Ronald de Sousa

I—Ronald de Sousa

Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like states, by contrast, are digital representations. I argue that the gravest problem—objectivity—is not insurmountable.

Twelve Varieties of Subjectivity: Dividing in Hopes of Conquest

Subjectivity is a theme common to many of those philosophers eager to deflate the ambitions of cognitive science. The claim is that persons differ from all other things in that they cannot be exhaustively described in the third person. Any attempt to do so will fail to capture something about every human being that is essentially subjective. This expression covers many things, and the word sounds all the more impressive for the fact that the things it purportedly designates are lumped into a very mixed bag. When lumped together as if they constituted one hugely complex problem, they tend to induce a sense of hopelessness. Which is exactly what some of the champions of subjectivity count on to preserve its mystery and irreducibility.

I. Self‐deception

Everyone is guilty of self-deception especially in the occasion where we don’t end up getting what we wanted. We tend to rationalize ourselves and tell ourselves that what we instead got is better than what we originally wanted anyway and then we learn to settle. Sometimes it can be as obvious and direct as this, but there are also times when we do it to ourselves unknowingly and without even being aware of it.

Comment: Language and Dimensionality in Appraisal Theory

The proliferation of dimensions of appraisal is both welcome and worrying. The preoccupation with sorting out causes may be somewhat otiose. And the ubiquity of emotions in levels of processing raises intriguing problems about the role of language in identifying and triggering emotions and appraisals.The proliferation of dimensions of appraisal is both welcome and worrying. The preoccupation with sorting out causes may be somewhat otiose. And the ubiquity of emotions in levels of processing raises intriguing problems about the role of language in identifying and triggering emotions and appraisals.

Here’s How I Feel: Don’t Trust Your Feelings!

It is a truism that most of what we do is governed by our emotions – providing “emotions” and “governed” are taken broadly enough. Bayesian calculus describes how choices derive from preferences and subjective probabilities; both are influenced, if not determined by emotions. But there are many reasons, both empirical and theoretical, for thinking that our emotions are often poor guides to risk. This fact has been richly exploited by advocates of “organic” agriculture (which would likely result in mass starvation or in the eradication of the earth’s forests if universally pursued) and by opponents of nuclear energy (which has caused far less actual harm than coal). However, attempts to correct emotional estimates of risk in the light of more objective probabilities and rational expectations will be futile, unless the corrections are framed in terms liable to affect hearers’ emotions in appropriate ways. These considerations raise two sorts of questions: What methods are appropriate for identifying those areas for which emotions do and do not constitute appropriate appraisals of risk? And are there ethical and non-deceptive ways in which people’s emotional stances can be appropriately corrected?

The sociology of sociobiology

Abstract This paper turns the tables on the criticisms of sociobiology that stem from a sociological perspective; many of those criticisms lack cogency and coherence in such measure as to demand, in their turn, a psycho‐sociological explanation rather than a rational justification. This thesis, after a brief exposition of the main ideas of sociobiology, is argued in terms of four of the most prominent complaints made against it. Far from embodying tired prejudices about the psychological and sociological implications of biology, sociobiology actually reverses a number of naive assumptions about the consequences of natural selection. I surmise that what really provokes the critics of sociobiology is a certain philosophical relevance of sociobiology both in the broad sense (the application of natural selection principles to behaviour) and in the narrow sense (the insistence on the centrality of certain mechanisms, such as gene selection). In both cases, taking biology seriously affects our philosophical vis...

The Rationality of Emotion.

In this urbane and witty book, Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists. He argues that emotions are a kind of perception, that their roots in the paradigm scenarios in which they are learned give them an essentially dramatic structure, and that they have a crucial role to-play in rational beliefs, desires, and decisions by breaking the deadlocks of pure reason.The books twelve chapters take up the following topics: alternative models of mind and emotion; the relation between evolutionary, physiological, and social factors in emotions; a taxonomy of objects of emotions; assessments of emotions for correctness and rationality; the regulation by emotions of logical and practical reasoning; emotion and time; the mechanism of emotional self-deception; the ethics of laughter; and the roles of emotions in the conduct of life. There is also an illustrative interlude, in the form of a lively dialogue about the ideology of love, jealousy, and sexual exclusiveness.Ronald de Sousa teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto. A Bradford Book.

Can Antimoralism Avoid Moralizing? Reflections on the Relation of Science to Ethics

To moralize is to claim to be entitled to impose normative moral standards on persons who either have not already endorsed them, or having endorsed them, fail to meet them. Antimoralism refers to the view that we should reject the hegemony of morality: contrary to what is assumed by most moral philosophers, we are not required to rank moral considerations above all others when we make decisions. On this view, the legitimate sphere of morality ought to be strictly constrained. The word ‘ought’, in the last sentence, signals a potential incoherence: for is this not itself a normative statement, which although it belongs strictly speaking to metaethics rather than morality, could be charged with the sin of moralizing? The argument of this paper begins by sketching reasons for thinking that existing attempts to find a foundation of morality all fail. In the spirit of Humean skepticism and Nietzschean genealogy, recent work in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience suggests that morality is not all of a piece, but arises from clusters of emotional dispositions that order themselves into relatively distinct domains. The avoidance of harm, justice and liberty are part of the liberal conception of ethics, which excludes three other domains – purity, community-loyalty and hierarchy- authority – that are central to traditional and conservative morality. Liberal ideology therefore seems guilty of just the sort of moralizing it deplores in traditional morality. I conclude by sketching some ways in which it can evade this charge.

Emergence and Empathy

The topic of empathy has recently received a good deal of attention, both for the questions it raises about its mechanisms and for the role it might play in motivating moral behaviour. The present chapter addresses both of these questions in the light of considerations about how shared experiences emerge from emotional interactions between individuals. It comprises three parts. I begin with the more general issue of the reducibility of collective emotions to individual emotions or other, sub-emotional, individual states. I do this by briefly situating the discussion in the context of two notions that have been somewhat contentious in philosophy during the last few decades: externalism, and emergence. In the second part, I narrow my focus to empathy, and discuss some speculations about its mechanism. In a third and concluding section, I draw on both the preceding discussion as well as some further considerations to buttress sceptical doubts about the importance of empathy for morality.

A Third Front in Philosophy

In a colloquium on “lyric philosophy,” this contribution records the efforts of an analytic philosopher to come to grips with questions that Jan Zwicky, who is both a fine poet and a subtle philosopher, has raised about anglophone analytic philosophy. The essay situates Zwicky between the analytic and Continental traditions in philosophy: like the best analytic philosophers, it is argued, she is enamored of clarity, but, like what is best in the Continental tradition, she demands of philosophy a deeper sense of meaning than philosophical analysts tend to do. It is from this unusual position that Zwicky is said to challenge the dogmas of the analytic tradition. Notable among those treated in this article are the belief that attributing literal meaning to anything but linguistic items is futile, belief in the possibility of distinguishing literal from metaphorical meaning, belief in the supremacy of argument over aphorisms, and belief in the importance of the “reductionist” program, which seeks to understand wholes in terms of their parts.