Louis C. Charland

(1958 - 2021)

The distinction between cognitive and perceptual theories of emotion is entrenched in the literature on emotion and is openly used by individual emotion theorists when classifying their own theories and those of others. In this paper, I argue that the distinction between cognitive and perceptual theories of emotion is more pernicious than it is helpful, while at the same time insisting that there are nonetheless important perceptual and cognitive factors in emotion that need to be distinguished. A general representational metatheoretical framework for reconciling cognitive and perceptual theories is proposed. This is the Representational Theory of Emotion (RTE). A detailed case study of Antonio Damasio's important new contribution to emotion theory is presented in defense of the RTE. The paper is intended for readers interested in the foundations of emotion theory and cognitive science

Most contemporary models and tests for mental competence do not make adequate provision for the positive influence of emotion in the determination of competence. This most likely is due to a reliance on an outdated view of emotion according to which these models are essentially noncognitive. Leading developments in modern emotion theory indicate that this noncognitive theory of emotion is no longer tenable. Emotions, in fact, are essentially representational in a manner that makes them “cognitive” in an important sense. This requires a reassessment of the place of emotion in the theory of mental competence. Building on Benjamin Freedman’s “recognizable reasons” account of competence, it will be argued that (1) emotions form a class of recognizable reasons of their own, and (2) that competence to consent is a matter of practical, rather than theoretical, reasoning. Emotions, then, are an essential ingredient in mental competence, and the cognitive bias that permeates the theory of mental competence today must be rejected.

In this paper I link two hitherto disconnected sets of results in the philosophy of emotions and explore their implications for the computational theory of mind. The argument of the paper is that, for just the same reasons that some computationalists have thought that cognition may be a natural kind, so the same can plausibly be argued of emotion. The core of the argument is that emotions are a representation-governed phenomenon and that the explanation of how they figure in behaviour must as such be undertaken in those terms. I conclude with some interdisciplinary reflections in defence of the hypothesis that emotions might be more fundamental in the organization of behaviour than cognition; that, in effect, we may be emoters before we are cognizers . The aim of the paper is: (1) to introduce a number of promising results in philosophical and empirical emotion theory to a wider audience; and (2) to begin the task of organizing those results into a computational theoretical framework