Morton, Adam

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makes ethical decision possible, which strikes me as verifiably false.) This is espe-cially unfortunate because recent work on responsibility has produced severalstrong alternatives to the authorship account. Raffoul’s continental story, properlydeveloped, can serve as a valuable interlocutor in those debates. His book maythus provide an incipient, if flawed, impetus in this direction.ROMAN ALTSHULERSUNY Stony BrookEmotional Truth. BY RONALD DE SOUSA. (Oxford UP, 2011. Pp. xviii + 391. Price£38.00.)This book is a collection of facts and arguments about emotion as a feature ofour thinking and planning lives. Behind it I can make out a big picture aboutsuccessful thinking, including appropriate feeling as a special case. In this reviewrather than describe all the facts and arguments I shall try to discuss the big pic-ture which, I should say clearly, de Sousa never states in the terms I am using.So what follows puts things in a broader and cruder way than he does. As I readde Sousa, his central aim is to explain and defend a view about the fulfilled orauthentic life, and to do so in terms of a linked set of comparisons between emo-tions and beliefs. The working out of this aim is tangled and often bewildering,as well as being clever and often very stimulating. The most ambitious idea,though, is just the thought that such a project is possible, that by asking what theanalogues for emotion of truth, knowledge, and rationality are we can get somehold on, well, the meaning of life. Very few will be converted to wholeheartedacceptance of the idea by this book, and some will dismiss it out of hand. But agood proportion of readers should be struck by a grudging admission: there’ssomething important here.The picture of authentic life that is a background to much of the action is this.People vary in their deep emotional natures, let’s say their emotional signatures,so it depends on a person’s particular signature which emotions can be madecentral for her, determining the appropriateness of other states of all kind in aHumean passion-first way. The result can be pictured as like the variegated butthematically unified Jackson Pollock paintings de Sousa alludes to near the end ofthe book. Embracing these emotions and the themes that they engage is thenwhat it is for that person to be true to herself. It is a kind of success that is differ-ent from contentment or getting what you want. Of course this is a metaphoricaluse of ‘true’, but for all that it is the sort of thing people might naturally say.They might also say that the emotion rather than the person was true, unfaked,authentic, for that person in the context of what else she was feeling and doing.Now see this through a more sedate take on truth and emotion. A sudden fearof someone can lead to a true belief that the person is dangerous. If the fear isoperating as fear should, this might be knowledge. There might be no other waythat person in those circumstances could have come to know of the danger. Soemotions can lead to true beliefs, and their proper functioning can be part ofgood truth-directed thinking. An emotion can also be part of the realisation of a220 BOOK REVIEWS© 2011 The Authors The Philosophical Quarterly © 2011 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterlydesire, of its content coming to be true. You want to express some home truthsto an acquaintance, but cannot do it until you are angry enough with him. Oryou feel generous to someone and that motivates a desire to ease her job prob-lem, which you are in a position to do. In these cases there is a systematic con-nection between an emotion and a state of affairs, which mirrors the connectionbetween a state of affairs and a belief that it makes true, or between a state ofaffairs and a desire which aims at bringing it about (and thus aims at the truth ofa corresponding belief). de Sousa is clear and helpful on all this. For him observa-tions such as these offer a tantalising hint of a way of approaching the content ofthe previous paragraph with some analytical rigour. Central is the Humean prin-ciple that given the right emotions a person will think in ways that lead to knowl-edge and accomplishment. What makes them the right emotions is that theyenable both successful belief and successful action.There are two complications, that could be helpful or could be obstacles. Thefirst is that emotions have both the belief-type direction of fit, where state fitsworld, and the desire-type fit, where world fits state. Often they seem to haveboth. In this they are like thinking; they fit the two fits together. The other is thattruth is not knowledge, of course, nor is the satisfaction of a desire the same asthe person’s accomplishing the desired thing’s coming to pass. With belief, besidestruth we have knowledge and justification and rational procedure, with no simpleconnection between them. So when an emotion is well-tuned to the agent’s situa-tion, giving her the information she needs in order to produce the effects that fither larger plans, should we see it as having something analogous to truth, or toknowledge and accomplishment, or to something in the category of reasonable-ness? de Sousa wants to call it truth. But he also emphasises the coherence aspectof the