In this chapter, Griffiths explores propositional attitude theories: those theories that claim that an emotion is the holding of a certain sort of proposition. He thinks they all fail. The most important reason why they fail is that they engage in conceptual analysis, by which is meant that they analyze what people ordinarily mean when they speak of certain emotions.
Section 2.1
Griffiths here explains what makes a theory a "propositional attitude" theory and starts to limn out what he objects to about such theories.
Since ancient times (Aristotle, Stoics), emotion has been seen as involving a judgement about the world. So, for example, I cannot be just angry. I have to be angry about something. To be angry "about something" is to judge that that thing is somehow the sort of thing that one gets angry about. In the case of the emotion fear, I can't fear without having a notion in my mind that "X is dangerous." Unless I have perceived and agreed with the perception that X is dangerous, I just cannot be afraid. Griffiths will eventually point out that there are people who are just afraid without having any idea what they fear, and so he will reject the necessity of a conceptual judgement of a particular sort for emotion.
Some varieties of propositional attitude theories allow that there are physical manifestations of emotions. Fear might involve sweating, tenseness, dilation, etc. BUT they say that those things are just symptoms. They are not part of what emotion REALLY is. Emotion for them could exist without those things. That is what it means to be "contingent": being afraid necessarily involves (so proposition theorists claim) a belief and avoidance behavior, but it only contingently involves particular physical manifestations. Thus emotion is something one can examine without worrying about empirical manifestations of it. To look at emotion is simply to analyze what people believe and think. One can look at their thoughts when they have emotions and arrive at an accurate and scientific assessment about their emotions.
So propositional attitude theorists hold that emotions are "intentional states directed onto objects of some particular class." "Intention" here means "a concept considered as the product of attention directed to an object of knowledge" (Merriam Websters). So in order to have any given emotion, one must believe that something belongs to the class of objects of that emotion. In order to feel fear, for example, one must believe that something belongs to the class of objects of fear.
So far, that may seem like a fine claim: emotions DO (usually) involve some belief about their object, and usually all the objects of a certain emotion share some similarity of belief.
A problem that Griffiths points out at the end of the section is that our concepts change over time. To have a concept of, say, "education" is to have a mental project that has some content now, but may change later, and has probably changed in the past. If all one needs to do to scientifically examine what an emotion is is to examine what people think it is, then propositional attitude theorists are right. But Griffiths thinks that at the very least, propositional attitude theorists need to allow for the fact that concepts change over time, because concepts are not fixed. That is because they are more often than not more like ongoing investigations than fixed, already written, fully formed things.
Section 2.2: Cognitive Psychology
An experiment was done (Schachter and Singer) in which subjects were physically stimulated by adrenaline. I guess this was intended to give them all similar physiological states. Then they were somehow put in varying situations. Their emotions tracked the situations well. Thus the same physiological state can exist with different emotions, and so emotions are NOT physiological states, was the conclusion. Emotions depend on beliefs and desires, not physical symptoms.
Everyone agrees that to have an emotion, one must process some information. Somehow one must become aware of something, one must engage in some sort of neural activity with that information as its content.
There is a school of psychologists called "cognitivists" who claim that emotions MUST involve cognition. By cognition, they mean things like problem-solving and other things that we might call "actively thinking about things."
There are others who claim that cognition in that sense is not required for an emotion. Sure, there is some sort of neural processing of information, but it is not cognitive: it is much more like a reflex, something done without what we in our nontechnical way might call "thought" about the information. The claim here is that there are "automatic" neurophysiological pathways from the reception of some information to having an emotion about that information.
There certainly are things like mechanical reactions to information: being startled is one. I engage in no thought about what startles me until after I am startled.
There are also things that we think about.
If you think that all emotions involve conscious thought about information, you will simply refuse to call anything that is mechanical or reflex-like an emotion.
That would be fine, but Griffiths is trying to figure out what the things that we normally call emotions are. SImply refusing to acknowledge that some things that we normally call emotions are emotions gets us nowhere. All it does is offer us new labels. Griffiths wants more than that. He wants the labels to reflect the underlying causes of the things we are labeling.
Hence he wants to ask whether the things we normally call emotions have reflex-like components,, to what extent, and whether they have to have them in order to be emotions.
He also wants to ask whether we feel fear BECAUSE we think "that is dangerous," or whether our emotion is caused by one thing while our belief is caused by another.
The experiment with rats: take rats and give them apple pie, which they like. Then knock them out and induce nausea. Do this enough, and they will react to apple pie with disgust. That seems to indicate that the disgust reaction is not the result of a conscious belief about apple pie. It is produced by something inconscious and therefore separate from the belief-forming mechanisms. The belief that apple pie is disgusting is CAUSED by the disgust reaction, not the other way around. Just so, at least some of the beliefs that accompany some emotions might be caused by the emotion instead of the other way around.
The big point is that there are mechanisms and pathways in the brain that are separate from the ones that involve explicit conscious beliefs.
So people might have emotional responses to things that they do not "think" about in the ordinary meaning of "think." The beliefs come after the response, and so the response is not the beliefs, and propositional attitude theorists are wrong at least about those sorts of emotional responses.
