Affective Experiences and Intuitions

In this section, I want to juxtapose the features of affective experiences with those of intuitions. If they admit of significant similarities, then, I think, this should give us some reason to take the idea that intuitions might be (some kinds of) feelings seriously, meriting further exploration. Recall that intuitions are 1) intentional, 2) assertive, 3) motivational, 4) noncommittal, 5) gradable in 5.1) content and 5.2) pushiness, 6) phe-nomenally epistemically valenced, and 7) nonvoluntary. Now, what about feelings? As we have seen, affective experiences areintentional. They can have all kinds of things as

their intentional or particular objects, including particulars and propositional contents.

Affective experiences are, in a specific way, also assertive (cf. Helm 2001, pp. 43 sqq.).

Let me explain: As we have seen feelings come with bases that can but do not have to be assertive. For instance, they can take assertive perceptions just as well as non-assertive imaginings as their bases (Lamarque 1981; Tye 2008). However, affective experiences seem assertive independently of whether their base is assertive or not: they are assertive in that they “claim” that their base-provided particular object exhibits the feeling-specific formal object. The affective experiences in which you feel a cramp in your calf, are afraid of a bear or are sad that Bambi’s mother died leave little doubt that the cramp is unpleasant, the bear dangerous and the fate of Bambi’s mother sad.

Suppose you see a spider and are afraid. Your fear [...] involves its striking you that your situation is dangerous [...] Again, your fear is not a mere consequence of things so striking you; nor does fear merely cause things to strike you that way; rather, fear is a state in which things so strike you.

(Bain 2013, S87)¹²⁰

In fact, this kind of emotional assertiveness in the face of fictive scenarios is what gives rise to the “paradox of fiction” (Radford and Weston 1975). In this context, let me spend some more time on non-assertive imaginings as bases of feelings.¹²¹ If I imaginatively relive the death of Bambi’s mother, what is it that my soaring sadness is “claiming”?

Is it that the death of Bambi’s mother constitutes a loss? I am inclined to accept this account as by and large accurate. Seriously, aren’t you saddened by the death of Bambi’s mother? Doesn’t your sadness lead to a flurry of loss-related thoughts? Don’t you want to cry? At the very least, my sadness quite assertively tells me that the death of Bambi’s mother is, well, sad. This it does despite the fact that, somehow, in the back of my mind, I am perfectly aware that the death of Bambi’s mother is a fiction.¹²²

120Juxtapose this with how Bengson describes what happens when one has an intuition:

When reading Gettier’s paper [...] Professor Typical considers whether Smith knows that the man who will get the raise has ten coins in his pockets. Itstrikesher that, even though Smith is justified in believing that this is so, Smith does not know it. (Bengson 2015, 711 p., my emphasis)

121Note that not all imaginings are about fictions, at least not in the sense that the fictionality of the imaginative content is obvious to or acknowledged by the imaginer. Equally, not all fictive scenarios are part of an imagining — they might well be represented by perceptual experiences when we, say, watch a play.

122Alternatively, what my sadness tells me assertively is perhaps something along the lines thatin the fictional world of Bambi, the death of Bambi’s mother is sad/a loss(cf. Lewis 1978). This would make my sadness very accurate, though perhaps on the expense of overintellectualizing it.

It is presumably this belief that leads me to regulate my (initial) behavioural response accordingly (Sperduti et al. 2016): “Come on, don’t cry! It’s not real!” But that there is something that needs to be regulated is due to my sincere, perhaps somewhat gullible sadness. Usually, we don’t take our affective experiences to fictions at face value—but that does not mean that they have no face value. To the chagrin of people suffering from idiopathic pain, phobias, jealousy or just less than optimal affective responses, the processes behind our affective experiences are to some degree insulated from our (explicit) beliefs. This kind of belief-independence affective experiences have in com-mon with illusory perceptual experiences that we know to be illusory. In the case of affective experiences, this is all the more unnerving since, in contrast to perceptual experiences, they usually single-handedly carry motivational force, potentiating often unwanted bodily and mental behaviours. Thus, while perceptual illusions are easily overpowered by better knowledge, unwanted “affective illusions” usually need wrestling.

