Twelve Questions for the Theory of Affective Pragmatics

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Notes

¹ Searle originally used the label Declarations to designate what I call Proclamatives. As I explained in my target article, I have repurposed this term to designate the category of nonlinguistic Declaratives_EE, the communicative point of which is to describe what the world is like. The similarity between the terms Declaration and Declaratives_EE has understandably led to confusion in some commentators. For example, Fischer argues that she does not see what analogy there could possibly be between my Declaratives_EE and Searle's Declarations, the communicative point of which is to bring about states of affairs just by saying so, as we do when we baptize a child, appoint someone as chairman, or fire an employee. The answer is that there is no analogy whatsoever. My Declaratives_EE are intended to be analogous with Searle's Assertives, not with Searle's Declarations, which I referred to as Proclamatives in my article. It may turn out that my choice of label for nonlinguistic Declaratives_EE is unwise because it is unnecessarily confusing. In previous drafts I called them Representatives_EE, which may ultimately work better.

² EE stands for “emotional expression.”

³ A different question is whether the meaning of a sentence determines its truth value. My view is that it does (once we have removed ambiguities and made vague expressions precise), whereas Fernández-Dols, with inspiration from Austin, seems open to the possibility that “[a] spoken statement, even the simplest one, has an undetermined truth value” (p. 465). The discussion of this additional disagreement would take me too far afield.

⁴ Fischer and Sauter also report on the case of surprise expressions, which appear to be recognizable cross-culturally through the snapshot method but are often not spontaneously produced when surprise is experienced, and they wonder what TAP makes of this difference between perception and production of surprise expressions. My view is that the recognition of the snapshot of a highly prototypical facial expression of surprise across cultures does not “point to a one-to-one mapping of emotion type and EE” even at the level of perception, contrary to what Fischer and Sauter suggest. All that it shows is that there exists one expression of surprise—the one captured by the snapshot—that is recognized cross-culturally. That very expression of surprise captured by the snapshot may rarely be produced spontaneously, and it may also be the case that no visual displays—prototypical or not—are reliably produced when surprise is experienced. I take this to show that there is a many-to-many association between emotion types and types of facial expressions at the level of both production and perception.

⁵ To say that X and Y are statistically correlated relative to background knowledge k is simply to say that p(X given Y & k) is higher or lower than p(X given k).

⁶ Ekman, Russell and Scherer are three examples of emotion scientists from different research programs who do not consider emotions to necessarily involve states of consciousness. At least since the mid 1990s, Ekman has described subjective experiences as being a distinctive feature of basic emotions but not a ‘sine qua non’ feature (and Ekman 1992 did not even include subjective experience among the defining characteristics of basic emotions). Russell (2003) has described emotion episodes as commonly having core affect as their parts, where core affect is a neurophysiological state that is consciously accessible as a feeling. But Russell has added that core affect is not necessarily involved in episodes of emotions, and that core affect itself need not be accessed as a feeling (it has to be accessible but not accessed). Scherer (2005) has described subjective experience as just one of five components of emotions (the others being an appraisal component, an autonomic physiology component, an action tendency component, and a motor expression component), allowing emotions to be instantiated whenever three of these five components co-occur, which allows for emotions which do not involve any qualia.

⁷ Fridlund states that I starkly dichotomize influence and information, but this is yet another misreading of my target article. I have clearly stated that Dawkins and Krebs (not me!) initially dichotomized information and influence, and then I explained why they changed their mind, coming to the conclusion that, to quote my article, “the extraction of natural information on the basis of statistical correlations and the attempt to exercise influence are complementary and equally important aspects of nonverbal communication” (p. 169).

⁸ A possible exception concerns a handful of emotional expressions that Darwin takes to have evolved through sexual selection, but I disregard this case in what follows. I also disregard the case of the emotional expressions that are direct effects of the activation of the nervous system or produced by antithesis. My focus throughout this section is exclusively on those emotional expressions Darwin explains through the principle of serviceable associated habits.

⁹ I notice in passing that Fridlund (1991, p. 5) seemed open to the idea that Darwin thought of emotional expression as exaptations. I focus on Fridlund's response to my target article here, without trying to reconcile different stages of Fridlund's thinking.