EMOTIONAL TRUTH
to appear in an
Aristotelian Society symposium (joint session) with Ronald de Sousa
II
– Adam Morton
EMOTIONAL
ACCURACY
ABSTRACT It is accuracy rather than truth itself
that is valuable. Emotional truth is a
dubious though attractive notion, but emotional accuracy is much easier to make
sense of. My approach to accuracy goes
via an account of what makes a story accurate.
Stories can be accurate but not true, and emotions can be accurate
whether or not they are true. The
capacity for emotional accuracy, for emotions that fit a person’s situation, is
an aspect of emotional intelligence, which is as important an aspect of
rational human agency as the intelligent formation of beliefs and desires.
I
Cheap truth. Truth comes in many forms, some cheap and some
valuable. Distinguish two dimensions of
cheapness. One dimension extends in the
direction of vagueness, indefiniteness and generality. If I claim that some flowers are coloured,
or that music is sometimes nice, what I say is true, but cheaply so. Another dimension extends in the direction
of the range of attitudes that can be counted as true. Truth can be extended from assertive
sentences to beliefs to questions and requests at very little price. When a person attitudes that p, and p, we
can count her attitude as true. So a
Yes-No question is true if the answer is yes; a desire is true when it is
satisfied. And we can say that all
Jane's desires on Tuesday were satisfied, which would be equivalent to ‘if on
Tuesday Jane wanted cats to fly then cats flew, and if she wanted 34+76 to be
994 then 34+76=994, and ....’. Similarly,
we can say that ‘Hamlet killed Polonius’ is true iff Hamlet killed Polonius,
and that ‘eπi = -1’ is
true iff eπi = -1,
without worrying about where in the world to find Hamlet, Polonius, and
imaginary numbers. None of this is very
demanding; the conceptual price is low, as the minimalist literature
shows. (See Williams 1976,.Horwich
1998.)
Emotional truth is easily achieved if one wanders far
enough out along these dimensions. My
fear that the dog will bite me is true if and only if the dog will bite
me. My elation that life has many joys
and my depression that life is a grim business are both true since life is a
grim business with many joys. But
there’s no philosophical pride to be had from bringing home these trophies; any
child with a butterfly net could have gone out and got them.
Now to the more valuable kinds. The opposite of vagueness is precision, and precision combined
with truth gives accuracy. Accuracy
certainly adds value to truth. For one
thing it allows non-perverse speculation: the difference between scientific
cosmology and metaphysical rambling is that cosmology distinguishes between
finely differentiated hypotheses - whether fundamental constants have this
value or this slightly different one - and tries to distinguish the different
consequences they would have. And on
the other dimension, the opposite of minimalist content-matching is to insist
on a world-to-mind direction of fit in which determinate aspects of the state
have to match determinate aspects of the world. (A substantive theory of truth – correspondence, as I’m slanting
it – thus aims not at telling us what propositions are to count as true, but
what kinds of truth to count as valuable, a point ignored by Lewis 2001.)
Emotional
truth that had these value-adding features would be something to aim for. There would be a point to directing the
evolution of our emotional states towards it, just as there is a point to
directing the evolution of our beliefs towards the more valuable, but only the
more valuable, forms of truth.
Analogous to the way precision in theory allows responsible speculation,
precision in emotion allows responsible intensity. If you have the exact emotion for the situation, then you
can feel it whole-heartedly, without the danger of inappropriate
blundering. A bull that dances through
the china shop. And analogous to the
world-to-mind fit of beliefs would be some notion of an emotion that is
demanded by the situation. Elation
where elation is right, depression or anger where that is right, whether or not
the person has grounds to motivate their feeling this right thing.
These remarks are meant to elicit sympathy for de Sousa’s
project. To the extent that we have a
grasp of the right emotion for a situation, the objectively right emotion, we
can see analogs in emotion of the valuable features of true belief. But they are also meant to insinuate a
doubt. The intuitions are linked not to
the core idea of truth itself but to the value-adding aspects that make it
worth having. In this paper I shall
argue that some of these aspects are independent of the core. We can make sense of emotional accuracy
without having to make sense of emotional truth, at least not in more than the
cheap and easy way just described. Some
of the consequences of accuracy-without-truth, though, are in many ways like
those that de Sousa wants from emotional truth.
II
Accuracy without truth. Consider two stories.
Story 1: a carriage rolled north down Baker Street
through a thick London fog on a cold December day in 1887. As it came to Marylebone Road the passenger
rapped on the driver's window and asked to be let out. Only the most acute of observers would have
recognized the crippled Crimean war veteran who emerged as the famous detective
Sherlock Holmes.
Story 2: a boat drew slowly along the Baker Street
canal in the balmy weather of London in the winter of 1887. As it joined the Thames a passenger leapt to
the bank. That person continued his
journey on foot.
