H. P. Grice's Emotum

EMOTUM -- emotion Philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ethics [from Latin e, out + movere, move, agitating motions] Aristotle claimed that emotion, which he called passion [Greek pathos, being acted upon] is a process or motion. Emotions are complex mental states with various degrees of intensity. Unlike moods, they are about some real or imagined objects. They give rise to actions or reactions. In this respect, they are associated with the will, but are distinguished from feeling in general because not all kinds of feeling are action-causing. Emotions are accompanied or expressed by bodily symptoms or external behavior. Typical emotions include love, anger, fear, joy, anxiety, pride, contempt, compassion, and indignation, and can occur alone or in combination. It is difficult to determine both the place and the role of emotions. Plato divided the human soul into three parts and held that emotion, as the state characteristic of the intermediate part, lies between appetite and reason. It can either help reason to control appetite or take the side of appetite to rebel against reason. This ambivalent position led to two contrary attitudes toward emotion in the later development of ethics. Rational ethics considers emotion to be a threat to morality and requires it to be governed by reason, while others, represented by Hume and Nietzsche, believe that emotion rather than reason is the center of moral life. Descartes’s study of the passions initiated important seventeenthcentury discussion of the emotions. William James and Carl G. Lange independently developed a position according to which emotion is a brute fact, a specific feeling caused by characteristic bodily changes in response to external stimuli. This thesis, which is called the “James–Lange view,” initiated the modern discussion of emotion. If emotion is the mental expression of bodily change, is it subject to the assessment of reason? Many traditional philosophers deplore the arationality of emotion, according to which emotion is neither rational nor irrational, but emotivism holds that emotion can cause cognition. Others consider that emotion can lead us to apprehend things in certain ways and is complementary to reason. According to this view, emotion has moral, aesthetic, and religious value. Emotion is associated with both virtues and vices. Some types of emotion, such as jealousy and pride, are vices, while others, such as love and benevolence, are virtues. It is disputed whether emotions are objective or subjective. For example, when we love something, is it because the object is loveable in itself, or because we project a subjective feeling upon it? Freud claimed that emotion is a reaction to something in our unconscious, rather than to something external. Many other modern writers have explored the diversity, complexity, and opacity of the emotions. “Emotions do not form a natural class. After a long history of quite diverse debates about their classification, emotions have come to form a heterogeneous group: various conditions and states have been included in the class for quite different reasons and on different grounds, against the background of shifting contrasts.” Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions. -- emotive meaning Ethics, philosophy of language A term introduced by the logical positivists in their discussions of the verifiability criterion. According to that criterion, only statements that can be checked by empirical evidence are meaningful. However, there are many apparently meaningful statements, such as those associated with moral discourse, which cannot be tested by experience. The logical positivists claimed that such statements are not factually or cognitively meaningful, but have emotive meaning, that is, emotive force. A detailed discussion of emotive meaning was developed by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, who distinguish the symbolic (referential) and emotive functions of language. In their symbolic function, statements refer to things; in their emotive function, they express and evoke feelings and attitudes. In his emotivism, C. L. Stevenson distinguished between the descriptive meaning and emotive meaning of expressions. The distinction lies in the kind of states of mind expressed or aroused. If the state of mind is cognitive, the meaning of the term conveys information and is descriptive. If the state of mind is affective or emotional, the meaning of the expression is emotive. Expressions in emotive meanings do not refer to the qualities of things, but prescribe a particular action or course of conduct. According to Stevenson, the meaning of ethical terms is descriptive in a sense, but primarily and chiefly emotive. “The emotive meaning of a word or phrase is a strong and persistent tendency, built up in the course of linguistic history, to give direct expression (quasi-interjectionally) to certain of the speaker’s feelings or emotions or attitudes; and it is also a tendency to evoke (quasi-imperatively) corresponding feelings, emotions, or attitudes in those to whom the speaker’s remarks are addressed.” Stevenson, Facts and Values -- emotivism Ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of language Also called the emotive theory of ethics. An account of the function of evaluative utterances in terms of the expression of the speaker’s emotion and the evoking of the hearer’s emotion, and a theory of evaluative fields such as ethics and aesthetics in terms of this account. The position can be traced to Berkeley, who claimed that evaluative terms such as “good” serve to raise some passion rather than to convey information. The view was developed in the twentieth century by the logical positivists, particularly Ayer, who claimed that ethical judgments are neither statements of non-ethical scientific facts nor statements of non-scientific ethical facts, but are only expressions of emotion that can be neither true nor false. In this way, to say that something is right or wrong amounts to saying “Hoorah!” or “Boo!” Hence, this version of emotivism is nicknamed the “boo-hoorah theory.” A full and sophisticated theory of emotivism is elaborated by C. L. Stevenson in his classical work Ethics and Language (1944). It argues that traditional moral theories generally but mistakenly take moral judgments to be nothing but descriptive expressions. Ethical utterances might be descriptive, but their main or primary meaning is emotive, for they do not refer to qualities in things, but function like interjections (“Alas!”), imperatives (“Do such and such!”), optatives (“Would that this were so”), prescriptions (“You should such and such”), or performatives (“I apologize”). An ethical statement is chiefly used to express (but not to report) one’s attitude and to try to influence the attitudes and conduct of others. Hence any purely descriptive account of evaluative judgments must be deficient. Other major proponents of emotivism include P. H. Nowell-Smith, Paul Edwards, and R. M. Hare. Hare’s theory has been called “prescriptivism” or, by Stevenson himself, “nearemotivism.” Emotivism was a major ethical theory in the twentieth century, but has lost its dominant position in recent decades, partly through changing understanding of the role of language and analysis in philosophy and partly because of its failure to connect morality with reason. “Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgements and more specifically all moral judgements are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.” MacIntyre, After Virtue