H. P. Grice: Desideratum and Implicatum

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.