Empedocles, Aristotle reported, thought that what animated the world was attraction and repulsion (philotës and neikos). For him, such forces were moral in nature but caused the phenomenal world. Hume made the very fact of reasoning a moral matter, and as noted stated that “reason is, and ought always to be, the slave of the passions” (Treatise II.3.1 399), but Hume’s dictum is more interesting for another reason: in his account, all reasoning is motivated.
Motivations are what the name implies: things that move us. It includes evolved functions, emotions, and desires.[1] But until fairly recently in the history of philosophy, they were regarded as fixed and firm properties of human souls or essences. Since Hume and Malebranche in the eighteenth century at the latest, these affective states, as they are referred to in psychology, have become regarded as natural, even in-born feelings. One of the more recent attempts has been to taxonomise emotions as universally shared human traits, following Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, published in 1872.
In the field of Cognitive Science/AI (increasingly misnamed disciplines) there is a problem called the Frame Problem. Initially a problem of how to program a machine to act in the real world, say, stacking blocks, by having to specify all the axioms needed for the environment (such as “blocks only move when acted on” or “blocks stay in the same spot if undisturbed”, or rather mathematical instructions to these effects), it was generalised to become a problem of philosophy and cognition.
The issue is basically, what do we need to know about the world in order to know about the world? Expressed like this, the issue is one that goes back at least to Plato, and is clearly philosophical. Kant referred to these necessary ideas a synthetic a prioria, that is, things necessary to believe before you start which are not truths of logic, such as the external world exists. But do we, or any cognitive system, need to have prior knowledge as such? As Quine once said, “creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic, if praiseworthy, tendency to die before reproducing their kind.” Similarly, Konrad Lorenz stated that synthetic a prioria are evolutionary a posterioria (as summarized by Franz Wuketits).[2] In short, we need to have something to draw our attention to the aspects of the world that, out of the literal infinity of possible things to attend to, help us (and other organisms that do attending) find things like food, mates, progeny, and potential threats.
And these aspects, which we shall call saliences, are not given to us in propositional form, nor are they beliefs to begin with. This is the mistake made by evolutionary psychology of a certain kind, along with genetic determinisms. We do not appear to have a priori beliefs, nor are there generally specific regions of the brain or modules for learning actions, ideas or perceptions (although there are modular aspects of sensory processing).
Saliences in psychology are dispositions to react to certain stimuli, which bootstrap as it were our subsequent and current learning. This is best illustrated by one of the examples of “innate” knowledge: primate reactions to snakes. It is widely known that monkey juveniles will not react to snake stimuli (real or researcher-induced) until they see mature members of their troop reacting.[3] Cattle and horses, on the other hand, react pretty much all the time to snake stimuli. The primates learn to react appropriately, but they will react to snake forms more rapidly than to other things. There is both a disposition to learn from mature conspecifics, and to react to snake shapes and movements.
The very notion of “innateness” has been the subject of much criticism. Shortly after the second world war, American psychologist Daniel Lehrman criticised Lorenz’ notion of “innate” behaviours (or at least what he thought was Lorenz’ idea). This occurred during the heyday of behaviourist psychology (stimulus-response, and “rats and stats”), but the critics retained a more internalist approach to the inner lives of animals, and required empathy (Einfühlung in German) on the part of the researchers. Lehrman’s response was of this kind.
The critique of the dichotomy is continued today, for several reasons. Some critics think that the two concepts fail to measure the same things (learning and behaviour, for example). Some think that everything requires the joint action of both heredity (genes) and environment, and all that varies is the mixture. Others think there are many such distinctions, and that focussing on genes is a category error. And finally, with some evidence in the case of Lorenz, some think it is eugenics-bound and underpins scientific racism. Lorenz was a card-carrying member of the Nazis during the war. But ironically, it was Lehrman who was rather unfairly attacked by those evolutionary biologists who supported Lorenz’ ethological approach as a scientific outsider.
My own view is that focussing on behaviours and beliefs is a mistake. Evolution has a strong case as an explanation of desires and dispositions that contribute to our fitness (fitness is not about strength or endurance and so forth, but about how many descendants a given variation leaves, on average, over several to many generations, as an indicator of how well that variation is able to satisfy the requirements of making a living and reproducing in a given environment). It doesn’t require genetically encoded beliefs, but dispositions are able to individually adapt to the local conditions. We have dispositions to develop a spine in the right nutritive environment (in utero, and with sufficient folic acid in the diet), and this is under genetic influence to be sure, but the environment is necessary too. No gene acts in a vacuum (try it and see) and no gene acts alone. Sterelny and Griffiths (1999) call this the “interactionist consensus”. Genes offer dispositional outcomes in the developmental process, not instructions for brain states.
We desire, on the whole but not always, things that in general add to our survival to reproduction. Hume’s dictum in effect is explained by evolution as the frames we desire are those evolution has cued up for us. In short, we pay attention to the saliences that matter.