As Brian McLaughlin points out: “We easily handle visual illusions, but we may be suckers for affective illusions.” (McLaughlin 2010, p. 157)

There is another important contrast: In the moment of their occurrence, affective expe-riences can usually be merely challenged on the level of their behavioural insinuations, and then also only given a good amount of willpower. However, if one looks beyond the very moment of their occurrence, we find ourselves capable of affective learning in the sense that, given the right circumstances, practical knowledge and behavioural engage-ment, we can change the very way affective experiences make things appear. Jealousy might lessen in strength, dissipate and, if one believes practitioners of polyamory, even turn into compersion. In other words: You can easily behaviourally override the way things look but you can’t change the way things look. In contrast, it is not easy to behaviourally override the way things feel but you can change the way things feel.

To sum up the former point: affective experiences assertively mark their particular objects as bearers of properties that are their formal objects. In Bennett Helm’s words

“emotions are evaluative feelings in the sense that they are a distinctive kind of passive assent to their targets as having the import defined by their formal objects” (Helm 2001, p. 59).

And these formal objects can plausibly be all kinds of properties that merit our concern and are of import to us. These properties, in turn, can be (causally) grounded in inter alia biological, bodily, social, linguistic, moral, aesthetic and epistemic imperatives.

Quite clearly, feelings aremotivationaland their motivational force isgradable. They can

more or less strongly move us to behave or act in specific ways. What is important in the present context: they plausibly not only motivate physical but alsomentalbehaviour and action, such as attending, remembering, reflecting or assenting (Clore and Huntsinger 2007). As Nico Frijda notes:

Many reactions that are considered “emotional” do not include much overt action. States of action readiness may remain just that: states of readiness.

However, the actions for which action readiness is readiness include cognitive actions: changes in beliefs. Emotions have been defined by Aristotle as well as by Spinoza as inclinations to think one way rather than another. (Frijda 2008, p. 72)

Notwithstanding the fact that affective experiences are highly potent engines of persua-sion, they do not amount to full commitment to what they would want us to believe or judge. Feelings occasionally stand in conflict with our (better or worse) judgments.

Insofar they arenoncommittal. It seems also obvious that we are patients with respect to affective experiences, i.e. feelings are nonvoluntary. Brady nicely summarises some of these aspects for emotional feelings:

It is clear that emotional experience is typically passive: [...] [W]hen we feel an emotion the import of our situation impresses or thrusts itself upon us.

[...] [T]o say that the import of a situation impresses itself upon S is to say, roughly, that S is inclined to assent to or endorse this view of the situation.

In other words, when S experiences an emotion she is subject to some kind of pressure to accept the relevant appearance (Brady 2009, pp. 420 sq.).

One of the central features of affective experiences is their phenomenal valence. It is a general phenomenal property specific to and shared among affective experiences (Weiss 2016). Now, phenomenal epistemic valence seems to resemble “general” phenomenal valence. Positive intuitions presumably feel somehow positive in comparison to negative intuitions and they do so in relation to truth; while negative intuitions feel somehow negative in comparison to positive intuitions and they do so in relation to falsity. This is indeed reminiscent of affective experiences: specific feelings are not only characterised by their valence but also by a formal object, i.e. feelings do not only feel somehow positive or negative, but also they let things appear in a certain way, for instance as offensive, sad, funny or pleasant (cf. Teroni 2018). Fear (or shame) feels somehow negative in comparison to, say, amusement (or an orgasm) and it does so in relation to danger (or self-directed inadequacy). Happiness (or pride) feels somehow positive in comparison to,

say, sadness (or migraines) and it does so in relation to success (or achievement). It seems plausible that phenomenal valence is part of the story that explains the phenomenal epistemic valence of intuitions. Phenomenal valence seems like a reasonable candidate tophenomenally ground and evaluation of a proposition being true or false.

From there it is not too far-fetched to see phenomenal valence also as a possible ground for the assertiveness of intuitions. As we have noted earlier, the assertiveness (and pushi-ness) of intuitions covaries with their phenomenal epistemic valence (see section 2.2.6).

