Response to Gut Reactions

DAVID HILLS

Stanford University

1. The same familiar emotion words, fear, anger, disgust, etc., are

central to the working vocabularies of two different sets of disciplines.

In the moral sciences—rhetoric, ethics, political economy, sociology,

anthropology, psychoanalysis—they name robustly contentful standing

states of a person with characteristic roles (sometimes supportive,

sometimes disruptive) in our ongoing efforts to think and act and

value in ways that can pass muster as rational. In the new experimen-

tal affective sciences tracing their origins to Darwin and William

James, they name recurrent but inherently short-lived states of pat-

terned arousal, triggered (typically) by face-to-face encounters with

their appropriate objects and involving characteristic physiological

changes, characteristic bodily expressions, characteristic action tenden-

cies, and characteristic changes in the way we perceive and think and

feel for as long as they last. These latter states have clear counter-

parts in animals we don’t view as thinking or acting or valuing in

any full sense of the terms.

It would be nice if we could persuade ourselves the two groups of

sciences had seized hold of a single underlying subject matter by two

different sets of conceptual handles, in something of the way students

of weather and students of climate have seized hold of a single underly-

ing subject matter—the atmosphere and its changes—by different but

similarly named sets of handles. The moral sciences are rich in candi-

date explanations but poor in promising investigative techniques; so

far, the new affective sciences are rich in techniques but poor in expla-

nations. So far both groups of sciences differentiate what they call emo-

tions by means of an untidy mix of different criteria, none of which

enjoys any obvious priority over the others. Each group of sciences

might look to the other for new and more perspicuous ways of arrang-

ing its own materials. Yet there are formidable obstacles to viewing

emotions and their study in this hopeful light.

720 DAVID HILLS

Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVol. LXXVI No. 3, May 2008� 2008 International Phenomenological Society

Jesse Prinz’s account of fear and its kindred is first and foremost an

account of fright and its kindred. His primary topic is emotion in the

affective science sense, states of arousal, what he calls state emotions as

opposed to attitude emotions. Yet he goes on to offer an account of

what it is to be durably afraid of something, framed in terms of what it

is to experience the likes of fright.

2. Prinz holds that state emotions are valenced embodied appraisals of

objects.

State emotions are invariably valenced, positive or negative, in that

the existence of such a state always involves some kind of command to

the subject that certain internal conditions for the state’s continued

existence be maintained (in the positive case) or changed (in the nega-

tive case). This is Prinz’s preferred gloss on the notion of pleasurability

or unpleasurability, inherent desirability or inherent undesirability, that

routinely figures in affective science accounts of emotional arousal.

State emotions are appraisals in that they constitute sizings-up of

their objects in terms of the bearing these objects look to have on the

subject’s own prospects (her prospective well being, her chances of liv-

ing up to her various goals and aspirations, her chances of fulfilling her

various commitments, etc.). Different state emotions offer different

appraisals of their objects. For instance,

State fear [physical fright] involves appraising something as ‘‘an imme-diate, concrete, and overwhelming physical danger’’.

State sadness involves appraising oneself as ‘‘having experienced anirrevocable loss.’’

Something along these lines, anyway—Prinz is noncommittal about

the details. The notion of appraisal itself, and Prinz’s first-stab

accounts of the content of the appraising involved in different particu-

lar state emotions, hail from Richard Lazarus, who calls such apprai-

sal-contents relational themes.

A striking feature of these specimen appraisal contents is their present

tense dynamic character. Prinz seems to think state emotions always size

objects up in terms of how they look to enhance or detract from my

prospects here and now. The account of sadness is especially striking

(and especially questionable) in this regard. Sadness may involve an

appraisal of my own condition as bad, but it needn’t involve an appraisal

of my condition as in the process of changing for the worse. If there’s an

appraisal involved in sadness, it is or at least can be a static appraisal.

I don’t know what led Lazarus to dynamize sadness in the first

place, but I have a suspicion about what leads Prinz to do so. He takes

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 721

it that the most perspicuous way to report a state emotion such as

fright is by some such form of words as:

S is frightened by O.

A sadness report willy-nilly takes the form:

S is saddened by O,

a form of words that’s easily heard as implicating O in a real or appar-

ent worsening of things (from S’s point of view) here and now.