Section 2.3: a simple version of the propositional attitude theory and basic problems with it
The simple theory (Solomon's): "My anger IS that set of judgements ... an emotion is an evaluate (or normative) judgement." Griffiths thinks that that is the most basic component of any propositional attitude theory, and he identifies 6 problems with such a theory:
So those are the problems with the simple propositional attitude theory of emotion that Griffiths sees. Remember that he is not denying that propositional attitudes are involved in emotions. What he is denying is that we should use propositional attitudes to identify and classify emotions for scientific purposes. That, by the way, does not mean that we cannot consider propositional attitudes in a scientifica analysis of emotions. It only means that they are not the factors that we should use in the basic acts of identifying and classifying. So, for example, in a scientific investigation, I might consider all the sorts of things that might affect metal, but when it comes to classifying and identifying metal, it would not do to classify it primarily by whether it is damaged by acid, whether it supports weight well, etc. Those things are important, but the primary classification should be determined by a chemist. Those things will follow the classification, presumably.
What if we say emotions are beliefs accompanied by desires?
It looks attractive to say that beliefs accompanied by desires are emotions. That can solve all the problems but number 1: objectless emotions.
But that leaves a problem: what desire accompanies the elation of satisfying a desire? If there is no desire then, then elation is not an emotion. That seems wrong.
Well, we can divide emotions into 1) appetitive emotions: those that include a desire for something; and 2) possessive emotions: those that include the belief that a desire has been satisfied.
A problem here is that desires are of two sorts: 1) the physiological sort that has strength based on how urgent it feels (there may be some bodily juices that can measure such desires), and 2) the behavioral sort which has strength based on how important it is as a reason for action. People notoriously often feel burning physiological desires that they do not act on, and then there are other behavioral desires that are not at all burning but lead to action (for example: the desire to have sex and the desire to act morally).
If one uses behavioral desires to explain emotion, then one cannot explain the physiological components of emotions. But if one uses physiological desires to explain emotion, then one will simply have a problem with explaining how those different physiological desires can lead to a categorization of emotion. This part of Griffiths is too fast and does not explain sufficiently for my taste.
In the end, however, Griffiths will reject the notion that emotions are propositional attitudes plus desires for reasons to be examined in section 2.7 and chapters 3 and 4.
Section 2.5: theories that combine propositional attitudes with physiological responses
According to hybrid theories, emotions are "that class of evaluations (i.e. propositions) which cause physiological disturbances." So, for example, judging that that is dangerous will not count as fear unless that judgement causes a certain physiological response.
The new element there is that it causes the physiological response.
On this theory, one attributes an emotion to someone and classifies it by determining what belief they hold and whether it causes a physicological response. Griffiths' main problem with this theory seems to be that although it allows for physiological response, it does not do much with it. It still relies on the nature of the beliefs and desires for identifying and classifying emotions. Griffiths claims that it turns out that empirically, facial displays and other physiological factors are psychologically important for saying whether someone has an emotion or not.
The theories which Griffiths is considering in this chapter sometimes try to consider other things, but at base, they are still conceptual analyses. They are theories that try to decide what emotions are by reference to what people THINK emotions are. He suggests that as conceptual analyses, they can be criticized in two ways. The first way is to criticize the contents of the theories. One says that we can't fear past events. Griffiths suggests that we can fear that our friend WAS on that plane that crashed. Why is that not a past event and not fear? Another theory says we cannot fear facts. Why is it not fear when someone fears death in general? Just because it's a fact that he or she will die?
The second way to criticize such theories is to say that they all approach emotion from the wrong place. What people THINK fear is is simply not necessarily what fear is. Just because most ordinary speakers of English have no idea what autonomic nerve responses are occurring in them when they fear does not mean that those responses are not fear.
Furthermore, these theories usually say that "a definition of emotion must involve only things logically connected to the emotion," but that is false: there is nothing logical about the connection of certain facial expressions, certain musculoskeletal movements, etc. to fear, but they may nonetheless BE fear.
Section 2.7: What would a successful propositional attitude theory achieve?
In this section, Griffiths claims that propositional attitude theory is hopeless for explaining emotion. He thinks that is the case even if we could all agree to a precise account of what we mean by fear, anger, and other emotions.
All the propositional attitude theories try to preserve "folk psychology" categories. They never question whether fear, anxiety, hatred, anger, envy etc. are not really the right way to divide the phenomena grouped under emotion.
A big problem for such analysis is that it must group a whole range of very different phenomena under one scheme. So, for example, hatred must include things that have strong negative characteristics. That idea, "strong negative characteristics" must be kept vague. Otherwise it won't include all the things that hatred includes. But keeping it vague makes it include too much, and also raises the further question of whether with such a vague term in its definition, hatred is a real category. It has become very vague itself. How do you define precisely strong negative characteristics.
In the case of fear, you might argue that all ojects of fear are dangerous, or perceived as such, and think that "danger" can be precisely defined, but for many other emotions, such as love and hate, there is not one quality which they all share that is precisely definable.
Take love for instance: all objects of love might share "lovableness." Lovableness can be one of two things: it can be the possession of one of a list of traits A, B, C, etc. (which is an either-or proposition usually), or it can be the disposition to elicit love. So something lovable is apt to be loved. If lovableness is a list of things, what holds that list together? If it is a disposition, then it becomes a problem that not all lovable things are loved, and so a propositional attitude towards something lovable even if it realizes that the thing is lovable will not necessarily constitute love.
Usually propositional attitude theories do little more than provide an adequate guide to folk psychology.
These theories identify some sets of propositional attitudes as one emotion, but they do not call other sets of propositional attitudes emotions. What makes some emotions and not others? The obvious answer to Griffiths is physiological, but that leaves a lot unexplained. Why do some propositional attitudes lead to physiological changes but not others (I.e. what makes an emotion an emotion!). Other rival approaches can explain such things.