Three Questions about Somatic Representations: A Response to Freedman’s “Akratic Believing”

I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Freedman’s paper on “Akratic Believing.” Often, philosophy of psychiatry offers insights to clarify psychological and psychiatric concepts. Less frequently, it involves a real dialogue between philosophy and psychological science. Dr. Freedman’s account of what is bothersome, rather than just philosophically wrong-headed, about the concept of epistemic akrasia demonstrates that, at least where anxiety is concerned, the a posteriori world may have a great deal to offer theoretical philosophy.

Freedman argues that understanding somatic responses to trauma, or more broadly construed, to anxiety, dissolves the problem of why there seems to be more to the problem of epistemic akrasia than first and second order beliefs simply “coming apart,” which Freedman finds incoherent. Drawing on a feeling of discomfort that she persuasively argues occurs in cases of both practical and epistemic akrasia, Freedman uses her own experience of anxiety to explore why she cannot convince herself of her own safety despite intellectually reasoning about why she ought to believe she is safe. This first-personal case augments examples of epistemic akrasia that Freedman draws from the literature. In each example, anxiety interferes with the agent’s ability to believe what she thinks she ought. Friedman explains this apparent paradox using evidence from the psychological trauma literature, which identifies a host of somatic responses that can result from trauma. Freedman argues that these responses are often experienced as cognitions, although they are actually subcortical, and thus non-cognitive. Freedman concludes that true epistemic akrasia is conceptually impossible. She explains why we experience situations that seem to speak against that impossibility as having doxastic merit or force, when in fact they do not. The conclusion that non-cognitive experiences influence our thoughts and actions, and therefore are not epistemically dismissible, is an important challenge to the personally sterile, prefeminist epistemology of the rationalist tradition.

Freedman’s discussion inspires a number of questions for me, but I use this space to ask the three that I find most compelling. First, I question whether the phenomena Freedman describes as the source of epistemically funny feelings are best characterized as “somatic representations.” Second, I wonder what she thinks they entail for epistemology generally. Third, I challenge Freedman’s claim that one cannot reason with such non-cognitive phenomena, for this is the basic premise of a number of psychotherapies. I address these in turn.

I begin with a terminological concern: I wonder whether Freedman’s term “somatic representation” does the work she needs it to do, because the phenomena of interest may be not be limited to the somatic, and they may not be representations. The psychology literature Freedman cites does not limit post-traumatic responses to the cognitive. Although what interests Freedman are somatic phenomena that seem to the agent to be cognitive, the psychological trauma literature she uses to support her position also addresses non-somatic, subcortical processes in the limbic system that affect behaviors, such as hippocampal or amygdala activation. These non-cognitive relays initiate but do not constitute somatic anxiety responses, leading me to wonder whether Freedman includes them among the phenomena of interest, because they are neither cortical nor somatic. If she is not interested in the non-somatic subcortical events related to anxiety memories, I am curious to hear why not.

Philosophically, I have a hard time conceiving representations as anything but cognitive. Whether representations are ideas, propositions, formulas, drawings, or models, they act as cognitive placeholders for lived experiences and perceptions. Representations alone do not provide either reasons for belief or action in the present, or post hoc justifications. But qua representations, they are cognitive experiences. Freedman may be saying that cognitive representations of somatic phenomena have doxastic weight, or lend credibility, or some such, but there seems to be an intermediate step missing from her argument that would link the phenomenological experience to cognitive content. If the experience is somatic it is not cognitive, and if not cognitive it is not representational. My bias may not undermine Freedman’s argument, but I do need to hear how she characterizes non-cognitive representations.

These...