Conceptual Emotions and Emotional Concepts: Possible Neurobiological Foundations for the Insights of Classical Pragmatists

This paper explores possible neurobiological foundations for some of the central claims of the classical pragmatists.  It draws heavily on the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.  It also makes use of works by Joseph Ledoux, especially The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human, as well as The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life.  The paper considers three major shifts in the understanding of the brain, each of which provide biological support for classical pragmatic insights.

1. The predictive rather than the perceptual brain.  Rather than viewing the brain as a stimulus/response organ with the function of presenting sensory experience for the purpose of enabling bodily responses, it is now widely held that the primary function of the brain is to predict what responses are necessary by (and usually in) the body to survive.  Survival is the central goal of the brain and the brain learns through iterative pursuits of this goal at various levels leading to reinforced behaviors that tend toward survival.  This means that all learning by the brain is goal oriented.  This provides a strong biological foundation for Peirce's pragmatic maxim and Dewey's insistence on the intrinsic relationship of meaning to value.
2. Interoception before exteroception.  Once the brain is understood first as a survival mechanism rather than a perception mechanism one can then ask what the brain needs to know to best fulfill its mission of keeping the organism (person) alive.  Primary emphasis is now placed on how the brain keeps track of and coordinates all of the activities inside the body.  This is interoception and it contrasts with exteroception, the bodily perception of the external world.  Barrrett and Ledoux both contend that the origin of emotions lies in interoception.  Ledoux credits William James for understanding the relationship of emotion to the brain's control of visceral systems, that is to the brain's efforts to maintain homeostasis within the body by sustaining internal systems and responding to internal needs.  Barrett emphasizes the importance of the "body budget" in both producing and regulating emotions.  Because emotions both emerge from and are used in adjusting to internal needs, they become highly individualized.  For Barrett, this insight helps to overthrow classic and still persistent ideas of identical emotional circuits present in the brains of all humans and passed down to humans through evolution; the so-called animal brain.  For Barrett and Ledoux this leads to a separation of intellect and emotion that is not born out by neuroscience.  It also leads to such things as misguided efforts to find "emotional signatures" in facial recognition software and to failures to integrate emotion and mind in psychotherapy.  Barrett credits James for first understanding that there is no such thing as specific and shared emotions such as anger, but rather a population of individual emotional responses that can be classified under the idea of something like anger.  Barrett also criticizes Dewey for affirming an essentialist view of emotion completely at odds with the position taken by James.  Barrett's position allows emotions to be understood more as learned concepts than as more primitive brain circuits.  If emotions are concepts that can be learned, humans have far greater freedom to change emotional concepts than the emotion circuit theory would allow for.  This makes emotional growth an important part of human flourishing.
3. Cognitive mapping.  It is now widely held that a primary function of the brain is mapping models of the world and using these models in the pursuit of goals.  This means that goals drive cognition.  However, the brain never creates a single map of the world to make predictions in service of goals, but rather maps within maps, within maps.  In sorting out possible relationships between maps, the brain must "vote" on which maps are relevant and which are not.  Emotions provide important guidance in goal selection and therefore influence the outcome of these neural votes.  Barrett proposes the idea of a concept cascade that uses the top-down predictive behavior of the brain guided by emotion to explain human experiences rather than bottom up biochemical deterministic explanations of behavior.  An important part of Barrett's theory of emotion is the role played by the "affective niche" of individuals.  The affective niche is dominated by the body budget concerns of individuals, but extends to the wider world and includes those things understood to be relevant to the body budget such as family, friends, and community.  Barrett contends that it is very difficult to think outside of one's affective niche in ways that will influence behavior.  This supports Dewey's notion of the associational character of learning and of politics.  His idea of the "public," or better of different "publics" extending in wider circles of association, as associations created through common goals demonstrates the importance of connecting learning and politics to emotion.  It also suggests that true learning and true political discourse can only occur when one is able to enter the affective niche of another person.  Barrett also notes that gaining greater "emotional granularity" allows for better public discourse between individuals and makes it more likely that individuals can change both their own and community outcomes.

These three areas do not exhaust the connections between contemporary neuroscience and pragmatism.  Additionally, pragmatism does not itself depend on these neuroscientific claims being widely affirmed.  However, the intersections between the science and philosophy are sufficiently tantalizing to suggest that pragmatism is more a paradigm for uniting multiple fields of human study rather than just a movement in philosophy.