Several things lead Prinz to favor such passive-voice passion reports

as basic. They portray state emotions as conditions of arousal we are

put into by external causal agencies, conditions not of our own mak-

ing, conditions in relation to which we are passive. They thus avoid

portraying state emotions as judgments we deliberately reach or tempo-

rary attitudes we self-consciously adopt. They portray the object of a

state emotion as the cause (or the right member of a set of collaborat-

ing causes) of the emotion in question. And unlike various other forms

of words we sometimes resort to in reporting a state emotion —

S fears O;

S is afraid of O;

S is afraid that p;

and the like—such reports don’t suggest that in order to represent O as

having the appraisal status of being threatening, my fright state needs

to involve:

(a) a constituent representing whatever it is about O that S

takes to be threatening;

(b) a constituent representing the proposition that O is threat-

ening; or even, for that matter,

(c) a constituent representing O itself.

Instead, a state emotion can appraise an object O as threatening with-

out containing any representation whatsoever of O itself; the thing my

fright appraises as threatening gets in on the act only as the cause of

my fright. All my fright need contain, all it need be, is a representation

722 DAVID HILLS

of threateningness as such. Something ‘‘simple’’ (the fright O induces in

me) can portray something ‘‘complex’’ (the fact, if it is a fact, that O is

threatening).

Finally, state emotions are embodied, in that:

(a) they are valenced states of various brain systems that are

causally sensitive to and so register various changing states of

the human body;

(b) those bodily changes are such that, once certain kinds of

perceptual learning and calibration have taken place, they’re

causally sensitive to and so register the appraisal-statuses of

objects in our immediate environment; and

(c) we naturally can and naturally do treat state emotions as

veridical and nonveridical perceivings, perceptual detectings, of

the appraisal statuses of objects. To be frightened by an object,

for instance, is to perceive it as threatening thanks to such a

valenced body-monitoring brain state.

3. Three main sets of considerations recommend this account in Prinz’s

eyes.

The first is a set of phenomenological convictions deriving from or

at least powerfully associated with William James. We can’t undergo a

state emotion without experiencing various feelings characteristic of it.

And these characteristic feelings, subjected to a certain kind of scrutiny,

function as sensible representations of ongoing bodily states and

changes. As James put it in a famous passage:

What kind of emotion of fear would be left if the feeling nei-

ther of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither

of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh

nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for

me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no

ebullition of the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilation of

the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous

action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a

placid face? (Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 449-50)

The second is a set of neurobiological findings by Damasio and others.

The distinctive states of arousal involved in and helping to constitute

state emotions involve distinctive activation patterns in parts of the

brain and nervous system independently known to be in the business of

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 723

monitoring and regulating various bodily states. Enduring damage to

these same areas produces enduring deficits in one’s capacity to care

about things, enduring deficits in one’s capacity to sustain the attitudi-

nal emotions crucial to leading the normal life of the kind of rational

animal we take ourselves to be.

The third is a set of arguments by Zajonc, to the effect that certain

special cases of state emotions such as fright are thoughtless, involving

no higher cognitive states either as ingredients or as immediate causal

antecedents.

4. Like Damasio before him, Prinz takes the different basic forms of

emotional arousal to be different patterns of activity in particular iden-

tifiable brain structures, patterns we are now able to watch in real time

as they unfold. Prinz’s arguments on this point involve speculative par-

allels between the neurophysiological architecture of vision and the

neurophysiological architecture of emotion. He appears to think state

emotions may simply be particular identifiable states of identifiable

brain structures, where he and his collaborators are on the verge of

actually making the relevant identifications. Heady stuff, this. I’m pro-

fessionally ill-placed to comment on most of it, yet there’s a diffuse

methodological worry that haunts me as I read it. Damasio and Prinz

move very quickly from data about what’s implicated in such and such

a task to conclusions about what’s dedicated to such and such a task,

and from there to conclusions about how much of the brain is actually

involved in performing the task in question. Theoretical parsimony is an

admirable thing, but it can’t do the work of evidence.

5. If state emotions like fright are embodied appraisals, arousal

states wherein we perceptually detect an object’s status as a threat (or

whatever) by means of its apparent effects on our own bodily states,

what should we make of attitudinal emotions such as being durably

afraid of something or being durably afraid that something is the case?

