In 1928, Lewis Mumford, best known then and now for his writings on architecture and cities, penned a book review for The New Republic on a quite different subject -- on the life of Charles Darwin. The review included the following rather over-the top praise: Darwin, the man, is one of the most loveable characters in the annals of the nineteenth century: when he is breeding pigeons or meeting with pigeon fanciers, when he is watching orchids or barnacles or experimenting, with the aid of a tender young lady, upon the emotions of an infant, he is like some great earth-god mingling with his own creations: his patience, his single-minded devotion, his tireless communion with nature, put him at the head of that great company of naturalists who have made man at home in a world so long foreign; and have increased the sympathy of human beings with the whole lineage of organic creation. I love it. It almost makes me want to get a copy of Darwin's book on the emotions so I can learn...
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Regular readers know of my interest in the nature and origin of emotions. Recently I came upon a certain story about the work of a neuroscientist named Joseph LeDoux. It seems that LeDoux tried to study fear in rodents. This meant (he thought) asking the question: what is happening in the brain of a rat when it perceives a threat? He learned a good deal about the two distinct "roads" by which news of the threat gets to the amygdala, the quicker but less informative "low road" and the slower higher-info "high road." BUT ... this was the part that struck me and that may be of philosophical significance ... LeDoux came in time to the conclusion that he hadn't been studying fear at all. He had been studying survival circuits and threat conditioning Such things should be named, or renamed, in a way that cleanses them of the subjective and human-centric notion that the rats are "afraid" of something merely because the sight or smell of i...
A recent story in Slate discusses replication issues with recent experiments on the relationship between emotions and facial expressions. This is appropriate grist for a blog called "Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed" if only because the initiating issue sounds so much like the James-Lange theory of emotions. But, I would submit, the sounds-like is key. There are big differences. But to start from the (logical) beginning. One normally suspects that a facial expression is, as the term implies, that which expresses something deeper. The emotion is the something deeper. So happiness is the cause and a smile is the effect. But some psychologists have claimed that they could increase an experimental subject's happiness by getting him to smile. By hooking his face up to electrodes that lead nowhere, for example, and telling him, "you're helping us in an experiment on the neuro control of facial muscles." That way, his "smile" comes about fo...
In 1986 a fellow named Rom Harre wrote a defense of the "social constructivist" view of emotions and discussed loneliness in this connection. Loneliness, in his view, has no somatic component, it is a cognitive emotion, and thus illustrates how emotions are relative to the society in which the individual lives and breathes (and, in this case, sighs) and has his being. Prinz, in the book I've discussed here before, replies that, first, he isn't sure loneliness should be classified as an emotion at all. It may be a mood , which he treats as subtly different. But he doesn't seem sure of that point, so for the sake of argument he regards it as an emotion. Second, though, it isn't necessarily the case that it lacks physical symptoms. "It is hard to imagine feeling lonely while one's heart is racing, for example." Third, and cutting to the heart of Harre's point, we don't have any good reason to believe that we need co...
I've written before here (as on September 27th) about Jesse Prinz' recent book on the emotions, a book in which he advocates and in the process somewhat revises the James-Lange theory. Today I'd like to quote a bit of what he has to say about romantic love, drawing on a classic work by C.S. Lewis (who is pictured above). "To contrast the constructivist approach with evolutionary psychology, it is instructive to ... reconsider romantic love. Some constructionists have endorsed C.S. Lewis' (1936) provocative thesis that romantic love was invented in medieval France....Apparently, during the twelfth century it became very fashionable for Frenchmen to become infatuated with married women of higher social station....It is hard to know which is more cynical [selfish-gene] reductionism or constructionism. On the former, love is an evolutionary insurance policy, and on the latter, it is a French fad that happened to stick." Prinz doesn't advocate either of...
Recently I made the comment that I found the James-Lange theory of emotions very wise. Henry followed up, asking whether I was aware of contemporary work that supported that 1880s-era view. I said "yes," and offered this link: Luca Barlassina . That's an article published just this year by Dr. Barlassina, a scholar affiliated with Ruhr-Universitat Bochum's Center for Mind, Brain, and Cognitive Evolution, written with the assistance of Dr. Albert Newen, who has a chair at the same Center. Barlassina and Newen (B&N) title their paper "The Role of Bodily Perception in Emotion: In Defense of an Impure Somatic Theory." Some definition of terms is then in order. A "somatic theory" is one that says that the body [that is, to avoid triviality, the set of non-brain portions of the body] plays a critical role in causing emotions (not just in expressing them). B&N explicitly cite James as an early theorist of this sort and they add ano...
Human emotions are the phenomenological side of instinctive physiological responses. This was William James' view, expressed in a chapter of PRINCIPLES, and with a proper extension of credit to James' co-discoverer, Carl Lange. James' words: "Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.... without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it righ...