Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXIII, No. 1, July 2001

Is Affect Always Mere Effect?

MARK JOHNSTON

Princeton University

Ralph Wedgwood balks at my argument at three significant points. I have some brief, and I hope helpful, reactions to the resistance that he offers.

1. I observed that being struck by the appeal of something renders particularly intelligible a desire directed towards it. I called the desires which involved being struck by the appeal of their objects ‘affective desires’ so as to demar- cate them within the enormously heterogeneous category of so-called pro- attitudes. As a first step in defending a Projectivist account of the authority of affect, the fact that finding something appealing makes desire particularly intelligible, Wedgwood writes: “Projectivists will likely find it plausible that affective desires differ from other ‘pro attitudes’ in precisely the following way: an affective desire for a certain state of affairs involves feeling pleased at the thought of that state of affairs coming about (or at least displeased at the thought of that state of affairs failing to come about)” (p. 217).

This looks like a definition of affective desire by way of genus (pro- attitudes) and differentia. But will the differentia do?

Feeling displeased at some thought won’t do. A ‘stick’, a dry moralist who finds nothing appealing, still might be said to feel displeased at the thought of others’ failure to do their duty. Will feeling pleased do? Suppose that I feel pleased at the thought of my working in the local soup kitchen. Even so, I need not find my working in the soup kitchen appealing. I might only find the thought of it appealing. I could be a self-indulgent dreamer, one who particularly enjoys the costless contemplation of himself in a good moral light. I might be pleased at the thought of my working in the soup kitchen while knowing that I would not find my working there appealing.

As a result of being pleased at these thoughts, I could even come to be vaguely inclined towards, and so in the philosopher’s sense have a pro-atti- tude towards, working in the soup kitchen. And this may be partly because such a pro-attitude is for me entirely safe. For I might know that when actu- ally facing the soup kitchen my vague inclination would dissipate and genuine revulsion would take its place. In these circumstances, Wedgwood’s conditions for having an affective desire towards working in the soup kitchen

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appear to be satisfied. Yet it seems odd to describe me as at any point finding my working in the soup kitchen appealing. My vague inclination and my feeling pleased at the thought of the relevant state of affairs just do not add up to that, but only to my finding a certain line of self-regarding thought appeal- ing. The problem is that my pleasure is in a certain way extrinsic to the inclination. (It is a cause of the inclination, but even if it were an effect the same problem would arise.) The difficult thing is to put affect and desire together in the right way. The account of affective desire at the end of my paper was meant to be a stab at just this.

2. Wedgwood is skeptical of my argument against the Millian version of Dispositionalism concerning sensuous goods, for example the property of being ethereally beautiful. He says that even if the Dispositionalist’s central claim is taken to be a claim about the essential structure of the property, a claim about the ‘analysis’ or real definition of the property-as I take it to be-nonetheless the property of being ethereally beautiful could be under- stood as contained within itself. He illustrates his idea by way of proposi- tions that contain as ingredients referential devices that pick out, or quanti- fiers that range over, those very propositions. But this familiar sort of self- reference is not itself the containment of one proposition within itself along with other ingredients; as if a proposition, or anything else, could turn out to be a proper part of itself. Yet the Millian Dispositionalist is committed to something akin to a property turning out to be a proper part of itself.

Against such a Millian, I insisted that a disposition is a relational prop- erty, i.e. what you get from a relation when you ‘saturate’ or fill in some or all of its argument places with relata. i n particular, the disposition under conditions C to present to a subject or subjects S the property of being ethereally beautiful has the form:

Disp(x, Pres(the property of being ethereally beautiful, S ) , C)

The relational property of presenting the property of being ethereally beau- tiful is in its turn what you get from the relation of presentation when you fill in its argument places with the property of being ethereally beautiful and the subject S. This constructivist metaphor of “what you get when you till in argument places” is to be cashed out in terms of the notions of ontological priority and its converse, ontological posteriority. Compare: singleton Socrates is what you get when you apply the set-building operation to Socrates. This entails that Socrates and the set-building operation are onto- logically prior to singleton Socrates.’ Likewise, the relation of touching and

I For a detailed and compelling account of ontological priority that begins with examples just like this, see Kit Fine “Ontological Dependence” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1995.