Helm links the assertiveness of emotions, something he calls “distinctively emotional assent”, directly to their valence which he couches in terms of pleasure and pain:

The idea of such distinctively emotional assent is implicit in the idea that emotions are evaluative feelings: being pleased or pained by things being thus and so is a kind of acceptance that things really are that way, an acceptance that falls short of full-blown judgment. (Helm 2001, pp. 45-46)

[E]motions are evaluative feelings in the sense that they are a distinctive kind of passive assent to their targets as having the import defined by their formal objects, and I have described such passive assents as feelings of plea-sure and pain: to be afraid is to be pained by danger, to feel hope is to be pleased by the prospects for success, to feel frustration is to be pained by repeated failure to attain some good, etc. This appeal to pleasure and pain is intended to make three points: first concerning the way in which emotions, as passive assents to import, are evaluations of a kind that dif-fers from evaluative judgment; second concerning the way in which emotions motivate subsequent action; and third concerning how emotions feel—their phenomenology. (ibid., p. 59)

In fact, it becomes hard to see which other class of mental states has anything resembling phenomenal epistemic valence. Perceptual experiences do not have valence¹²³and while beliefs might be thought to have an epistemic valence, this valence does not seem to be phenomenal (Koksvik 2011; Martin and Dokic 2013).¹²⁴ So either intuitions are their own class of mental states characterised by the primitive property of phenomenal epistemic valence or they belong to the familiar class of affective experiences. In the latter case, their phenomenal epistemic valence could be partly explained by the general phenomenal valence of feelings. This does not appear implausible considering how Clore

123But see Dokic and Martin 2015a.

124Though those subscribing to cognitive phenomenology might disagree.

characterizes the impact of affect on judgment and thought in a way reminiscent of intuitions:

[A]ffect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind.

Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, posi-tive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. [...] In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognition (Clore and Huntsinger 2007, p. 393).

A related similarity comes to the fore if we consider that positive and negative intuitions are phenomenal polar opposites. Now affective experiences harbour many pairs of phe-nomenal polar opposites: pain and pleasure, sadness and joy, disgust and delight, shame and pride, contempt and admiration, hate and love. On second thought, it seems that phenomenal polar opposites can be foundonly among affective experiences. A plausible explanation for this observation lies in the hallmark of affective experiences: the property that makes and breaks phenomenal polar opposite pairs is phenomenal valence. After all, phenomenal valence by itself embodies the most fundamental polar opposition: positive and negative, good and bad, “yin and yang”. Add determinate positivity or negativity along the same or a related property dimension, such as saddening and joyful, and you get a pair of affective experiences that appear to be phenomenal polar opposites.

This is presumably why it is hard to find phenomenal polar opposites among perceptual experiences and imaginings: the visual experience or imagining of red is not the polar opposite of the visual experience or imagining of blue. One might now argue that one example shows nothing since one can find also examples of affective experiences that have no polar opposites such as...anger?¹²⁵ If so, it should be enough to find justsome phenomenal polar opposites among, say, perceptual experiences. The best I can come up with is the thermoceptive experience of coolness and warmth. Nevertheless, I think that this appearance can be most naturally explained by positing that thermoception often comes together with affective components, namely a positive or negative valence.

It seems that the positive experience of warmth is the polar opposite of the negative experience of coolness. However, if both coolness and warmth feel good, are they then still phenomenal polar opposites? I doubt that they are. Thus, phenomenal polar opposites appear as exclusively affective phenomena.

125But what about feeling flattered?

Affective experiences are content-gradable in a particularly interesting way. First: feel-ings come with other mental states as their bases. Some of these bases such as perceptual experiences and imaginings will have content-gradeability, lending this feature to the af-fective experiences that take them as their base. Having said that, there is more to the story: it is not only that the content of the feeling which is provided by the base will appear more or less vivid because the base has the feature of content-gradeablity.

Crucially, the fact that it is the content of a feeling will make a characteristicadditional contribution to the vividness of the content. This is suggested by the ample empirical evidence that feelings facilitate content encoding in virtue of their affective properties such as valence and arousal (e.g. Lang et al. 1998; Schupp et al. 2003; Kensinger and Corkin 2004; Sharot et al. 2004; Phelps et al. 2006; Talarico and Rubin 2007) as well as their effect on attention:

Emotions “also function to enhance thequality of a subject’s representation of her emotional situation, by focusing attention onto important events and by keeping attention focused there. This results in an increased sensitivity to emotionally-relevant features in the subject’s environment. [...] Emotions thus function to enhance a subject’s evaluative construal of her situation, by making her additionally focused on and sensitive to features which constitute reasons for that construal” (Brady 2009, 422-423, his emphasis).