suitability of states: in particular how the choice of emotion depends onwhat else a person believes, wants, and feels. (And also, we might add, her man-ner of thinking and her virtues and failings). This seems more like reasonableness.Epistemologists often stumble on the simple fact of trivial and pointless knowl-edge. Knowing how many peanuts you have eaten on Tuesdays. There are alsostupidly acquired true beliefs, and irrationally held true beliefs. Sometimes it istop quality thinking but still a waste of time. In recent years a number of episte-mologists have wrestled with pointlessness and considered its implications. Theaim of inquiry cannot just be true belief, and it cannot just be knowledge. Per-haps it is understanding; but there is stupid understanding too, as when youunderstand that the number of peanuts you have eaten on Tuesdays is more thanthree and less than the number of electrons in the universe. So worthwhile orvaluable inquiry is not the same as successful inquiry. This suggests that worth-while thinking in general, including the development and play of emotions, is notdefined just by intrinsic content-focused criteria, analogous to truth or knowledgefor beliefs, but also by the totality of a person’s aims: the reasonableness dimen-sion rather than the knowledge dimension.These facts are friendly to de Sousa in one way. They support his holismabout emotion. They are unfriendly in another way. They suggest that theanalogy is not to truth-knowledge-understanding but to reasonableness-rational-BOOK REVIEWS 221© 2011 The Authors The Philosophical Quarterly © 2011 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterlyity-justification. No doubt these have fundamental connections, but they are par-ticularly hard to make out in this moment of philosophy. In ancient pre-Gettierdays there were internalists who thought that the addition of truth magics justi-fied belief into knowledge (and presumably that the addition of satisfaction magicsreasonable motivation into accomplishment). Sometimes de Sousa seems nostalgicfor such a position. Now many of us are externalists who think that justfied beliefsare those that result from processes that in specific ways tend to produce truths.(So by analogy reasonable desires are those that tend to initiate successful actions?Some would find that hard to swallow). This would put factors that enable suc-cess into the truth-like category. And de Sousa is generally on this side, so wemight read him as trying for an externalist account of emotion. There is a tensionhere with the central role of coherence. It is just unclear what the connectionbetween coherence and truth or success is. It is far from clear that researcherswho fit everything into one mega-consistent pattern end up with more frequenttrue beliefs than those that tackle one problem at a time. It probably depends onthe environment - the type of complexity of the world - and their individual epi-stemic emotions. Renouncing coherence brings worries in the case of failure,though. The well-thought-out and satisfying revolutionary rage that structures anunsuccessful life-long revolt will miss this kind of truth, even if the life it shapes isintuitively authentic. So will the deeply held devotion to a non-existent god. (Thisworry is at least partly dealt with by an aspect I have ignored: states are endowedwith formal objects, so that a failed revolutionary sentiment can be successfullydirected at the good).de Sousa does want both a generally success-oriented picture and an emphasison coherence. One reason is that it makes lives into unified items, not just onedamn event after another, where the value of any episode depends on how it fitswith what surrounds it. So it makes a big difference whether the suggestion thatindividual people have emotional signatures is correct. de Sousa cites some inter-esting but possibly flaky research by Magai and Haviland-Jones (pp. 84--6) pin-ning down characteristic patterns in different people’s reactions to situations ofimportance. Without something like this idea it would be hard to live up to theneo-Humean principle that emotional coherence drives rationality, though we donot have to assume that different human beings vary significantly. It helps herethat de Sousa takes a wide range of states to be emotions, presumably includingfundamental attitudes along the lines of Ratcliffe’s feelings of being. I’d like tohave seen more discussion of the possibilities here.I have focused on a central strand in the book, ignorning many subsidiariesand digressions. Many of these are important. I have ignored interesting discus-sions of emotions and values, of formal objects of emotion, and of emotionalismin moral theory. I am particularly taken with the suggestion that a narrow con-strual of what falls under morality restricts the ability of politicians to get on highhorses (p. 148). There are many such delights, and I recommend the book to any-one with time, patience, or the ability to dip and skim. There’s a lot here.ADAM MORTONUniversity of British Columbia222 BOOK REVIEWS© 2011 The Authors The Philosophical Quarterly © 2011 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly

Emotional Truth. By Ronald de Sousa. (Oxford UP, 2011. Pp. xviii + 391. Price £38.00.)

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