At first Prinz tells us the relation of an attitudinal emotion (such as

being durably angry) to the corresponding state emotion (such as being

frightened) is simply that of a standing pure disposition to its tempo-

rary occurrent manifestation—the relation of being fragile to actually

breaking.

One problem with this, as he eventually acknowledges, is that even if

state emotions can dispense with constituents serving to represent

objects, properties, propositional contents, etc., attitudinal emotions

can’t, since they must continue to possess recoverable objects, proposi-

tional contents, etc. in the absence of the objects they serve to appraise.

In chapter 8 he suggests that an attitudinal emotion of being afraid

that p might arise from a contentless disposition to be afraid (just plain

afraid, apparently) in combination with an independently formed repre-

724 DAVID HILLS

sentation of the proposition that p thanks to some mysterious process

of ‘‘perceptual binding,’’ involving the synchronized firing of different

neural populations. I find it difficult to make sense of this suggestion.

In fact, even state emotions must provide in some manner for the

explicit internal representation of their own objects. There needs to be

some intrinsic feature of a well-designed fright state by means of which

it represents some particular object hereabouts as threatening. Other-

wise we might flee the watering hole when what we really need to be

fleeing is the lion we encountered there.

A more fundamental objection awaits us, regardless of how we

understand the intentionality of state emotions. My being durably

afraid of O has causal and rationalizing powers of its own, powers it

exercises even when it isn’t being manifested in an ‘‘occurrent’’ state of

being frightened by O—powers it perfectly well could exercise even if it

were never so manifested. Indeed, we sometimes become aware of our

durable fears without ever viscerally feeling them; we simply witness

their causal and rationalizing powers at work in our lives and perform

an inference to the best explanation. This couldn’t happen if durable

fear were a pure disposition, a mere proneness to become frightened

under appropriate circumstances. My dreading, being durably afraid of,

an upcoming event may motivate me to misremember the event’s date,

pushing it further into the future. Discovering that I’ve misremembered

its date may be what informs me that I dread the event itself. When the

event finally arrives, I may find it completely unfrightening. None of

this could happen if dreading something were identical with a proneness

to be frightened by it when confronted with it face to face.

6. A tempting line of thought goes as follows. In certain vivid and

gripping and central cases of fright—the snake in the grass, the earth-

quake tremor in the middle of the night—we become aware of some-

thing threatening by becoming aware of our fear of it, and we become

aware of the fear in the first place by feeling it viscerally, in our racing

heart, our sweaty palms, etc. Once stopped in our tracks by our own

visceral feelings, we can go on to search out and identify the particular

real or apparent threat that triggered them in the first place. Zajonc’s

cases of thoughtless emotion can seem like especially pure, especially

fast-acting cases of this effect. What if such cases revealed the nature

and point of fright (and the point of the visceral feelings that fright

deploys) in an especially pure way?

In Prinz himself, this line of thought is reinforced by a sense that if

it weren’t for their usefulness in the perceptual threat-detection system

he supposes fright to be, the arousal states and visceral feelings

involved in fright would be biologically pointless. He doesn’t see why a

complicated set of special brain systems and brain states should have

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 725

evolved to register such bodily changes simply in order to represent

‘‘the vicissitudes of vasculature’’ as such. Instead they must have

evolved as they did in order that, once the body is appropriately cali-

brated, they might alert us to threatening things in a rapid, vivid, per-

ceptual manner.

But the body-monitoring systems Damasio outlines have work to do

that is distinct from, as urgent as, and more incessant than any work

they do in representing external things as threatening. I have in mind

their role in various forms of ongoing and biologically urgent homeo-

static physiological regulation. There’s good evolutionary reason why

certain visceral bodily states—a racing heart, shortness of breath—

should make themselves reliably felt, quite apart from any role they

may play in the genesis and constitution of state emotions such as

fright. A racing heart and shortness of breath are states that become

dangerous or even fatal if they last too long; and they are often exacer-

bated or relieved by changes we voluntarily make in our ongoing vol-

untary activity. So one good evolutionary reason for letting a racing

heart or shortness of breath make themselves felt via negatively

valenced, inherently distressing feelings is to induce us to modulate the

manner in which we exert ourselves or the manner in which we breathe

so as to keep such states from lasting too long—unless, of course,

something of overriding importance is at stake in letting them persist.

