Craig DeLancey introduces his book as a “survey of what basic emotions reveal about some central problems in the philosophy of mind” (vii), including the ontological status of mental states, the naturalization of intentionality, the internalism-externalism debate in moral psychology, the mystery of phenomenal consciousness, and the engineering of autonomous machines in artificial intelligence. In this review, I will discuss two central methodological commitments that shape the overall strategy of DeLancey's book.

The first is a commitment to a naturalistic understanding of the emotions. DeLancey considers two popular approaches to the study of emotion to be incompatible with the naturalism he favors, namely conceptual analysis of ordinary emotion terms and social constructionism. He rejects the former in light of Griffiths' (Reference Griffiths1997) critique, according to which some emotion terms are natural kind terms, the extension of which cannot be established merely in light of associated folk descriptions. Note that one can maintain that empirical investigation is the proper method for the study of emotions without holding that “emotion” itself designates a natural kind. In fact, there are reasons to believe that “[t]here probably is no scientifically appropriate class of things referred to by our term emotion” (3). According to this view, the proper method for studying the emotions is to focus on subclasses of emotions whose members share a dimension of similarity that makes them suitable for being embedded in predictive and explanatory scientific generalizations of some science.

This is what lies behind DeLancey's focus on the so-called “basic emotions,” a subset of emotions about which a significant degree of scientific consensus has emerged in the past 30 years. DeLancey aligns himself with the research tradition developed by Tomkins, Ekman and Izard among others, according to which some emotions—the “affect programs”—are biologically based and pan-cultural suites of short-term, coordinated and automated responses that include measurable physiological changes (e.g. increased heart rate), stereotyped facial expressions (e.g. baring of teeth) and action tendencies (e.g. attacking). DeLancey's argumentative strategy is to assess philosophical theories of emotions and mind in light of our best scientific understanding of the two most widely accepted examples of basic emotions, anger and fear (the exact list of basic emotions or affect programs is still controversial). This methodology strikes me as one of the main virtues of DeLancey's book, which shows by example that philosophy and the sciences of mind need not be in opposition in the study of emotions, but rather can complement each other in a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.

The other approach to the emotions DeLancey considers to be at odds with naturalism is social constructionism. DeLancey argues that this theory is based on a bad inference, namely the inference from the observed cultural variations of the elicitors of emotions or of the behaviors associated with emotions to the conclusion that emotions have no features “of the kind biology or another physical science would properly describe” (71). Affect program theory, he points out, is perfectly compatible with the ethnopsychological evidence that cultural differences affect both the input and output sides of basic emotions. This is a good point, but it only deals with the most radical and least interesting strand of social constructionism. More sophisticated versions of the theory do not claim that there is no biological core to basic emotions, but rather that a full understanding of emotions demands a careful consideration of some of their neglected social dimensions. Parkinson's (Reference Parkinson1995) transactional theory of emotion, for example, claims that emotions are socially constructed not because their inputs and outputs vary with cultures, but because they sometimes rely on a socially sustained pretense of passivity that is instrumental to the strategic negotiation of social transactions. One is left with the impression that some recent and potentially insightful developments of social constructionism have not been given an entirely fair hearing in DeLancey's book.

The second fundamental commitment of DeLancey's project is a rejection of a picture of mind that prioritizes cognition—defined as “the ability to entertain and utilize…propositional attitudes” (223)—over affective and perceptuomotor abilities. A common approach in the philosophy of mind explains human perception, action and emotion in terms of the language-mediated abilities to engage in propositional attitudes, and to perform theoretical and practical inferences on their basis. This approach to emotions is expressed in the so-called cognitivist theory, which takes emotions to be special kinds of evaluative judgments or thoughts, or special combinations of beliefs and desires. DeLancey acknowledges that the cognitivist model is viable for some instances of basic emotions, but he plausibly argues that it does not constitute the royal road to a general understanding of emotional phenomena.

One problem with the cognitivist approach is that it hides from view the common genus of emotions in humans, infants, and animals, a genus that can only be understood on the basis of a theory of “nonlinguistic (i.e., subcognitive) intentionality” (101). Cognitivism is also hard to reconcile with the wealth of scientific evidence on basic emotions marshaled by psychologists and neuroscientists, including the fact that they can be elicited by subliminal stimuli, that they are often “concretum-directed” (91) (e.g. a phobic can be afraid of a snake without being afraid that some snake-involving proposition is the case), and that they are sometimes elicited by stimuli traveling along subcortical neural pathways.

A reformulated cognitivism may meet some of these objections, for example by watering down the notions of judgment, thought, belief, and desire so as to make them available to animals and infants, automatic, unconscious, not propositionally articulated, and so on. This move, however, carries the risk of turning the defining notions of cognitivism into mere place-holders, blurring the significant differences between linguistic and nonlinguistic intentionality. One of DeLancey's key intuitions, as I understand him, is that what distinguishes the nonlinguistic intentionality of emotions is that they are fundamentally “action-directing intentional states” (95), grounded in representations that differ in kind from the representations typical of judgments, thoughts, and propositional attitudes (at least under a common philosophical understanding of such notions). The hard task, which is not really addressed in the book, is to understand in detail of what this difference in kind consists, and whether or not it extends from the basic emotions to the so-called higher cognitive emotions, such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, and jealously.

The general picture of mind DeLancey ultimately recommends as an alternative to cognitivism is a “hierarchical view of mind” (viii), according to which autonomy, the capacity to be goal-directed, finds its foundation in abilities to emote and engage in perception-action couplings that we share with non-human animals, rather than in the higher cognitive abilities that differentiate us from them. The fruitfulness of this reversal of emphasis from the linguistic and eminently human to the bodily and essentially common among species will have to be judged in light of the explanatory and pragmatic gains that follow from it. What seems to me certain is that this is an approach well worth exploring, especially with respect to emotional phenomena that appear in homologous form across species. Despite a tendency to treat difficult philosophical issues a little too quickly, DeLancey's book is to be commended for offering the reader a good introduction to some of the most fascinating philosophical issues raised by the emotions, and for exploring how they could offer a new perspective on some problems of continuing interest to the philosopher of mind.