Neither story is
true. Possibly neither is false. But the first is in two respects more accurate
than the second. Baker Street does
not have a canal, and even if it did it would not reach the Thames. The winter of 1887 was not balmy. That is the first accuracy, fit: the first
story fits the world as it is, even though it does not say anything true about
it. The first story is also detailed in
a way that the second is not: it gives a specific name to its protagonist, and
describes his appearance. Though both
stories can be matched with many non-actual worlds, the first applies to fewer
than the second does: it is more restrictive.
(We are probably speaking of infinitely many worlds in both cases, so
‘fewer’ is problematic. It would be
best to consider cases where one story’s worlds are a subset of those of
another. But that would require four
stories rather than the two I used.)
The two aspects interact. Detail allows fit. If a
story has enough details that can be taken as true of an actual situation then
it will fit it. Fit selects
detail. If a story is taken as fitting
a particular situation then we can assess the detailedness of its description
of that situation. This suggests a
tentative definition of accuracy. One
story is more accurate depiction than another of an actual situation when there
are more elements of the one that are true descriptions of aspects of the
actual situation than there are of the other.
(One story might be taken to be intrinsically more accurate than another
when there is an actual situation such that there are more elements of the one
that are true descriptions of aspects of that situation than there are elements
of the other that are true descriptions of any actual situation.) That will do for now; the definition is not
meant to be taken very carefully. (It
surely will not survive rough handling: taking stories as closed under logical
consequence and then literally counting true sentences, etc.)
Some think that stories are true of worlds, and thus
simply true when they are true of the actual world. I do not want to get into this question. The important point is that one not-true
story can be more accurate than another.
Science fiction is not very accurate, at any rate not accurate about the
technological possibilities (or even usually the laws of nature) of the present
actual world. Cowboy fiction is said to
give a very inaccurate impression of life in the Wild West. Zola or Hardy probably do give relatively
accurate reports of life in the times and places they discuss. But none of these stories are true. In fact, a story can have a good measure of
accuracy while being not just true but impossible. Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is full of historical,
sociological, and emotional accuracy while describing something that just can’t
happen.
Accuracy as just described seems to presuppose truth. An accurate story has many elements that are
true descriptions of an actual situation.
But a more careful formulation takes care of this. A story can be taken as describing a
situation no elements of which does it actually name. For example a story might begin ‘The general had accumulated many
powers, so many that concerned citizens plotted to assassinate him’. It might be taken as describing events in
Rome in the first century BCE, or in many other times and places. But no element of it is simply true. Conversely a Jonathan Miller type production
of ‘Julius Caesar’ might add enough detail that – incorporating all elements of
the production into the story – it was an accurate portrayal of Tony Blair and
his entourage. The assassination itself
would then be a non-descriptive detail that gained significance from its links
to the descriptively accurate elements.
Neither accuracy nor truth simply presupposes the other.
II
Emotional accuracy. What does this have to do with
emotions? The essential link is that a
person’s emotions involve representations, and these representations can be
more or less accurate depictions of her situation. Contrast two classes of cases.
(1a) An engineer is laid
off by her company. She realizes that
the economic climate is not good for getting another job of the same kind,
feels relieved that she does not have to face more boring programming disguised
as design, and goes back to university to do a MBA.
(1b) An engineer is laid
off by her company. She takes this as
showing that she has neither the technical nor the personal skills for success
in a demanding profession, becomes very unhappy, and does not look for another
job.
(1c) An engineer is laid off by her company. She reflects on the less competent and less
hard working colleagues who have kept their jobs and of the lack of respect her
boss has always shown to her. She gets very
angry, goes into his office and pours a cup of coffee over his head.
(2a) An engineer is laid
off by her company. She thinks of all
the desired things that will now never happen and is overcome with sorrow. She becomes very unhappy at the fate of abandoned
animals, and cries whenever she sees a dog walking without a leash, or a
non-fat cat.
(2b) An engineer is laid
off by her company. The next day she
finds her mind is full of confusing thoughts moving in all directions. There is something exciting about the confusion
and she develops an enthusiasm for the company. She starts a web site on which satisfied customers and grateful
employees can register their good feelings.
(2c) An engineer is laid
off by her company. Feelings of anger
rise up in her and she directs them at American policy in the middle east. She becomes a fervent campaigner for the
internationalization of Jerusalem.
I
am trying not to put this in an overly cognitive way. On a 1970's-type account the emotion just is a complex of states
essential members of which are propositional attitudes, which in accurate cases
have true propositions as their objects.
