Uku Tooming is a Research Fellow in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He works primarily on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and epistemology.
A post by Uku Tooming
According to sentimental perceptualism (or emotional perceptualism), affective experience is a basic source of knowledge about normative and evaluative matters, like perceptual experience is the basic source of knowledge about descriptive matters (see Milona & Naar 2020; Tappolet 2016). One way to cash this out is in terms of justification: affective experiences about X (where X is some scenario or situation) can immediately (but defeasibly) justify evaluative judgments about X, like perceptual experiences can immediately (but defeasibly) justify descriptive judgments.
For the perceptual analogy to hold promise, it should be substantive enough to make it plausible that affect is a fitting candidate for being basic source of justification in the same way as perception is. In particular, there should be epistemically significant common features that are shared by both perception and affective experience.
One relevant question to consider is whether perception and affect function similarly in imaginative contexts. Much of our affective and evaluative life is concerned with future and counterfactual scenarios, not just with what is present at hand. If the justificatory power of affective experience were limited only to affect that is felt in response to events experienced in the present, then it would be highly unlikely that imagination could do the epistemic work that sentimental perceptualists assign to it. The perceptual analogy should therefore transfer also to imaginative uses of perception and affect: the justification of evaluative beliefs on the basis of affective imaginings should have the same structure as the justification of descriptive beliefs on the basis of perceptual imaginings.
Before going on, here are some clarifications. By affective imagining, I mean imaginings that include projecting one’s affective reaction to imagined X and that thereby put one in a position to consider how one would feel about X if it obtained. By perceptual imagining, I mean imaginings that include projecting one’s perceptual experience to imagined X and that thereby put one in a position to consider how X would look like if it obtained.
With regard to perceptual imaginings, there are good reasons to think that they can justify beliefs about how things could or would look like under a range of perceptible changes because perceptual capacities are employed also in perceptual imaginings, and the latter inherit the same structural constraints that corresponding perceptual experiences have. In virtue of this, perceptual imaginings presumably inherit from perceptual experiences the same kind of epistemic power (compare Balcerak Jackson 2018, 220).
At first glance, this also seems to apply to affect and affective imaginings. After all, in imagining one’s affective response to some scenario, one presumably employs the same affective capacities as in responding affectively to some scenario that is present at hand. Notice, however, that this leaves open the possibility that affective capacities have evolved to respond to imagined scenarios differently than to scenarios that are experienced in the present. If there is a difference and that difference is significant with respect to the justificatory force of affective imagination, then this suggests that we should not think that the justificatory force of affective imaginings is analogous to the justificatory force of perceptual imaginings.
This possibility becomes salient when we consider the use of affective imaginings in predicting one’s affective reactions to future events. In the case of future-oriented affective imagining, affective capacities being in proper order does not ensure that the affective imagining in which they are deployed is geared toward accurate predictions. Rather, there are empirical reasons to think the proper functioning of the affective system makes it likely that affective imaginings misestimate future affect and thereby, if affect were a form of value representation, it would also make it likely that affective imaginings misestimate the value of future affairs.
Why should we think that the affective imagination is not geared toward accuracy with respect to future contents? The reason comes from decades long research on affective forecasting which indicates that people are systematically prone to error in their predictions about their future affective reactions. Although they are mostly accurate about the valence of their feelings, they tend to overestimate, and sometimes underestimate, the intensity and duration of their affective reactions (Wilson & Gilbert 2005). The tendency to overestimate is also known as ‘impact bias’.
There are empirical reasons to believe that these misestimations serve a purpose. Morewedge and Buechel (2013) have argued that impact bias evolved because it motivates one to produce the predicted event oneself. Accordingly, they hypothesized that misestimating the affective impact of an event increases one’s motivation to either produce or avoid it. They confirmed three predictions: (1) people were less prone to impact bias when they were not committed to producing the predicted event than when they were so committed; (2) people were more prone to impact bias when they believed that they were able to influence the event in question than when they did not believe that; and (3) affective forecasts influenced agents’ effort to bring about the predicted event. Morewedge and Buechel took those results to suggest that the pervasive inaccuracies that affective imaginings exhibit are outcomes of the proper functioning of the affective system. If they are right, the affective system does not seem to have evolved to accurately represent offline future contents. Instead, its function is to contribute to one’s motivation to pursue the represented content. This makes it arguably different from the perceptual mechanisms whose function to accurately represent the world is preserved in their future-oriented imaginative use.
Given these differences between perception and affect, there is thus a reason to doubt that the analogy between them is deep enough to treat the epistemic significance of the latter on the model of the former. While the constraints on the perceptual system in its offline use are plausibly inherited from the constraints on its online use, in that its proper function is to model perceptual appearances accurately in both contexts, the constraints on the offline use of the affective system are not geared toward accuracy.
In response to this issue, a sentimental perceptualist could dispute the assumption that ordinary perception functions to convey an accurate picture of the world. If it didn’t aim at accuracy, the asymmetry between perception and affect would arguably break down. Suppose that both the primary function of perception and emotion is motivational, not representational. If that were the case, then there would be room to argue that the justificatory powers of perception and affect are sufficiently similar for sentimental perceptualism to appeal to it. However, if that were the case, it might still put pressure on sentimental perceptualism because the latter seems more consistent with the more conservative view of perception according to which perception aims at accuracy.
References
Balcerak Jackson, M. (2018). Justification by imagination. In F. Macpherson & F. Dorsch (Eds.), Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory. Oxford University Press.
Milona, M. and Naar, H. 2020. Sentimental perceptualism and the challenge from cognitive bases. Philosophical Studies, 177(10), 3071–3096.
Morewedge, C.K. and Buechel, E.C. 2013. Motivated underpinnings of the impact bias in affective forecasts. Emotion, 13(6), 1023–1029.
Tappolet, C. 2016. Emotions, Values, and Agency. Oxford University Press.
Wilson, T.D. and Gilbert, D.T. 2005. Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134.