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Dormant and Active Emotional States

2022-03-10, Stout, Rowland

George Pitcher marks a familiar distinction in the philosophy of emotions as follows: When it is said of someone that he has an emotion, this may be said of him either in (a) an occurrent, or in (b) a dispositional sense. A person who is frightened by a face at a window, or who gets angry at two boys because they are mistreating a dog, has an emotion in the former, occurrent, sense – he is actually in the grip of the emotion. But a person who hates his father, or is jealous of his landlord, has an emotion in the latter, dispositional, sense – he may not actually be feeling the emotion now. (Pitcher 1965, 331-2). I will take issue with this idea that there are two different senses in which someone has an emotion. While it is unquestionably the case that there is a proper distinction to be marked here, I take it that it is the distinction between an emotional state being active and the same state being dormant, not a distinction between two kinds of emotional state – occurrent and dispositional ones. I will argue that when you are in the grip of anger with the two boys for mistreating the dog you are in the very same dispositional state you will be in later when you have cooled down and are thinking about something else altogether though still angry with the two boys for mistreating the dog. When in the grip of anger you are in a dispositional state that is in the process of being manifested – it is an active dispositional state.

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Being subject to the rule to do what the rules tell you to do

2010-04, Stout, Rowland

One way to start thinking about agency is to try to distinguish the special way that reasons are involved in action from the way that reasons are involved in inanimate nature. Consider the following pair of explanations: Explanation A. The reason the soufflé collapsed is that the oven door was opened at the wrong time. Explanation B. The reason John collapsed onto the sofa was that he was exhausted after a hard day at work.

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Empathy, Vulnerability and Anxiety

2019-04-30, Stout, Rowland, Baghramian, Maria

A concept of empathy as openness to the emotional perspective of another is developed in opposition to a concept of sympathy as agreement with the emotional perspective of another. Empathy involves knowledge of how things are emotionally for the other person, which is not the same thing as knowledge of the other person’s emotions. Being open to another perspective requires the capacity to hold two perspectives in mind simultaneously–one that is one’s own perspective and at the same time the adopted perspective. This is why empathy can be so challenging for someone suffering from some kinds of anxiety.

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Critical notice : Decontaminating our view of the mind

2003, Stout, Rowland

I suppose that most people think their minds are inside their heads, and not spread around in the environment outside. Now that we are not able to make sense of the old Cartesian doctrine that minds exist in some non-material realm this looks like the only option; our minds are lodged in our brains. Perhaps we have learnt enough from Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) attack on the very meaningfulness of this way of talking about minds that we might modify our way of putting this. What we would say instead is that facts about the mental depend on facts about the brain. To put it more technically, the mental supervenes on the neurophysiological. This means roughly that if any of the facts about your mind were different then some neurophysiological fact about your brain would have to be different too; facts about the mind do not float free from facts about the brain.

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I-Seeing the anger in someone's face

2010-06, Stout, Rowland

Starting from the assumption that one can literally perceive someone’s anger in their face, I argue that this would not be possible if what is perceived is a static facial signature of their anger. There is a product/process distinction in talk of facial expression, and I argue that one can see anger in someone’s facial expression only if this is understood to be a process rather than a product

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What someone's behaviour must be like if we are to be aware of their emotions in it

2012-06, Stout, Rowland

Emotions are manifest in the behaviour that expresses them. This only makes sense if a piece of emotionally expressive behaviour is taken to be an Aristotelian process of manifesting or realising emotion. The emotions that are manifest in such processes can only be perceived if perception too is taken to be an Aristotelian process. I argue that on plausible assumptions about the nature of emotion this process must itself be one of emotional engagement with the subject of the perceived emotions. This gives us something like Gallagher's "Interactive Theory" of how we know other minds. The question remains as to how we can be aware of other people's emotional states when we are not interacting with them. The answer is that we are conscious of these emotions using the same interactive perceptual potentiality that we employ when we do engage with them emotionally, but we do not employ the full range of possibilities provided by that potentiality. For this answer to work it is essential that the 3rd- personal capacity to recognize someone’s emotional state must be seen as a limiting case of the 2nd-personal capacity to be aware of someone’s emotions by engaging with them emotionally.

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The Category of Occurrent Continuants

2016-01-01, Stout, Rowland

Arguing first that the best way to understand what a continuant is is as something that primarily has its properties at a time rather than atemporally, the paper then defends the idea that there are occurrent continuants. These are things that were, are or will be happening – like someone reading or my writing this paper for instance. The prevailing philosophical view of process is as something that is referred to with mass nouns and not count nouns. This has mistakenly encouraged the view that the only way to think of process is as the stuff of events and has obscured the possibility of thinking of processes as continuants.

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What you know when you know an answer to a question

2010-06, Stout, Rowland

A significant argument for the claim that knowing-wh is knowing-that, which is implicit in much of the literature on this, is spelt out and its significance explored. The argument includes an assumption that knowing-wh involves a subject being in a relation with an answer to a question and an assumption that answers to questions are propositions or facts. The paper considers a series of counterexamples to the conjunction of these two assumptions, developing refinements until the best one is achieved. The neatest response to the existence of this counterexample is to deny that answers must be facts.

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Mechanisms that respond to reasons : an Aristotelian approach to agency

2012-12, Stout, Rowland

Are there any mechanisms in the natural world that respond to reasons – that are sensitive to considerations about what they should do? I think that the answer is that there are approximately 6.6 billion of them on this planet alone. This is not to say that there is nothing more to being a person than being a rational agent – a reasons-responder. My claim is just that to the extent that we are agents we are mechanisms that respond to reasons.

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What are you causing in acting?

2010-08, Stout, Rowland

My target for attack in this paper is the fairly widespread view in the philosophy of action that what an agent is doing in acting in a certain kind of way is causing an event of some corresponding type. On this view agency is characterized by the agent’s causing of events. To pick one of many manifestations of this view here are Maria Alvarez and John Hyman.We can describe an agent as something or someone that makes things happen. And we can add that to make something happen is to cause an event of some kind. (Alvarez & Hyman, 1998, p. 221)