The upshot is that if paired with an affective experience, representational content appears as morevivid. Note also that the intensity or motivational force of a feeling does not have to co-vary with the clarity and distinctness of the content of their base. The perception of a blurry snake-like shape can trigger fear as intense as the clear and distinct perception of a snake. Something similar about intuitions is noted by Koksvik:

One possibility is to place variability in the content of the intuition [...] as variance in its determinacy. [...] However, [...] it might clearly but weakly seem to someone that torturing one innocent person to save 20 others is permissible (while it clearly and strongly seems to that person that torturing an innocent person to save a thousand is). [...] My own preference is to say that the pushiness of intuitional experience is itself gradable. (Koksvik 2017, p. 6)

So what we get is this: On a closer look, intuition experiences appear quite similar to affective experiences. This is reminiscent of the reason why Perceptualists exploit percep-tual experiences as an analogy to elaborate features of intuitions: intuition experiences

are similar to perceptual experiences. There they stop, however. What explains this similarity is not that intuition experiences are perceptual experiences. Even Perceptu-alists dismiss such Literal Perceptualism as counter-intuitive. In contrast, I submit that the similarity between intuitions and affective experiences is straightforwardly explained:

it’s because intuitions justare affective experiences. Thus:

Affectivism: Intuitions are affective experiences.

Is this as counter-intuitive as Literal Perceptualism? Perhaps for some philosophers.

However, as we have seen in section 4.1, to the “man on the street” and to psychologists this conception seems presumably quite natural. Of course, we cannot simply jump to the conclusion that intuitions are affective experiences from here and leave it at that.

What I take these reflections to motivate, however, is that one canreasonably formulate the hypothesis that intuitions aresome kind of affective experiences. This is the central idea behind Affectivism. To this, a sceptic might object that intuitions appear very different from classical examples of feelings such as hunger, fear or joy. Indeed, casting intuitions as affective experiences against this background might seem counter-intuitive at first, especially if one takes only bodily and basic or paradigmatic emotional feelings to be representatives of the class of affective experiences. However, as even James is willing to admit, the class of feelings comprises more: Chapter 5 will introduceepistemic feelingsand chapter 6 will argue that they are affective experiences, emerging as the ideal candidate class for intuitions (chapter 7). I am not going to jump to the conclusion that intuitions are (some kind of) affective experiences, I am going to work up to it slowly.

Chapter 5

Epistemic Feelings

5.1. Introducing Epistemic Feelings

Epistemic feelings have been broadly described as “feelings that enter into the epistemic processes of inquiry, knowledge and metacognition” (de Sousa 2008, p. 189).¹²⁶ Among the phenomena that populate our mind, epistemic feelings have only recently begun to attract the attention of philosophers (e.g. de Sousa 2008; Arango-Mu˜noz 2014).¹²⁷ However, as Mangan and Prinz note, epistemic feelings have made appearances in the writings of James and Descartes (Mangan 2001; Prinz 2011).¹²⁸ Looking back, de Sousa goes as far as to locate epistemic feelings in decisive moments of philosophical history such as “when Meno’s slave boy recognizes the correctness of Socrates’ demonstration of the way to double the square” in Plato’s Meno or when in the course of the Meditations, Descartes arrives at his cogito which finally seems to him clear and distinct, rescuing him from drowning in radical doubt (de Sousa 2008). We also find less well-known but exceptionally vivid mentions of epistemic feelings in Dewey’s writings:

126Epistemic feelings, with possibly some variation in extension, are also sometimes called noetic, cog-nitive or metacogcog-nitive feelings as well as epistemic or intellectual emotions (e.g. Clore 1992; Koriat 2000; Stocker 2004; Prinz 2007, p. 350, 2011, pp. 190 sq.; Morton 2009; Dokic 2012; Goldie 2012;

Carruthers 2017b).

127That is to say, alarger portion of the class of epistemic feelings has recently become topic of interest.

127That is to say, alarger portion of the class of epistemic feelings has recently become topic of interest.