Ronald De Sousa

Ainslie’s Picoeconomics presents an ingenious theory, based on a remarkably simple basic law about the rate of discounting the value of future prospects, which explains a vast number of psychological phenomena. Hyperbolic discount rates result in changes in the ranking of interests as they get closer in time. Thus quasi-homuncular “interests” situated at different times compete within the person. In this paper I first defend the generality of scope of Ainslie’s model, which ranges over several personal and subpersonal levels of psychological analysis. I raise a problem which results from the temporal relativity of assessments of value, and affects the possibility of objective values. Finally, I offer one example of a form of time-related irrationality on which Ainslie’s scheme does not seem to have a grip, namely one which relates not to a situation’s relative position in time, but to its temporal (‘progressive’ or ‘perfect’) temporal aspect.

The notion of representation lies at the crossroads of questions about the nature of belief and knowledge, meaning, and intentionality. But there is some hope that it might be simpler than all those. If we could understand it clearly, it might then help to explicate those more difficult notions. In this paper, my central aim is to find a principled criterion, along lines that make biological sense, for deciding just when it becomes theoretically plausible to ascribe to some process or state a representational role. I shall be especially concerned with some differences, in this regard, between classical and connectionist models. The relation between ‘standard’ artificial intelligence and connectionism turns out to illustrate a ‘first in, last out’ principle: What we most easily understand (and so can program) is what we have most recently invented; tasks we ourselves perform best, by contrast, are a lot harder to understand. Classical AI has modelled the former; connectionism tries to tackle the latter. I end with some speculations about the possible implications of these considerations for our understanding of understanding.

Emotions are Janus‐faced. They tell us something about the world, and they tell us something about ourselves. This suggests that we might speak of a truth, or perhaps two kinds of truths of emotions, one of which is about self and the other about conditions in the world. On some views, the latter comes by means of the former. Insofar as emotions manifest our inner life, however, we are more inclined to speak of authenticity rather than truth. What is the difference? We need to distinguish the criteria of correspondence or appropriateness suitable for authenticity from those that embody the criterion of truth. Furthermore there is also a question about the transitions – among states of mind, and between states of mind and behaviour – that emotions encourage. This realm of transitions concerns rationality. After sketching the relevant distinctions, I will endeavour to justify the view that emotions should be appraised in terms of all three terms.

The question What is an individual? goes back beyond Aristotle’s discussion of substance to the Ionians’ preoccupation with the paradox of change -- the fact that if anything changes it must stay the same. Mere reflection on this fact and the common-sense notion of a countable thing yields a concept of a “minimal individual”, which is particular (a logical matter) specific (a taxonomic matter), and unique (an evaluative empirical matter). Individuals occupy space, and therefore might be dislodged. Even minimal individuals, therefore (Strawsonian individual or Aristotelian substance) already contain the potential for competition or conflict. What is added by biology to this basic notion? It emerges from some recent work on the evolution of metazoan animals that individuals as we know them are minimal individuals towhich four features have been added, and which appear to be inseparable: differentiated multicellularity; sexual reproduction; segregation of germ from somatic cells; and obligatory death. Whether or not individuals are to be counted as units of selection, they are not the beneficiaries of natural selection.

Philosophers like to warn against fools’ paradises: not places where fools can safely cavort, but rather conditions in which fools mistakenly think themselves happy. The warning presupposes that real and merely apparent happiness can be told apart. Of course that claim is not altogether disinterested, since philosophers have a professional investment in the distinction. Thus they have endorsed this or that attitude to death, holding up promises of ultimate comfort or threats of excruciating regret, to be dispensed at the last hour, just when the money-back guarantee expires.

The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, truth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events and characters depicted. To have emotions is to care about certain things: we can wonder whether those things are really worth caring about. We can wonder whether our passions reflect who we are, and whether they constitute fitting responses to the vicissitudes of life. So there are two aspects to emotional truth: how well an emotion reflects the threats and promises of the world, and how well it reflects our own individual nature. That is the starting point of this book, which looks first at the analogies and disanalogies between strict propositional truth and a looser, "generic" sense of truth. As applied to emotions, generic truth is closer to those original meanings: as in a portrait's fidelity or friend's loyalty. Taken in this sense, the notion of emotional truth opens up large vistas on areas of life essential to our existence as social beings, and to our concerns with beauty, morality, love, death, sex, knowledge, desire, coherence, and happiness. Each of those topics illustrates some facet of the dominant theme of the book: the crucial but often ambivalent role of our emotions in grounding and yet also sometimes undermining our values. Emotions act, in holistic perspective, as ultimate arbiters of values where different and independently justified standards of value compete.

