How to Do Things with Emotional Expressions: The Theory of Affective Pragmatics

ABSTRACT

It is widely accepted that emotional expressions can be rich communicative devices. We can learn much from the tears of a grieving friend, the smiles of an affable stranger, or the slamming of a door by a disgruntled lover. So far, a systematic analysis of what can be communicated by emotional expressions of different kinds and of exactly how such communication takes place has been missing. The aim of this article is to introduce a new framework for the study of emotional expressions that I call the theory of affective pragmatics (TAP). As linguistic pragmatics focuses on what utterances mean in a context, affective pragmatics focuses on what emotional expressions mean in a context. TAP develops and connects two principal insights. The first is the insight that emotional expressions do much more than simply expressing emotions. As proponents of the Behavioral Ecology View of facial movements have long emphasized, bodily displays are sophisticated social tools that can communicate the signaler's intentions and requests. Proponents of the Basic Emotion View of emotional expressions have acknowledged this fact, but they have failed to emphasize its importance, in part because they have been in the grip of a mistaken theory of emotional expressions as involuntary readouts of emotions. The second insight that TAP aims to articulate and apply to emotional expressions is that it is possible to engage in analogs of speech acts without using language at all. I argue that there are important and so far largely unexplored similarities between what we can “do” with words and what we can “do” with emotional expressions. In particular, the core tenet of TAP is that emotional expressions are a means not only of expressing what's inside but also of directing other people's behavior, of representing what the world is like and of committing to future courses of action. Because these are some of the main things we can do with language, the take home message of my analysis is that, from a communicative point of view, much of what we can do with language we can also do with non-verbal emotional expressions. I conclude by exploring some reasons why, despite the analogies I have highlighted, emotional expressions are much less powerful communicative tools than speech acts.

KEYWORDS:

• Basic emotion theory
• behavioral ecology view
• emotion
• emotional expressions
• evolution of language

Acknowledgments

This article has been a long time in the making, so I am afraid I will forget to thank some of the people who have helped me make it better, although they are not responsible for any of the residual shortcomings. I begin by thanking Dacher Keltner, Daniel Cordaro, Alan Fridlund, and Jim Russell for agreeing to participate in the Great Expressions debate I moderated in 2015 as editor of Emotion Researcher. I have learned a ton from that fascinating debate, which took months to organize and execute, and some of the central ideas of this article have emerged as I was trying to find common ground among debaters. I also thank Dorit Bar-On and Mitch Green for inviting me to inspiring workshops at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at the University of Virginia that got me started on the project of making sense of emotional communication. My gratitude also goes to Josef Behr, Julia Fischer, Trip Glazer, York Gunther, Mara McGuire, Richard Moore, Gerald Moshammer, Eddy Nahmias, Achim Stephan, Dan Weiskopf, and many others I am unfortunately forgetting for feedback on earlier manuscripts and/or for discussions of specific points of analysis. Finally, I thank audiences for helpful questions at the workshop on language evolution at the Center for Mind and Brain in Berlin; at the Philosophy of Science Association Meeting in Atlanta; at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Charleston; at the Emotion Research Group meeting in Toronto; and at talks at the University of Missouri, Saint Louis, at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany, and at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Funding

I thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for funding in the spring 2015 semester during my stay at the University of Osnabrueck in Germany. I also thank the John Templeton Foundation for funding in the spring 2016 semester under the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project. The opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of either the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation or the John Templeton Foundation.

Notes

¹ Appraisal theorists and psychological constructionists have also developed influential theories of emotional expressions (see, e.g., Russell & Fernández-Dols, 1997; Scherer, 2000), but I won't be able to discuss their theories in this article except tangentially. Similarly, I won't be able to consider the rich philosophical literature on the nature and function of emotional expressions (see, e.g., Abell & Smith, 2016; Bar-On, 2013; Glazer, 2016; Green, 2007). Both tasks must be left to other articles due to space constraints.

² For example, hearts have the selected function of pumping blood, because pumping blood in the past contributed to the selection of heart-bearing organisms. Helpful overviews of the concepts of function in biology and philosophy include Wouters (2003) and Garson (2016).

³ The principle of antithesis seems to contradict Darwin's claim that emotional expressions did not evolve in order to communicate, because in this case the selected effect of the expression seems to be selected precisely to communicate an “opposite frame of mind.” I disregard this problem in what follows (see Dewey, 1894, for an early proposal on how to eliminate this contradiction).

⁴ Darwin's opposition to the idea that emotional expressions are adaptations for the purpose of communicating must be understood in its historical context. In Darwin's time, the dominant theory of expression was Bell's (1844) theory, according to which “many of our facial muscles are “a special provision” by God for the “sole object” of communicating our emotions (Bell as quoted in Darwin 1872, p. 11). Darwin's primary concern was to argue that expressions have not been given to men by God but, rather, emerged from evolution. To make this point, Darwin denied Bell's claim that expressions have the selected function of communicating about inner states, as this was Bell's rationale for assuming that God had given them to men. Of course, Darwin could have chosen another path, namely, conceding that human emotions are there because of their communicative function but denying the other half of Bell's thesis and show that evolution, rather than God, had been the granting authority.