Indeed, many of the bodily changes announced to a body’s owner

by the visceral sensations characteristic of fright have another job to

do vis-a-vis threatening things themselves, one which is at least as urgent

as that of signaling the threat’s existence to the body’s owner. This is the

job of initiating the forms of evasive action called for by the most

urgent, recurrent, historically important kinds of threat confronted by

our ancestors as the relevant body-monitoring systems evolved in the

first place. There is a good evolutionary reason why such evasion-initi-

ating bodily changes should make themselves felt, quite apart from any

role they may play in detecting threatening objects. For even when the

changes themselves are largely involuntary, they stand in need of ongo-

ing voluntary modulation if they are to take appropriate forms under

specific concrete circumstances.

The feeling components of fright aren’t there simply to inform us

about threatening objects; they have other, perhaps more urgent kinds

of informative work to perform. For this very reason, the states of arou-

sal characteristic of fright aren’t detectors we can freely recalibrate so as

to render them sensitive to new and different states of our environment.

7. These considerations weaken Prinz’s for the embodied appraisal

view of state emotions. Now I’d like to venture a direct argument

against it.

726 DAVID HILLS

I agree with Prinz about this much: In fright, we represent things as

threatening in a special way, thanks in no small part to bodily changes

these things produce in us and to our feelings of these bodily changes;

this special way of representing things as threatening prepares us in

special and important ways to act on the threats posed to us by threat-

ening things. But does the mode of representing here really amount to

a quasi-perceptual detection of the threatening as such?

(a) We humans are such that an object can seldom send us into

the arousal state characteristic of fright unless we already

regard this very object (or this very kind of object) as threaten-

ing, already judge this very object (or this very kind of object)

to be threatening, as a result of activities that count as cognitive

by any reasonable standard. Zajonc-like cases are the exception,

not the rule, in the lives of rational creatures like ourselves.

(b) The rare exceptions, cases where we are or can be fright-

ened by a thing we haven’t already judged to be threatening,

are cases where the links between perception and arousal (on

the one hand) and arousal and appropriate action tendency

(on the other) are so tight and so insulated from rational eval-

uative activity in the here and now as to make the claim that

how we behave toward the object here and now depends on

how the object is appraised here and now rather suspect.

(c) In the general run of cases, where a prior cognitive judg-

ment of threateningness forms an essential part of what pro-

duces and sustains the arousal state, the combination of prior

appraisal of the object plus close-at-hand perception of the

appraised object is pretty much all that it takes to get the arou-

sal state characteristic of fright.

In view of (a) and (b), the arousal state characteristic of fright can’t in

general have the function of getting us humans to appraise particular

things (or particular kinds of thing) as threatening for the first time. In

view of (c), the arousal state characteristic of fright can’t in general

have the function in us humans of confirming our antecedent tentative

appraisals of particular things (or kinds of thing) as threatening.

But on any reasonable view of what constitutes a representational

state as perceptual, a perceptual state representing a thing as F is one

with the function of getting us to attribute Fness to that thing for the

first time, confirming us in our prior attributions of Fness to that thing,

or both.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 727

So on any reasonable view of what constitutes a representational

state as perceptual, the arousal state characteristic of fright isn’t a per-

ceptual state representing its object as threatening—in us humans, at

any rate.

It may clarify the situation to reflect that the most important proper

objects of human fright are richly particularized and become effective

objects of fright as we learn

(a) why these things (and kinds) are threatening in the first

place, and

(b) how to recognize these things (and kinds) when they’re

close enough to constitute a real and present danger.

Arguably we can and do retune our bodies and body-monitoring sys-

tems to be sensitive to these particular things and kinds as part of our

efforts to prepare ourselves to act appropriately when we re-encounter

them. But we can’t and don’t retune our bodies and body monitoring

systems to be sensitive to the presence of whatever it is about particular

things (or things of a particular kind) that renders them threatening in

the first place. In general, that isn’t something to which our bodies can

be rendered sensitive, for it isn’t something to which our senses can be

rendered sensitive. In the large and central area where response to

threat really does depend on appraisal, appraisal itself is and is bound

to remain a job for higher cognitive processes, no matter how much

recognitional work gets done by visceral feelings. In the cases that mat-

ter the most for creatures like us, a good cold sweat is and is bound to

remain the fruit of honest cognitive toil.

728 DAVID HILLS