The Philosophical search for Natural Kinds is motivated by the hope of finding ontological categories that are independent of our interests. Other requirements, of varying importance, are commonly made of kinds that claim to be natural. But no such categories are to be found. Virtually any kind can be termed ‘natural’ relative to some set of interests and epistemic priorities. Science determines those priorities at any particular stage of its progress, and what kinds are most ‘natural’ in that sense is always a real and lively scientific question. The general philosophical problem of scientific realism is also real; but between the scientific and the metaphysical, the ‘Problem of Natural Kinds’ sits otiose.

Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions and on that of their objectivity as revealers of value: emotions are neither simply natural nor socially constructed, and they apprehend objective values, but those values are multidimensional and relative to human realities. The axiological position I defend jettisons the usual foundations for ethical judgments, and grounds these judgments instead on a rationally informed reflective equilibrium of comprehensive emotional attitudes, tempered with a dose of irony.

Somewhere along the course of evolution, and at some time in any one of us on the way from zygote to adult, some forms of detection became beliefs, and some tropisms turned into deliberate desires. Two transitions are involved: from functional responses to intentional ones, and from non-conscious processes to conscious ones that presuppose language and are powered by neocortical re- sources. Unconscious and functional mental processes remain and constitute an 'intuitive' system that collaborates uneasily with the conscious intentionality of the 'analytic' system. Emotions bridge these divides: in particular, specifc feelings affect inference, cognition and metacognition. In what follows, after a brief reminder of the crucial role of emotions to rational thought and action in general, I first look at how fear affects belief. I then narrow my focus to some examples of what I shall refer to as epistemic feelings. These include specialized variants of fear and greed; and feelings of doubt, certainty, knowing and familiarity. I shall also describe some surprising recent findings about the influence of oxytocin on trust and about the direct influence of social conformity on perception and belief

In both biology and psychology, the notion of an individual is indispensable yet puzzling. It has played a variety of roles in diverse contexts, ranging from philosophical problems of personal identity to scientific questions about the immunological mechanisms for telling ‘self’ from ‘non-self.’ There are notorious cases in which the question of individuality is difficult to settle — ant hill, slime mold, or beehive, for instance. Yet the notion of an individual organism, both dependent on and independent of other individuals in specific ways, is crucial to our conception of life itself. It is also crucial to our notion of mentality, and hence to other concepts — moral and social — which must be explicated in terms of individual mentality. (Think, for example, of the importance of the quality and nature of individual consciousness to debates about abortion and euthanasia.)

This is a Big Book from one of Canada's preeminent philosophers. It aims at nothing less than to define what characterizes modernity, and then to tell us what is wrong with it. Like many a Big Book, it is predictably full of interesting things, and equally predictably disappointing, not to say feeble, in some of the central theses for which it argues. But then what more, in philosophy, can we really expect? It's what we tell our students: you don't have to be right, and you don't have to make me agree with you, but you do have to produce interesting arguments and show that you have thought seriously about the issues.

How should we understand the emotional rationality? This first part will explore two models of cognition and analogy strategies, test their intuition about the emotional desire. I distinguish between subjective and objective desire, then presents with a feeling from the "paradigm of drama" export semantics, here our emotional repertoire is acquired all the learned, and our emotions in the form of an object is fixed. It is pretty well in line with the general principles of rationality, especially the lowest reasonable principles. Turned to the second part of this side of reasonable. I will inquire how emotional beliefs, desires, and behaviors contribute to the rationality. I will present a very general biological hypothesis: emotions by controlling highlights the characteristics of perception and reasoning, so that we remove the difficulties due in particular to lead to paralysis; they are being simulated by a simplified perception of information, thus limiting our practice and cognitive choice. How are we to understand emotional or axiological rationality? I pursue analogies with both the cognitive and the strategic models, testing them against intuitions about emotional desires. We distinguish two different classes of desires, the subjective and the objective, and propose that emotions have a semantics that derives from "paradigmatic scenarios", in terms of which our emotional repertoire is learned and the formal objects of our emotions fixed. This fits in well with emerging facts about how our emotional capacities develop, and it can also be squared with the general principles of rationality, particularly minimal rationality. In the second part, I return to the perspective of rationality. I ask how emotions contribute to the rationality of beliefs, desires, and behavior. I proffer a very general biological hypothesis: Emotions spare us the paralysis potentially induced by a particular predicament by controlling the salience of features of perception and reasoning; they temporarily mimic the informational encapsulation of perception and so circumscribe our practical and cognitive options.