Likewise our behaviours – we are attracted to our social co-members, and we tend to regard with suspicion those who are foreign. This isn’t deterministic, and can be ameliorated with early experiences of those who would be foreigners. My parent’s generation hated the Japanese (although oddly, not the Germans) after world war two. I had a close friend who was Japanese in high school. Our experience of what is normal in generally fixed by our wider environment, and not simply our parental influences, although such things as political and religious attitudes are often highly heritable.
There are many naturalistic theories of the emotions, and one of them is Paul Ekman’s extension of Darwin’s book, to assert that emotions are universals of human psychology. Few dispute this, but the way emotions are cut up and classified has not achieved a consensus yet. Ekman’s work falls under the rubric of evolutionary psychology[4] and utilises anthropological studies, but there is an element of cherry picking here. For a start, many research questions are framed in terms of prior categories of emotion (which, as noted in the footnote above, is a very recent term) such as hate, disgust, and fear, rather than in terms of earlier and possibly wider than merely agrarian societies’ categories, like taboos, or stranger aversion,[5] seeking glory, or fear of the gods. Some taxonomies of emotion are rather spare, such as the two dimensional version of valence and arousal, or attraction and repulsion on one axis and strength of reaction on the other (by Schachter and Singer). Others include a higher number of axes, from four to eight or more. Other theories include cognitive appraisal, situational awareness, and neurophysiology. My point here is that the issues with physicalism and emotions are not that there is no natural account, but that there are too many. So for simplicity I will simply expound my own view.
The psychologist James A Russell wrote
In the traditional view, categories such as fear and anger are well defined. In the present account, they are not defined by necessary and sufficient features. The set of events picked out by the English word fear is not a biologically given category.[6]
Russell, along with several others, introduced – or rather re-introduced — an idea that is sometimes called phase space or state space classification of emotions.. The idea is that the dimensions or axes form a continuous space. Now which axes is a matter of empirical research and theoretical choice, but the point for us is that while we may all have roughly the same space across cultures and individuals, the emotions can cluster in different places. A similar case lies in colour spaces. While some “primary colours” may be shared by nearly everyone (apart from those with some form of colour blindness), other divisions will be the end result of a combination of cultural and biological factors. Likewise emotions and other desire-based impulses. The terms of, say, honour and battle berserk behaviour do not map directly onto shame and anger as used by the western cultures.
So we can have emotions without dualism. And the reasons for thinking we need dualism, or phenomenalist accounts, are again a matter of mis-definition, western centrism, and projection of the norms and values of the ones doing the classifying. As with Evolutionary Psychology, too many concepts in psychology reflect what Henrich and colleagues call the WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic) bias of research (sometimes called the “Chicago undergraduate effect” since they are the subjects of a lot of psychological research). This is clearly demonstrated in the assumption that we have unique internal experiences for each emotion, a “feeling” of being angry, in love, etc. And you all by now know what I think of feels.
References
Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. 1992. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Ekman, P. 2004. Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. Henry Holt and Company.
Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2–3): 61–83.
Lehrman, Daniel S. 1953. “A Critique of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 28 (4): 337–63.
Lorenz, Konrad Z. 1997. The natural science of the human species: An introduction to comparative behavioral research: The "Russian Manuscript" (1944-1948). Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Lutz, Catherine. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll & Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Russell, James A. 2003. “Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion.” Psychological Review 110 (1): 145–72.
Vicedo, Marga. 2023. “Beyond the Instinct Debate: Daniel Lehrman’s Contributions to Animal Behavior Studies.” Journal of the History of Biology 56 (2): 251–84.
Wuketits, Franz M. 1984. Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge. Theory and Decision Library ; v. 36. Dordrecht ; Boston: D. Reidel.
[1] The term “emotion” is surprisingly recent, having been introduced to English in the very early nineteenth century. Prior to that, passions, sentiments and affections were the basic categories of desire.
[2] Quine, "Natural Kinds", in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), p. 126;. Wuketits, Concepts and approaches in evolutionary epistemology: towards an evolutionary theory of knowledge, 1984.
[3] The research on this has been challenged and revised, and seems difficult to reproduce outside the laboratory. However, this is not a unique problem in comparative psychology, and does not mean it has been falsified.
[4] The Stanford Encyclopedia article on Evolutionary Psychology, by Stephen Downes as at Winter 2024 makes a distinction between “lowercase” evolutionary psychology that is psychology (most often of humans) informed by our evolutionary history and physiology, and “capital letter” Evolutionary Psychology, which is a school of thought introduced by Cosmides and Tooby, a couple at the University of California Santa Barbara (Barkow et al. 1992). As a result capital Evolutionary Psychology is sometimes referred to as the west coast or Santa Barbara model.
[5] The Pacific Island inhabitants of Ifaluk Island have a response to strangers that needs to be evoked called metagu, where a member of the tribe dresses monstrously and chases children who do not show sufficient justified anger (song) around strangers, as documented by Catherine Lutz’s 1988 book Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll & Their Challenge to Western Theory.
[6] Russell, James A. 2003, 151