Andrea Scarantino

A philosopher of science working on emotion definition and taxonomy, and the wiki’s first source to engage LeDoux (2012) directly. See scarantino-2018-basic-emotions.

The position

Emotions are motive states. Whether they are felt is a separate question with a separate answer — often no. This puts him in what he calls the Motivational Tradition, against both the Feeling Tradition (which defines emotions by how they feel) and the Cognitivist Tradition (which defines them by how they construe the world).

The organizing insight of his taxonomy: theories of emotion have historically defined emotions by one of three features — how they feel, how they cognize, how they motivate — and most disputes in the field are really disputes about which of the three is the explanandum, dressed up as disputes about evidence.

Why he is hard to file

He is a basic emotion theorist who concedes most of the constructionist case, which makes “pro-BET vs anti-BET” useless as a placement.

What he grants Barrett and Russell:

• Folk emotion categories are not natural kinds — “their extensions are too heterogenous for any scientifically interesting generalizations to be true of all of their members.”
• The bodily-signature evidence has not materialized: “high correlations and specificities have not been demonstrated empirically.”
• Emotions have no essences, no fixed boundaries, and massive internal variability.

What he keeps anyway: evolved, pan-cultural, causally potent affect programs with homologs in other species — a “probabilistic latent variable” model against the constructionists’ “emergent variable” model. Emotions cause the responses; they do not emerge from them.

The reconciliation is metaphysical rather than evidential. Basic emotions are HPC kinds (Boyd), so variability is what the theory predicts. And they are explicated categories — basic fear is a proper subset of folk fear — so evidence about fear writ large does not bear on them. See basic-emotions.

Where he splits from LeDoux: the explanandum

Not the neuroscience. Scarantino’s headline finding is that he and LeDoux agree about the mechanism nearly completely — same two-level control structure, same decoupling of adaptive behaviour from feeling, same higher-order account of when feelings arise, same box in the same diagram for the global motive state.

The disagreement is about what a theory of emotion is for:

• LeDoux: the central task is to explain how feelings come about. So “fear” should name the feeling, and the motive state gets a neologism (defense survival circuit).
• Scarantino: the central task is to explain how emotions motivate behaviour. So “fear” (qualified: basic fear) should name the motive state, and the feeling gets a phrase (feeling of fear).

See what-should-emotion-terms-refer-to. His argument that this choice must not be settled by appeal to common sense — Quine on conceptual truths, and the observation that lay confusion over Pluto’s demotion did not move astronomers — is the methodological core of the paper.

Where he splits from Panksepp: with LeDoux

Worth recording, because it is the one place he and LeDoux are allies against a third party. Panksepp holds that the circuits organizing adaptive responses to evolutionary challenges are the same circuits producing the associated feelings. Both Scarantino and LeDoux deny it: adaptive behaviour and feelings are implemented by different circuits. See can-we-know-animal-feelings.

The payoff Scarantino claims for his version: because activating a basic affect program need not generate any feeling, basic emotions can be ascribed to infants and non-human animals “even in the absence of agreed upon dependent measures for studying feelings in creatures without language.” Where LeDoux’s framework makes the animal question unanswerable-and-therefore-avoidable, Scarantino’s makes it unnecessary — the motive state is the thing being attributed, and it is behaviourally tractable.

On consciousness

Sympathetic to higher-order theories, neutral between HOP and HOT variants, and neutral on whether the higher-order representation must be occurrent or merely dispositional. A conscious basic emotion is therefore two mental states: the basic emotion, plus a higher-order state whose content is that one is having it. An unconscious basic emotion “remains unconscious, but it continues to motivate behavior.”

Notably, he endorses LeDoux & Brown’s (2017) cortical localization of the higher-order representation — prefrontal, posterior parietal, and insular cortex. That last item matters to where-are-feelings-constituted and is flagged there.