Is Emotion a Form of Perception?

Theories of emotions traditionally divide into two categories. According to some researchers, emotions are or essentially involve evaluative thoughts or judgments. These are called cognitive theories. According to other researchers, an emotion can occur without any thought. These are called non-cognitive theories. Some defenders of non-cognitive theories argue that emotions are action tendencies, others say they are feelings, and still others say they are affect programs, which encompass a range of internal and external events. One of the most celebrated non-cognitive theories owes, independently, to William James and Carl Lange. According to them, emotions are perceptions of patterned changes in the body. I think the perceptual theory of emotions is basically correct, but it needs to be updated. In this discussion, I will offer a summary and defence.

The question I am addressing bears on the question of modularity. Within cognitive science, there is a widespread view that perceptual systems are modular. If this is right, then showing that emotion is a form of perception requires showing that emotion is a modular process, and showing that emotion is modular could contribute to showing that emotion is a form of perception (assuming that not all mental capacities are underwritten by modular systems). Therefore, modularity will figure centrally in the discussion that follows, as it did in an earlier treatment of this topic (Prinz 2004). There is, however, a change in how I will approach this topic here. I have come to believe that perception is not, in fact, modular as that term is defined by Fodor (1983) in his classic treatment of the topic. Perceptual systems bear features in common with Fodor's modules, but Fodor's approach is, in my view, mistaken (Prinz 2006). Here I will introduce the idea of quasi-modules, which bear some things in common with Fodor's modules, and I will argue that emotions are quasi-modular. This thesis will help secure the parallel between emotion and perception.

I. What Is Perception?

To determine whether emotion is a form of perception, it would be handy to have a working definition of perception. I am not going to offer such a definition, however. Offering conceptual analyses of psychological terms is methodologically unscrupulous. It presupposes, quite implausibly, that our ordinary folk psychological terms have good definitions. There are some paradigm cases of perception, but what these have in common must be determined by careful observation and theory construction, not armchair lexicography. Still, as a starting place, we can reflect on some of the features that paradigm perceptions have in common. If we consider visual, auditory, and olfactory states, for example, we find the following characteristic features:

First, perception takes place in sensory systems. Sensory systems are systems that convert physical magnitudes into mental representations. Each sensory system has dedicated transducers that are stimulated by non-mental features of the world, and output mental representations in a modality- specific code.

Second, perception involves the generation of internal representations, and these typically represent the mind-external stimuli. Sometimes the senses represent proximal stimuli (i.e., perturbations of our sensory transducers), but they can also represent more distal stimuli (e.g., external objects) or relational properties (e.g., secondary qualities, or powers that external objects have to cause mental states in us). It is important to emphasize that sensory systems may have to do a fair amount of processing before representations of complex distal objects can be generated. When you see a giraffe, for example, the eyes first convert light reflected from the surface of the giraffe into a vast assembly of edge representations and colour patches. These are then bound together and organized into a representation of the giraffe's contours. Those contours are used to extract perceptual invariants that remain constant across various viewing positions and these are matched against stored templates in visual memory. Through this process, the visual system ends up generating a giraffe representation. It generates that representation by first representing something else: patterns of light. Giraffes are not identical to their appearances, but we detect them through their appearances. Objects are not directly given to...