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the entity Mary are ontologically prior to the relational property of touching Mary; or to put the general point the other way around, relational properties are ontologically posterior to the corresponding relation and the relevant ‘saturating’ relata. But then if the property of being ethereally beautiful is defined as the disposition whose structure is displayed above, that property is ontologically posterior to the relational property of presenting to S the prop- erty of being ethereally beautiful. This latter property is in its turn ontologi- cally posterior to the property of being ethereally beautiful. Given this, the Millian account can be seen to imply that the property of being ethereally beautiful is ontologically posterior to itself. This cannot be, and for the same basic reason, a whole cannot contain itself as a proper part. For the parts would have to be ontologically prior to the whole and yet the whole be included among them. The whole would then be ontologically posterior to itself. But nothing could be that.

3. In some ways reminiscent of Brentano, Wedgwood sketches an interesting account of how belief-based emotions can be correct or incorrect. He also maintains, quite rightly, that the affective element in such cognitive emotions is a reaction to judgement or belief, and not a refinement of sensing. For some reason he takes this as something I should have to resist, even though I emphasize at several points that my focus is on one of the roles of affect and that I am setting the belief-based emotions to one aside. Rather than oppose Wedgwood’s account, I hope to incorporate something like it in a more comprehensive treatment of affect and the emotions. But I take it that Wedgwood’s real objection is that given his account, mine can be seen to be misplaced or at the very least unnecessary.

This is what I do not see. Why can’t affect play a dual role? In the sensory cases in which I am interested, affect can sometimes disclose evaluative features in a way that then entitles one to the corresponding evaluative belief. In the cases Wedgwood highlights, evaluative belief arises in a way that is not dependent on sensing the appealing or the repellent as such. In these cases certain feelings will likely follow upon one’s beliefs. Emphasizing as I do the blurred boundary between sensuous values and the aesthetic, I wonder whether Wedgwood really wants to press his ban against the sensory model even in the aesthetic case. Surely here there is something to the idea that someone cannot see it or hear it because he can’t feel it.

The case for sensory disclosure of value is most vivid in cases in which one can only effectively convey to another the considerations of favor of, say, a style, a song or a friend’s manner by having the other sense it, in part by feeling as one does. So I might whisper in a seminar-“It’s because she makes points in just that way that I admire her so much.” And there may be no other route to what I am offering as a decisive consideration in favor of judging her admirable. You have to see the particular determinate way in

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which she is appealing, and you do this by being in some way struck by that appeal, Here we have the hallmarks of what some philosopher’s call ‘non- conceptual content’-utter determinacy, essential reliance on perceptual demonstration, and the presentation of a feature in a way that is prior to judgement. Although one might reasonably shy away from talk of non- conceptual content, don’t we here have reliable signs that a feature is being sensed?

Contrast the very different situation in which I read a well-crafted descrip- tion of her in action. If I understand him, Wedgwood’s account of such a situation would be that reading the description leads to ‘a purely cognitive understanding’ of her features, which in its turn causes an ‘affective state’ of admiration. However, in such a case it is natural to suppose that the feeling of admiration is experienced as warranted by what one has read. It seems impossible to adequately account for this in Wedgwood’s terms without supposing that the purely cognitive understanding incorporates some basic evaluative beliefs concerning how she is. Thus we have a familiar model of cognitive emotions as complexes of basic evaluative beliefs causing feelings or ‘affective states’.

Now given this model and Wedgwood’s blanket rejection of the idea of sensing values, I do not think he is entitled to appeal to a principle of default rationality in order to justify confidence in the correctness our basic evalua- tive beliefs. Wedgwood writes: “it is generally rational for each person to presume that her own affective states are correct and appropriate, at least until she has some positive reason to think otherwise-in just the same way as it is rational to presume that one’s sensory experiences are correct and veridical, in the absence of any positive evidence to the contrary. This could then explain why it is rational to treat one’s affective states as defeasible prima facie evidence of the corresponding evaluative facts” (p. 221). But remember that for Wedgwood, affective states can only be consequential upon basic evaluative beliefs. They are never prior sensings. Are we then to understand basic evaluative beliefs as initially formed without evidence or entitlement and only then acquiring prima facie justification as a result of their causing affective states?

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