How We Feel About Terrible, Non‐existent Mafiosi*
2011; Wiley; Volume: 84; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00437.x
ISSN1933-1592
Autores Tópico(s)Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
ResumoWatching the bottom of the ninth inning of game four of the 2004 American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, we were anxious. The Yankees were up 4–3, and New York's renowned closer, Mariano Rivera, was on the mound. The announcers were starting to talk about the Red Sox's history of tragic postseason disappointment since 1918. But the game wasn't over yet! The Sox could score at any moment, and all would be well… Our hearts were racing, our palms were sweating, and we were experiencing a distinctive and uncomfortable fearful anticipation. Why did we have this affective response to the game? We endorse a commonsense explanation: The origin of our anxiety had a cognitive component and a conative component. The cognitive component was our belief about what was about to happen: that the Sox were about to lose and have their World Series hopes dashed for the 86th straight year. The conative component was a desire that that not happen. Together the cognitive and conative states produced our affective response. Watching the end of a performance of Romeo and Juliet, we were anxious. Romeo was mourning Juliet's apparent death, and starting to talk about suicide. But Juliet was only unconscious! She could wake up at any moment, and all would be well… Our hearts were racing, our palms were sweating, and we were experiencing a distinctive and uncomfortable fearful anticipation. Why did we have this affective response to the play? We propose that, again, the origin of our anxious affect had a cognitive and a conative component. But the cognitive component wasn't a belief– it was an imagining, a cognitive state analogous to belief. And the conative component wasn't a desire – it was a conative state that stands to desire as imagining stands to belief, an i-desire.1 In this paper we argue that some of our affective responses to fiction have this kind of origin: They are traceable to the interaction of cognitive and conative states, where the cognitive state is an imagining and the conative state is an i-desire. The most contentious bit of this story is the postulation of i-desires as the conative component. This is the bit that we mainly argue for here. One part of the story we just assume – that the affective response is traceable to the interaction of a cognitive and a conative component. It seems pretty clear that this sort of explanation is correct in the Red Sox case and in some other cases of affective responses to actual events.2 So we just assume that some account of this form is correct for the Red Sox case and assume, too, that accounts of the Red Sox and Romeo and Juliet cases are unified to at least this extent – that they are traceable to the same sorts of psychological mechanisms of affect-generation based on belief-like cognitive states and desire-like conative states. Within this framework, theories about the natures of the relevant cognitive and conative states face the tribunal of experience as a corporate body. We argue that a theory including i-desires does best. At the end of season five of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, head of a New Jersey mafia family, is caught up in a police bust and flees on foot. Watching this scene, we were filled with anxiety that Tony would be arrested.3 What produced this response? Again, we think that this response, like our response to the Yankees/Red Sox game, can be traced to the interactions of a cognitive, belief-like state and a conative, desire-like state. In what follows we'll argue that in the Romeo and Juliet and Sopranos cases a theory that cites a genuine desire as the conative contributor to our affective responses is implausible, and that a theory that posits i-desires is to be preferred. In our theory of mind, mental states are represented by boxes and boxes are individuated by functional role. Theories like ours postulate some cognitive mechanisms, and some representation types, and detail how the mechanisms interact with each other, and which representation types they are sensitive to. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich are the philosophers with the best worked out blueprint of our imaginative architecture (Nichols and Stich (2003)). Theirs lacks a box for i-desires – that is, it lacks a category of representations that plays a functional role that stands to the role of desires as the functional role of imaginings stands to that of beliefs. By, like them, assuming that mental states are differentiated by functional role, we make the contrast between our view and theirs clearest. We do not need to assume that mental states are solely defined by functional roles. Whether they are solely so defined we leave open. Back to The Sopranos. How is anxiety about Tony generated? It's clear from the Red Sox case that beliefs and desires can generate affective responses. The belief that something is going to happen can combine with the desire that it not happen to cause anxiety. So part of the right mental blueprint looks like this, where boxes represent mental states, arrows represent causation: The idea is that when the right proposition tokens fill the belief and desire boxes, this causes some affect. That the Red Sox are going to lose pops into the belief box. That that not happen pops into desire box. Together these states cause anxiety. Can we explain our