Lacewing, Michael

English

Heythrop College Publications

David Pugmire, Rediscovering Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 
1998), pp. 140, £14.95. (Ratio XIII, Sept 2000, 287-92) 
 
 
In philosophy, the idea that emotions may be treated as types of thought, 
judgemental or non-judgemental, has become almost an orthodoxy . . . . The 
pervading aim of the present work is the restoration of emotional affect, or 
feeling, as a free-standing, working concept in understanding emotion. (3-4) 
 
In its own terms, this book must be regarded as a success and an important 
contribution to our philosophical understanding of emotion. If you wish to defend a 
(purely) cognitive theory of emotion, it is against the arguments of this book that you 
will need to defend yourself. I say a ‘(purely) cognitive theory’ because Pugmire does 
not intend to leave the Church of Cognition, only to nail to its door a list of theses 
indicting the inadequacy of its conception of emotion. The Church currently has two 
broad doctrinal camps: ‘propositional’ (a.k.a. ‘judgementalist’) theories and 
‘construal’ theories. Both are raked over the coals for attempts to explain emotional 
feeling in terms of cognition. Pugmire’s anti-reductionism is not new, as he 
acknowledges (one can find it perhaps most notably in Michael Stocker’s work), but 
he produces a powerful and original defence in its favour. 
 That emotions involve cognition is not at issue. Nor is it at issue whether 
emotions are felt in a way that distinguishes them from cognition more generally. 
Clearly, there are beliefs held and judgements made unemotionally. Likewise, there 
are construals – ways of seeing the world – that are not evocative of feeling; I can 
perceive a snake to be dangerous without feeling afraid. (These issues are dealt with 
in Chapters 1–3.) The question is what feeling an emotion consists in (Chapters 4 & 
5). Cognitive theories maintain that ‘emotional feelings are themselves thoughts, 
emotive thoughts, transfigured in the right way’ (63). Central to the cognitive defence 
is the observation that the thoughts in question are evaluative. The cognitivist claim is 
that evaluative thoughts, when the evaluation is made from the first-person 
perspective, can impact on the subject in such a way as to be felt. The difficulty this 
analysis faces is specifying what is needed for the thought to constitute feeling, and it 
is this difficulty Pugmire exploits. But the real strength of his account is to back this 
up with an alternative explanation for the connection between evaluation and feeling. 
I shall look at his negative and positive arguments in turn. 
 Although some of his arguments against the propositional theory are not new, 
two things are noteworthy in Pugmire’s discussion: first, the clarity and depth with 
which he explores the issues; second, the novel emphasis he places on the difficulties 
created by the propositional form of the judgement or belief. Attempting to specify 
the exact thought(s) of an emotion, one which can with justice be said to capture the 
content of the emotion, can prove ‘a disarming challenge, even in simple and familiar 
cases’ (70). This will be especially so if the specification is intended (a) to distinguish 
the thought as emotional; and (b) to distinguish it as the particular emotion that it is. 
To say that my disgust at the slug in the kitchen is constituted by thoughts of its slimy 
and polluting nature is to underdescribe it, for I am not disgusted when confronted 
with an oil spill, which is equally slimy and polluting. But it is hard to say what 
further thoughts about the slug are involved in my disgust. This difficulty is 
exacerbated when we consider a second objection, that of circularity: ‘thoughts that 
succeed in pinpointing the evocative aspects of a thing tend to do so simply by 
referring to their power to evoke the feeling in question’ (ibid.). The terms likely to 
appear in such thoughts, such as ‘scary’, ‘disgusting’, ‘adorable’, derive their meaning 
from the feelings they evoke. 
 We cannot hope to overcome these difficulties by supplementing the 
evaluative judgement with the satisfaction or frustration of a desire (a suggestion 
made by Robert Gordon). Pugmire rightly comments that desires, as motivational 
states, may be ‘palpable’ but, unlike emotional feeling, need not be. If they are felt, 
the nature and intensity of this feeling is what needs explanation, so the mere having 
of the desire is insufficient to explain the feeling. 
 Although the construal theory fares better against the first objection to the 
propositional theory, as it need not claim that the ‘aspectual shape’ of the situation is 
formulatable in propositional terms, it still faces the second. The construal is 
presumably supposed to make sense of the emotion, to provide it with intelligible 
content (30). But in many cases, such as phobias, it will fail to do this. Take a case of 
agoraphobia: Either such specification of the construal as we can give does not 
motivate the emotion in those not already particularly susceptible to it (e.g. ‘the 
vastness of open spaces’) or it already expresses the emotion (‘the frightful and 
engulfing nature of vastness which leaves one vulnerable’). A common move is to 
supplement the first, neutral specification by the addition of ‘concern’ in order to 
motivate the emotion. But generic ‘concern’ together with construal still 
underdetermines which emotion is felt, and attempts to specify the sort of ‘concern’ 
involved ‘appeal to the character of different kinds of emotional arousal to understand 
the nature of the concern’ (73). A more promising response is to claim the construal 
does not always provide independent grounds for the emotion, but represents the 
world from the perspective of the emotion. Pugmire believes this is to abandon its 
cognitive nature, but I shall suggest otherwise below. 
 Turning now to his positive argument, we find that Pugmire contends that 
there is a direct link between evaluation and feeling, which is why in attempting to 
characterise the evaluative content of the emotion, we end up appealing – explicitly or 
tacitly – to emotional feeling (as opposed to cognition). He suggests that emotional 
feelings are sui generis ways things matter; they do not so much register value as 
confer value on their objects, on the basis that the object arouses the feeling (58). The 
feeling is a ‘constructive valuation’. This is why ‘the valuations emotions embody 
may be conveyed only by those parts of our critical vocabulary that are expressive of 
feeling’ (60). Cognition can play a role in emotional evaluation, though Pugmire later 
indicates that the ‘constructive’ model is widespread among the emotions, as it will be 
uncommon to find a ‘plausible informing conceptualisation’ that conveys the 
evaluative content of the emotion (103). (This is not to suggest that all value is a 
construct from feelings. We can make evaluations that are independent of how the 
object makes us feel.)  
 This additional, non-cognitive source of evaluation means that ‘emotions can 
fail to be a function of the cognitions appropriate to them’ (59). At this point, Pugmire 
makes the familiar observation that cognition of the object is only one possible cause 
of emotional feelings about it. Others include associations with the object, what it 
symbolises, or the chemical-physiological state of the person. These can cause the 
feeling and its evaluation of the object directly.  
 So how are we to understand the relationship between emotional feelings and 
cognition? Pugmire remarks 
 
