"byzantine" -- from Grice's Dictionary

Agitation. A Byzantine feeling is a Ryleian agitation. . If Grice were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that “to feel Byzantine” is just to have a an anti-rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that Grice is or might *be* Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticize Grice on the grounds that Grice saddles himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. And why? Well, because, alla Parsons, if a quantifier is covertly involved at all, it will only be a universal quantifier which in such a case as this is more than adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. Grice’s situation vis-a-vis the ‘proposition’ is in no way different. The word ‘emotion’ is used to designate at least three or four different kinds of things, which I shall call ‘inclinations’ (or ‘motives’), ‘moods’, ‘agitations’ (or ‘commotions’) and ‘feelings’. Inclinations and moods, including agitations, are not occurrences and do not therefore take place either publicly or privately. They are propensities, not acts or states. They are, however, propensities of different kinds, and their differences are important. Feelings, on the other hand, are occurrences, but the place that mention of them should take in descriptions of human behaviour is very different from that which the standard theories accord to it. susceptibilities to specific agitations are on the same general footing with inclinations, namely that both are general propensities and not occurrences. Agitations are not motives. But agitations presuppose motives, or rather they presuppose behaviour trends of which motives are for us the most interesting sort. There is however a linguistic matter which is the source of some confusion. There are some words which signify both inclinations and agitations, besides some which never signify anything but agitations, and others again which never signify anything but inclinations. Words like ‘uneasy’, ‘anxious’, ‘distressed’, ‘excited’, ‘startled’ always signify agitations. Phrases like ‘fond of fishing’, ‘keen on gardening’, ‘bent on becoming a bishop’ never signify agitations. But words like ‘love’, ‘want’, ‘desire’, ‘proud’, ‘eager’ and many others stand sometimes for simple inclinations and sometimes for agitations which are resultant upon those inclinations and interferences with the exercise of them. Thus ‘hungry’ in the sense of ‘having a good appetite’ means roughly ‘is eating or would eat heartily and without sauces, etc.’; but this is different from the sense in which a person might be said to be ‘too hungry to concentrate on his work’. Hunger in this second sense is a distress, and requires for its existence the conjunction of an appetite with the inability to eat. Similarly the sense in which a boy is proud of his school is different from the sense in which he is speechless with pride on being unexpectedly given a place in a school team. To remove a possible misapprehension, it must be pointed out that not all agitations are disagreeable. People voluntarily subject themselves to suspense, fatigue, uncertainty, perplexity, fear and surprise in such practices as angling, rowing, travelling, crossword puzzles, rock-climbing and joking. That thrills, raptures, surprise, amusement and relief are agitations is shown by the fact that we can say that someone is too much thrilled, amused or relieved to act, think or talk coherently. It is helpful to notice that, anyhow commonly, the word which completes the phrase ‘pang of . . .’ or ‘chill of . . .’ is the name of an agitation. I shall now argue that feelings are intrinsically connected with agitations and are not intrinsically connected with inclinations, save in so far as inclinations are factors in agitations. But I am not trying to establish a novel psychological hypothesis; I am trying to show only that it is part of the logic of our descriptions of feelings that they are signs of agitations and are not exercises of inclinations. Feelings are not among the sorts of things of which it makes sense to ask from what motives they issue. The same is true, for the same reasons, of other signs of agitations. Feelings, in other words, are not among the sorts of things of which it makes sense to ask from what motives they issue. The same is true, for the same reasons, of the other signs of agitations. This point shows why we were right to suggest above that feelings do not belong directly to simple inclinations. An inclination is a certain sort of proneness or readiness to do certain sorts of things on purpose. These things are therefore describable as being done from that motive. They are the exercises of the disposition that we call ‘a motive’. Feelings are not from motives and are therefore not among the possible exercises of such propensities. The widespread theory that a motive such as vanity, or affection, is in the first instance a disposition to experience certain specific feelings is therefore absurd. There are, of course, tendencies to have feelings; being vertiginous and rheumatic are such tendencies. But we do not try to modify tendencies of these kinds by sermons. What feelings do causally belong to are agitations; they are signs of agitations in the same sort of way as stomach-aches are signs of indigestion. Roughly, we do not, as the prevalent theory holds, act purposively because we experience feelings; we experience feelings, as we wince and shudder, because we are inhibited from acting purposively. Sentimentalists are people who indulge in induced feelings without acknowledging the fictitiousness of their agitations. It seems to be generally supposed that ‘pleasure’ and ‘desire’ are always used to signify feelings. And there certainly are feelings which can be described as feelings of pleasure and desire. Some thrills, shocks, glows and ticklings are feelings of delight, surprise, relief and amusement; and hankerings, itches, gnawings and yearnings are signs that something is both wanted and missed. But the transports, surprises, reliefs and distresses of which such feelings are diagnosed, or mis-diagnosed, as signs are not themselves feelings; they are agitations or moods, just as are the transports and distresses which a child betrays by his skips and his whimpers. Nostalgia is an agitation and one which can be called in one sense a ‘desire’; but it is not merely a feeling or series of feelings. There is the sense of ‘pleasure’ in which it is commonly replaced by such words as ‘delight’, ‘transport’, ‘rapture’, ‘exultation’ and ‘joy’. These are names of moods signifying agitations. There are two quite different senses of ‘emotion’, in which we explain people’s behaviour by reference to emotions. In the first sense we are referring to the motives or inclinations from which more or less intelligent actions are done. In the second sense we are referring to moods, including the agitations or perturbations of which some aimless 98 THE CONCEPT OF MIND movements are signs. In neither of these senses are we asserting or implying that the overt behaviour is the effect of a felt turbulence in the agent’s stream of consciousness. In a third sense of ‘emotion’, pangs and twinges are feelings or emotions, but they are not, save per accidens, things by reference to which we explain behaviour. They are things for which diagnoses are required, not things required for the diagnoses of behaviour. Since a convulsion of merriment is not the CHAPTER VI: SELF-KNOWLEDGE 147 state of mind of the sober experimentalist, the enjoyment of a joke is also not an introspectible happening. States of mind such as these more or less violent agitations can be examined only in retrospect. Yet nothing disastrous follows from this restriction. We are not shorter of information about panic or amusement than about other states of mind. If retrospection can give us the data we need for our knowledge of some states of mind, there is no reason why it should not do so for all. And this is just what seems to be suggested by the popular phrase ‘to catch oneself doing so and so’. We catch, as we pursue and overtake, what is already running away from us. I catch myself daydreaming about a mountain walk after, perhaps very shortly after, I have begun the daydream; or I catch myself humming a particular air only when the first few notes have already been hummed. Retrospection, prompt or delayed, is a genuine process and one which is exempt from the troubles ensuing from the assumption of multiply divided attention; it is also exempt from the troubles ensuing from the assumption that violent agitations could be the objects of cool, contemporary scrutiny. One may be aware that he is whistling ‘Tipperary’ and not know that he is whistling it in order to give the appearance of a sang-froid which he does not feel. Or, again, he may be aware that he is shamming sang-froid without knowing that the tremors which he is trying to hide derive from the agitation of a guilty conscience.