors do not, to our knowledge, conceive their work as a contribution to the ‘situationist’ literature that is the focus of this volume, we contend that their proposals constitute a fairly exact, affective parallel to situationist ideas about cognition. The primary aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that a situated approach to emotion already exists and is backed by a substantial experimental literature.