A feeling can be not only a reaction to how things are perceived . . . it can also be 
a way of taking account of this . . . . In fact, the terms in which things are 
apprehended seems integral to at least many feelings . . . [which] presuppose a 
background of expectations and values. (60) 
 
This suggests a close and two-way link between cognition and feeling, but cannot be 
considered a satisfactory analysis as it stands. When Pugmire returns to the question 
at the end of Chapter 7, the discussion is again brief and unsatisfactory. To make 
generalisations about the relation between cognition (either construal or judgement) 
and feeling in emotion is unwise, he claims, but emotions (a) will typically 
incorporate both and (b) should not be thought of as mere clusters of these elements. 
 Given these remarks, one particularly puzzling issue, unfortunately never 
addressed, is the relation between cognitive valuing and constructive valuing. A 
feeling can be a way of ‘taking account of how things are perceived’, and so of 
registering the value an object has, or it can ‘fail to present a state of affairs outside 
itself’ (59), and simply confer value on its object. We have an account of the latter, 
but what is involved in the former? Furthermore, what determines whether a feeling is 
registering or conferring value? How can we tell subjectively? Isn’t it likely that 
symbolism and psychological association will often play some role in our emotional 
responses (as Freud, for one, thought)? Does this make all emotional valuing 
conferring? Are the two types of valuing mutually exclusive, or can they operate 
together within a single emotion? Or can an emotional feeling be both a response to 
certain beliefs and construals and simultaneously go beyond them in ways which fail 
to represent the world? The lack of discussion of these issues means we are not shown 
how an emotion is a unitary phenomenon. 
 Nevertheless, Pugmire’s discussion has presented a strong challenge to 
traditional cognitive theories, for the evaluations involved in emotion can often only 
be expressed in emotive vocabulary. An important tool in this vocabulary is metaphor 
and Chapter 7 is an enlightening exploration of the links between metaphor and 
feeling. It defends the thesis that the sense of a metaphor is frequently only fully 
available from the point of view of feeling. Pugmire’s purpose here is to show how 
metaphor can depict feeling in a way propositions cannot. But I would turn the 
material in this chapter to another use: to suggest that the evaluation embodied in 
feeling need not always be ‘constructive’. Metaphors can be representations of 
properties and objects in the world without thereby becoming formulatable in non-
metaphorical terms. One may need certain experiences to understand the metaphor 
(101), and even if we do not want to say the metaphor is ‘true’, we will say whether it 
is apt or not. So if the perspective of metaphor is often entangled with the perspective 
of feeling, we may claim that feeling registers aspects of the world – evaluative 
aspects – that cannot be expressed in other terms. It is not simply that metaphor best 
describes feeling, but that metaphor best describes the world from the perspective of 
feeling. It is the best representation of the emotion’s construal we can give; and 
although this construal may often be ‘constructive valuing’, a ‘gilding’ of the world, 
is it impossible that an emotional (and so metaphorical) perspective is sometimes the 
most revealing, the most ‘truthful’ perspective to take? It is a common assumption of 
much work in philosophy of the emotions that that which cannot be expressed in 
‘neutral’ propositional language cannot be part of reality. I have yet to hear a 
persuasive argument to this effect. Why should representation, in certain 
circumstances, not require a different, affective mode of consciousness and its content 
require an affective mode of expression? It is only the old dualism between reason 
and emotion, now strongly rejected, that leads us to think feeling itself cannot be 
genuinely representational. 
 I have not yet mentioned Chapters 6 or 8. The former is a very good 
discussion of the relation between feeling and knowledge – either of one’s own 
feelings or those of another. Chapter 8 discusses ‘factitious emotions’, emotions that 
fail to be real examples of the emotions they purport to be because their origins are 
suspect (111). It is full of insights on self-deception and the way factitious emotions 
misrepresent our true values. It ends with a plea for spontaneity and self-honesty: 
‘true emotion demands a capacity for constantly renewable openness to the world and 
for acceptance of emotion even when it pulls against the diktat of cherished 
prescription’ (131). Given the topics of the two chapters, it is a shame that Pugmire 
does not discuss unconscious emotions. 
 This book is written with clarity, insight and, appropriately, a good deal of 
feeling, which makes it both extremely readable and a highly significant contribution 
to our understanding of the nature of emotion. 
 
Michael Lacewing 
University of Reading 
Reading, England. 
 
m.k.lacewing@reading.ac.uk 


Rediscovering Emotions. D. Pugmire

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