I take it that a number of writers, notably de Sousa and Greenspan (see
de Sousa 1987, Greenspan 1988, also Goldie 2000) have shown us more plausible
ways of recognizing that thinking is essential to emotion without turning
emotions into thoughts. Without taking
on the details of any of these accounts I shall assume that when one is in an
emotional state there are patterns of belief and belief change, desire and
desire change, and characteristic intentions, that are essential to ones being
in that state rather than another. If a
person is afraid then there is a pressure towards thinking that some things are
dangerous, and a tendency towards wanting to avoid or escape some things,
whether or not she succumbs to the pressure or goes along with the
tendency. This is enough to make what I
have called the emotion-story essential to the emotion, and thus to give the
emotion an intrinsic degree of accuracy as a depiction of a person’s situation.
I
said that accurate emotions are sustainable in the face of an accurate grasp of
the facts and possibilities. Why
possibilities? Consider someone who
takes as fearful something that cannot hurt him, or who greets with joy
something that cannot do him any good.
The emotions don’t fit the situation not because the object will not
harm or will not help; after all, it is appropriate to be afraid of a
rattlesnake that in fact does not bite one.
The lack of fit comes because something is thought to be capable of what
it is not. More generally, an emotion
can be inaccurate because it misrepresents the possibilities of the whole
situation. Most emotions are
action-guiding, taking action in a very general way to include strategies of
thought. (This is a central idea in
most of the papers in Goldie 2001.)
They will not serve this role if they are unhinged from the actual
situation of the agent; and they will not serve it if they do not respect what
is actually possible and impossible, in fact what possibilities are more or
less remote. So an accurate emotion
must not only contain detailed representations that fit the actual situation;
it must represent that actual situation as rightly situated in the galaxy of
could-have-beens and would-have-ifs around it.
This might seem to distinguish accuracy of emotion from accuracy of
belief. I think it does not, though. A belief can be inaccurate though true in a
detailed way of the actual world.
Consider for example a rich and complete system of unnatural Goodmanian
concepts, cutting across natural kind boundaries in weird and peculiar ways,
and consider beliefs expressed in terms of them. The belief that all emerats are granimals is true (emerats are
emeralds that come to human notice before 1 Jan 3000 or otherwise rats, and
granimals are green things noticed before that date or otherwise animals). But it misrepresents what emeralds and rats
are like and taken together with other similar beliefs would misrepresent what
is possible for them. So respect for
how a situation is situated among its possible variants is something we should
write into a better definition of the accuracy of belief, too, taking accuracy
even further from truth.
Accurate
emotions are not well described as true.
After all, the analogy is with an accurate story, and many very accurate
stories are not true. The difference
shows up in the non-uniqueness of accuracy.
All of (1a)-(1c) are accurate, accurate to the same facts about the
engineer's life. I see no reason to
think that any one has to be more accurate than the others; each could
invoke as rich a body of beliefs and desires, fitting the person’s situation
and its possibilities as well as each other one. (That is why (1b) is included: emotions that we think of as less
wise or less admirable may still be accurate.
But see section III below.)
Another
way of putting it. An accurate emotion
is like a rich myth, deeply engaged with the details of some aspect of the
world. A less accurate emotion is like
a shallow or artificial myth, a Walt Disney substitute, which tries to depict
mythical events that bear no detailed relation to what actually happens in
people's lives. Or, the accuracy of an
emotion is like the observational accuracy of a scientific theory, which
can capture actual and potential observations more or less well. Theoretical and observational assertions and
concepts can be intimately connected; neither may be intelligible without the
other, and yet it is clearly true that observational accuracy does not
guarantee truth. There can be rival
equally observationally accurate theories, relative to any way of drawing the
somewhat arbitrary line between observation and theory. And among non-true theories some will be
more accurate observationally than others.
For some purposes, e.g. navigation or bridge construction, observational
accuracy will be more important than truth.
We want a rich and reliable body of connections with the ways the world
impinges on us. So too with emotions:
among the variety of attitudes we could take to the situations we find
ourselves in, we want those that give a rich and reliable set of connections to
guide our further acting and feeling.
III
Emotional intelligence. My main point has been that among the emotions
a person can direct at a situation some fit it better than others. The point can be extended: among the
varieties of anger, or of sadness or exhilaration, that a person can direct at
a situation some fit it better than others.
So accuracy cuts across our usual classifications for the emotions. You can be miserable, elated, or curious,
and be so in a way that does or does not accurately represent your
situation. No emotion is intrinsically
accurate. But some distinctions
between emotions are necessary for a creature that is to have accurate
emotions. Sadness must be distinct from
depression; remorse, guilt, shame, and embarrassment must be kept apart. Falling into one of these when another fits
the situation is a sure route to emotional mess. And finding ones way around a rich range of emotions is as
demanding as finding ones way around a complex set of beliefs. It requires a special and admirable quality
that it makes sense to call emotional intelligence.