⁵ In Scarantino (in press), I argue that we should replace mandatory causation with probabilistic causation in order to have a plausible version of basic emotion theory. I label the updated version of the theory the “new basic emotion theory,” or New BET.

⁶ In some cases, the very same muscles will be involved in emotional expressions and in other facial movements: The raising of the eyebrows can be featured both in the expression of surprise and as a conversational signal.

⁷ Furthermore, it is sometimes assumed that in order for communication to take place, the recipient must pick up the information carried by the signal. I do not make this assumption either, allowing a signal to communicate insofar as it is produced in order to influence through information transfer, whether or not the recipient picks up such information and is influenced by it.

⁸ The notion of an utterance ranges over both written and spoken tokenings of sentences.

⁹ As I quoted earlier, Searle's term of choice for what I propose to label Proclamatives is Declarations. The term Declarations is confusing on multiple levels. First, assertions generally consist of declarative sentences, so the term Declarations wrongly suggests the inclusion of assertions as a paradigmatic member. Second, in animal communication theory, the term declarative is commonly used to characterize signals that are descriptive rather than directive in nature. For example, pointing is distinguished into “declarative pointing” and “imperative pointing,” with the former aiming to draw attention to what the world is like and the latter aiming to get something from a recipient (Tomasello, 2008). This is to say that declarative pointing is conceptually closer to what Searle calls an Assertive than what he calls a Declaration, with which it has nothing in common. For these reasons, I put the term Declarative (rather than Declaration) to a new use in a later section, and use from here on the term Proclamative to characterize speech acts that make it so by saying so (“You are now husband and wife”).

¹⁰ An alternative is the so-called code model of linguistic communication (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). According to it, the speaker encodes a certain non-natural meaning into a linguistic utterance, and the hearer decodes such meaning using the same code, where a code is a conventional mapping between words and what the words non-naturally mean. Despite its historical importance and fruitful applications to engineering problems of communication (Shannon, 1948), the code model is now widely considered inadequate for understanding the nature of linguistic communication, because much of what is communicated linguistically goes beyond what is conventionally encoded in the words being uttered.

¹¹ Searle (1969) added that there are limitations to what can be requested without relying on language. For example, he suggested that “one cannot request of someone that he, e.g., undertake a research project on the problem of diagnosing and treating mononucleosis in undergraduates in American universities” unless language is available (p. 38). Tomasello (2008) has rejected Searle's claim, emphasizing that if there is a preliminary discussion on who will undertake a research project on the problem of diagnosing and treating mononucleosis in undergraduates in American universities, and the teacher wraps things up by pointing to a particular student, the teacher has thereby nonlinguistically requested that the student undertake such a project. This is true, but Searle's general point still stands. Unless linguistic conventions are available prior to gesturing, gesturing alone cannot generate a request to undertake a research project on the problem of diagnosing and treating mononucleosis in undergraduates in American universities.

¹² The converse is also true: Acts of speech are not necessarily speech acts. As Green (2007, p. 70) noted, I can utter a sentence in a microphone to test it without performing any speech act.

¹³ For an influential attempt to explore the communicative dimensions of gestures and their roles in the evolution of language, see Tomasello (2008).

¹⁴ I am not sure about the existence of analogs of linguistic Proclamations like uniting in matrimony, baptizing, firing, sentencing, and so on. These speech acts appear to depend on conventional linguistic rules in a more radical way than other types of speech acts, and so it is far from clear that they can survive in a world that contains only natural meaning. This is not to say that is it impossible to conceive of non-linguistic conventions that would allow showings to make it so the way they allow sayings to make it so. For example, there could be a culture that allows couples to get married by non-verbally expressing happiness in the right circumstances just the way it allows them to get married by saying “I do” in the right circumstances. This is a topic worthy of further investigation, but for now I bracket the issue and assume that we can do with emotional expressions at least four of the five things we can do with language.

¹⁵ If Proclamatives_EE turn out to exist, there will be more than four categories of social motives conveyed by emotional expressions.

¹⁶ Grice's (1957) view was that natural meaning is factive, namely, that some X can naturally mean some Y just in case Y is instantiated. I have argued against this way of understanding natural meaning. On my view, X can naturally mean Y even if Y is not the case (see Scarantino, 2015b).

¹⁷ Ekman (1997, p. 318) also said that emotional expressions carry information about “the person's thoughts: plans, expectations and memories.” I cover the notion of “plans” in my discussion of emotional expressions as commitments to action. The other two categories of “expectations” and “memories” are unclear, so I disregard them in what follows. Ekman's specific examples of memories also seem unconvincing (e.g., he argued that an anger expression carries the information that the agent is remembering earlier cases in which he or she was offended, which may happen on occasion but appears false as a general rule).

¹⁸ Another possibility I do not explore in this article is that the expressions themselves may have representational qualities independent of the emotions about which they carry natural information. For instance, emotional expressions could be functionally referential in the same sense in which vervet monkey alarm calls are functionally referential, namely, by being taken to stand for particular external referents in the world. For example, a vervet monkey snake alarm call represents the world as dangerous by virtue of correlating with the fear of signalers; it also represents the world as containing a snake by virtue of correlating with snakes and being taken to stand for them by signal recipients (Scarantino & Clay, 2014).