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Proceedings/Recueil Des Communications Année : 2018

Emotions without language. The case of infants and animals

Résumé

By considering emotions as propositional attitudes (PA), cognitivists consider that emotional content is akin to propositional content (D'Arms & Jacobson, 2004; Lycan, 2012; Solomon, 1973). If we consider that more or less all humans are capable of emotions, this view does not appear as an issue, but we are missing two points: by all human we refer to adult, children and infants but they do not all have propositional thoughts; and, humans are not the only creatures capable of emotions, animal are and they do not have propositional thoughts either (Davidson, 2001). The cognitivist hypothesis puts too much importance in the necessity of language for emotions, there are interesting approaches to explain emotions in non-language entities. I aim to show that there can be emotions without language because the link between the two is not trivial. I will discuss some of the issues raised to show that this idea of Davidson is not required: “we can continue to explain the behaviour of speechless creatures by attributing propositional attitudes to them while at the same time recognizing that such creatures do not actually have propositional attitudes.” (Davidson 1985, 477–8). Being at a pre-language stage, infants do not experience emotions as adults, and there may be different developmental kinds of emotions. Deigh’s idea of pre-language emotions stems from this (Deigh, 2011). There are mature emotions – experienced by adults – and primitive emotions – experienced by infants and animals. This would explain how infants can be surprised without having the concept of surprising. There are examples of surprise recorded for infants (Wynn 1992). They have an idea of what the situation should have been, hence some expectations on the unfolding of the situation. Because PA give a special access to the world by mean of language, one could wonder how infants can make the world intelligible for themselves without this mean of language. Primitive emotions can be connected to a perceptive way of representing the world. A great part of the research on emotions focus on them being a set of neurophysiological cues and reactions (Ekman 1980). Primitive surprise would be akin to primitive representations, infants being at a biologically immature developmental emotional stage that consists of only feelings, stage that would then be implemented by a cognitive part when they grow up and acquire linguistic abilities. Absence of complex emotions would be linked to absence of complex thoughts, the development of both being linked. A famous example of animal surprise is given by Malcolm (1972) with the dog chasing a cat under the wrong tree. The dog has an idea of the situation – even a wrong one – and would be surprised to see the cat in the next tree because it did not expect it. The dog cannot think but he can believe that the cat wen up the tree (Malcolm 1972). A similar idea is found in Dumett (2006) with his animal protothoughts consisting in spatial representations. Davidson (2001) also agree to some mental representation for animals. Animal have perceptive thoughts about the objects of their behaviour even if they do not think. This explains why we have no difficulties in attributing basic emotions to animals (joy, fear) but not complex ones (pride, nostalgia). Deona & Terroni (2012) propose that emotions are bodily attitudes and animal need only to perceive and react to have them. This does not allow them to understand what happen, so no concept mastering or reflexion. Deigh’s dichotomy also apply here but with the possible add-on of a developmental notion of conceptual mastery: primitive emotions allow for some watered-down concepts that may evolve into full concepts if the entity develops language. Note that this point is delicate because we could infer from it that animals developing linguistic abilities would reach mature emotions. According to the brentanian tradition, to believe is to believe something, this raises issues for propositional attitudes. Animals do not have PA because they lack language (Davidson, 2001), but they possess a certain kind of belief, or at least mental representations (Call & Kaminski, 2004). Infants also possess a kind of beliefs (Wynn, 1992). Beliefs being propositional attitudes entails that there is a relation between a subject and an entity (The something that is believed). This kind of reification links the capacity of having beliefs to concept possession (Glock 2010) and there is a lot support against this for animals (Glock 2010, Deigh 1994). But this rests one conception of concepts that can be challenged. The emotion of surprise offers non-linguistic way of assessing cognitive abilities. To grasp reality enough to be surprised does not require language (Wynn, 1992), (Hauser, MacNeilage, & Ware, 1996), nor the concept of surprising (Tappolet 2016). To be surprised, any subject must meet some requirements: understand a given situation, have some expectations about what is going to happen next, and the new situation must differ enough from the expectations to provoke the surprise. The presence of expectation leads to two cognitive assumptions: the strong one is belief; the weak one is mental representation. This is in accordance to what has been said about two different kind of emotions. Language mastering is not a necessary condition for emotions because not all emotions are cognitively demanding, or rather they don’t always need to be. We can use a developmental scale to account for emotions complexity. Another way of shifting the problem is by rethinking the category of propositional attitudes with a new stance on intentionality following Glock argument: “one can believe something which is not the case, intend to do something which never happens, and love someone who does not exist.” (Glock 2010 p.13). In the first case there is a PA, but the second is an action-oriented attitude and the third is an object-oriented attitude. But we then would have to question the idea of intentionality for animal which is delicate. Bibliography - Call, J., & Kaminski, J. (2004). Word learning in a domestic dog: evidence for “fast mapping.” Science, (304 5677). - D'Arms, J., & Jacobson, D. (2004). Emotion and Action. In R. C. Solomon (Ed.), Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (1st ed.). Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. - Davidson, D. (2001). Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford University Press. - Deigh, J. (1994). Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions. Ethics, 104(4), 824–854. - Deigh, J. (2011). Emotions, Values, and the Law. Oxford University Press. - Deonna, J., & Terroni, F. (2012). The Emotions. A philosophical introduction. Routledge. - Dummett, M. (2006). Thought and Reality. Oxford University Press - Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., & Ancoli, S. (1980). Facial Signs of Emotional Experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39 (6), 1125–1134. - Glock, H.-J. (2010). Can Animals Judge? Dialectica, 64(1), 11–33. - Hauser, M. D., MacNeilage, P., & Ware, M. (1996). Numerical representations in primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 93(4), 1514–1517. - Lycan, W. G. (2012). Desire considered as a propositional attitude. Philosophical Perspectives, 26(1), 201–215. - Malcolm, N. (1972). Thoughtless brutes, 46(September). - Solomon, R. C. (1973). Emotions and Choice. The Review of Metaphysics, 27(1), 20–41. - Tappolet, C. (2016). Emotions, Value, and Agency. Oxford University Press. - Wynn, K. (1992). Addition and subtraction by human infants. Open MIND

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Philosophie
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hal-04010161 , version 1 (14-03-2023)

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Marie Michon. Emotions without language. The case of infants and animals. pp.48-52, 2018, 978-84-09-06054-2. ⟨hal-04010161⟩
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