Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
A little dose…of judgment or reason often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature.
(Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species)INTRODUCTION
I am going to explore the nature of emotions or their counterparts as exemplified in the lives of non-human animals. Emotion is a somewhat indeterminate concept, as is that of sophistication. So I will start with a concept of emotion that I have proposed in the past as useful in human moral psychology, and with several dimensions of sophistication that we find in human emotions as so understood. Then, by considering some observations about some animals' capacities, I will estimate the degrees to which such animals approximate such sophistication.
I have proposed (R. Roberts [1988, 2003]) that the central cases of human emotions are “concern-based construals.” This conception makes emotions out to be a special kind of perception. Perception is not merely sensory reception, but reception that is so structured as to make some kind of sense of the object. The paradigm human emotions are events of receptivity structured by a synthetic unity of “factual” and “evaluative” attribution. Thus emotions ascribe some character or other to the situations they are about, and this character is both “descriptive” and “evaluative” (concern-based – a matter of care or interest to the emotion's subject).
In human beings, the sensory content of perception is subject to extreme reduction or attenuation relative to the perception's content or intentional object – what is perceived.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.