Cognitio 2011

Abstract:      Are a subset of animal and human emotions justifiably considered to be mental states that are similar and usefully compared?  Here I argue that while the theoretical and empirical challenges that have been advanced by skeptics of (the existence or the comparability of) animal affective consciousness fall short of undermining the possibility or likelihood of similar and comparable animal and human emotions, they should nevertheless be taken seriously in so far as they identify sources of error that might be made in a comparative claim about animal and human emotions.  These sources of error can be roughly classified as fallacious inferences and assumptions that are prone to occur in evolutionary explanations, in interpretations of behavioral and neurological data, and in theoretical comparisons of emotional consciousness and emotional concepts across species.  I address these sources of error by qualifying the kinds of emotions that we can justifiably ascribe to both humans and animals, and by clarifying the nature of the evidence that supports such ascriptions.



     To that end, I propose an evolutionarily informed neurological and behavioral criterion for emotion ascription in both humans and nonhuman animals.  This criterion allows me to advance a theory of affect programs or basic emotional states that is capable of explaining why some kinds of emotional states are widely distributed among different species.  The view I defend is that an animal or human is in a comparable basic emotional state just in case it meets the following two conditions:



     i. The organism has an indirect awareness of a physiological state (including pains, pleasures, and indirectly experienced somatic states that are neurologically simulated) and a direct awareness of an intentional object, and



     ii. The indirect awareness is an awareness of a physiological state not merely as a state of the body, but as a contributory representation of the psychological value that the intentional object has to the organism.



     If the proposed criterion of emotional ascription and the view of basic emotions I defend is correct, then not only is there convincing (though necessarily incomplete) neurological, evolutionary, and behavioral evidence for the presence of similar and comparable kinds of emotions in animals and humans; there are also good philosophical reasons for endorsing formal similarities in the intentional structure and value-laden content of these basic emotional states.