Emotional
intelligence will not always result in emotional accuracy, any more than
theoretical intelligence will always result in true belief. And just as truth bears a complex relation
to the coherence of belief, emotional accuracy bears an equally complex
relation to the coherence of emotions, with one another and with a person’s
complex of beliefs and desires.
Sometimes the more accurate emotions a person can have will not cohere
well with one another or with the person’s other states. This will typically be when the other states
are defective, or when the situation is so complex that the person is not
capable of coherent attitudes that represent it well. (But then, the universe is like that, compared to our
little brains.) And, to pile on the
warnings, there is no more guarantee that emotional accuracy will give us
better lives than there is that we will be happier if we have true
beliefs. To the perspicacious tyrant
who kills you if you don’t believe he is charming there corresponds the situation
that is so unbearable that your sanity will not permit you to react to the way
it really is. But, we all trust, these
are aberrant outlying cases. In
general, the route to truth leads through evidence and results in satisfied
desire, and the route to emotional accuracy leads through the acquisition of a
range of possible feelings and attitudes and the capacity to discriminate
between them, and results in the harmony of thinking and feeling. More specifically, it tends to link the
evolution of our beliefs, our desires, and our feelings, and allows the present
state of each of these to put pressure on the others. It allows us to be whole people, by having patterns of thought
that make two-way connections between what we believe and what we feel. (Some of the connections in one way
are clear: when you discover the insect is harmless your fear should
change. The connections the other way
must consist in part of your emotions helping select relevance of evidence and
direction of thought. If you feel
instinctively afraid of the insect you look for reasons, both in what you can
see around you and in what you know, which might settle the question of its
dangerousness.)
Imagine
then a progression. It starts with our
hard-wired emotional responses, with their fixed affects and their simple paradigm
scenarios. Emotional intelligence then
intervenes, and we acquire the capacity to modulate our emotions to what we
learn and what we come to want. (At the
beginning we feel dismay at a situation; at a later stage we anticipate regret
for the action we are choosing; at a yet later stage we anticipate regret if we
take one choice and remorse if we take the other.) Suppose that the capacity were perfectly acquired. Then our emotions would match our situations
to the extent that our information about then was accurate. Could they then be counted as emotional
truths? The main factor to consider is
the way they exclude one another. At the
original primitive stage fear, say, and delight are mutually exclusive. And the exclusion is not just the effect of
quirks and limitations: it is intrinsic to a simple fear that it leads one to
intend avoidance and to a simple delight that it leads one to intend
contact. They are emotions that cannot
both be held, though we can oscillate between them. But each might be equally accurate. As de Sousa, following Tappolet (2000), would put it, the values
of danger and of attractiveness are both present. So we shouldn’t count them as truths. (It would be a strange kind of truth, such that having it
committed one also to falsity. To fear
is to take as not attractive.) But at
later stages the exclusion lessens. We
acquire more subtle emotions, such as a delighted horror. (You see the notorious association between
sophistication and perversity.) Then it
is possible to acknowledge that the situation is both dangerous and
attractive. So as our emotions become
more and more refined they come to be capable of representing more and more of
the values present in our situations, in such a way that to acknowledge one is
not to reject another.
Might
there be an ideal end to this progression, where in any situation an agent
could have emotions which accurately represent it, and which do not exclude any
others that accurately represent it? I
have no idea. I do fear that these kinds
of heroically accurate emotions would have become so much like beliefs that
they could not easily serve the functions of emotions. After all, as Greenspan and earlier work by
de Sousa taught us, emotions are essential for defining patterns of salience
that create pressures on the evolution of our beliefs and desires. These patterns are essentially selective;
they make things possible for us by limiting the possibilities. But perhaps creatures with sufficient
emotional intelligence would be able to assume these deliberately limiting
perspectives while also remaining open to alternatives. Perhaps.
We don’t have to take a position on this, in order to conclude that
there is such a thing as emotional accuracy, that it is valuable, and that
intelligent thinking and feeling aims at it.
REFERENCES
de Sousa,
Ronald,1987, The rationality of the emotions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Goldie,
Peter, 2000, The emotions: a philosophical exploration (Oxford UK:
Oxford University Press).
Goldie,
Peter ed.,2001, Understanding Emotions
(London: Ashgate).
Greenspan, Patricia, 1988, Emotions and reasons (London:
Routledge).
Horwich,
Paul 1998, Truth, second edition (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press).
Lewis,
David, 2001, ‘Forget about the “correspondence theory of truth”’, Analysis 61:
275-280.
Tappolet,
Christine, 2000, Emotions et valeurs (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France).
Williams,
C.J.F., 1976, What is truth? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press).