affective responses to fiction using just these resources, without adding boxes to the blueprint? We can think of two ways to do so, neither attractive. One candidate belief/desire explanation of our affective response to The Sopranos: We genuinely believe the content of the fiction – we believe that a New Jersey mobster named "Tony Soprano" is in danger of being apprehended by the police – and this combines with a desire that the guy be safe to produce anxiety. On this explanation, the Sopranos case is not importantly different from one in which we believe a friend is about to be apprehended and desire he not be. Because of this, the explanation makes us out to be crazy, believing in a Jersey mobster we know full well doesn't exist. To some, this imputation of craziness is a selling point of the explanation—they think that affective responses to fiction are crazy—and we come back to the explanation in section three, but, rejecting its implications for our own sanity, we set it aside for now. A better sort of belief/desire explanation appeals to beliefs and desires about the fiction. In the Romeo and Juliet case, we believe that in the fiction the star-crossed lovers are about to die, we desire that they don't die in the fiction, and that makes us anxious. A story like this attracts in some cases: reading children's books with his son, one of us often wants the book to go a certain way (wants the Cat in the Hat to clean up and leave, wants Dingo Dog to be pulled over), believes it might well not go that way (the mother is right outside and the house is a sty, Dingo is so much faster than Officer Flossie), and frets. But you needn't have such a desire about the fiction Romeo and Juliet in order to feel the relevant anxiety; we didn't. The last thing that we wanted was for the play to have some sweet, happily-ever-after ending – that would be an aesthetic disaster! What we wanted was for the play to end tragically. Something similar is true in the Sopranos case. Here we just lacked the desire that the fiction be such that Tony escapes. (We have enough confidence in the writers of The Sopranos to trust that whatever they decide about whether Tony is safe or not is what is best for the fiction.) The Sopranos case is different from the Romeo and Juliet case, though, in that we didn't also have a desire that Tony not escape in the fiction. We think the examples of our reactions to Tony's and Romeo and Juliet's predicaments show that if a desire is helping to produce anxiety, the desire is not in every case one concerning how the fiction – either The Sopranos or Romeo and Juliet– goes. Michael Smith and an audience member at the 2007 Eastern APA objected that we misdescribed ourselves above and, hence, that the examples don't show what we think they show. Instead, what goes on in us is that, in addition to the desires that the show go as the writers plan and that the play goes tragically, we also have desires that in the fiction Tony escape and that in the fiction Romeo and Juliet survive. What produces anxiety, then, is the desire that in the fiction Tony escape and the belief that he won't and the desire that in the fiction Romeo and Juliet survive and the belief they won't. What accounts for our misdescribing ourselves above is that we focus on the global desires we have—that the show go as the writers plan, that the play go tragically—while neglecting the local ones—that in the fiction Tony escape, that in the fiction Romeo and Juliet survive.4 Illustrating his point, Smith described a case in which you are listening to music, knowing full well that some nasty discordant bit is coming up, and feel tense about it. What explains that? Plausibly, that you don't want to hear the nasty bit and believe you are about to. That is perfectly consistent with your thinking the piece, as a whole, is better for having the nasty bit in it and, indeed, wanting the piece as a whole to have the nasty bit in it. We agree with Smith's description of what is going on in the music case. We disagree that that account explains what went on with us as we watched Romeo and Juliet. The Smith/audience member view makes us out to be conflicted about the fiction5—wanting, because of a global desire, for the fiction to go one way and wanting, because of a local desire, for the fiction not to go that way—and you needn't be so conflicted—we weren't. Others, we think, weren't. If you were so conflicted, the fiction would disappoint you by not giving you everything you want. But Romeo and Juliet was not disappointing for us in this way. To be clear, the objection is not that, if the desire-about-the-fiction view is right, you are somehow irrational for both wanting the show to go one way and wanting it not to. Rather, the objection is that you are of two minds about the fiction and, because of this, you are sure to be (in some respect) disappointed. Note, too, that the fiction being disappointing is consistent with our wanting to engage with it and consistent with our being pleased with the fiction. When you go to a good restaurant, you know full well that you'll leave not having had everything you want—you wish you could have had the McNuggets, too—and that is occasion for disappointment even in cases in which you are, all things considered, pleased with the restaurant. If you could arrange things so that you could go to that restaurant and have everything you want on the menu, you would. Hence the disappointment. Still, you want to go to that restaurant. In fact, you might well seek out restaurants you know will disappoint you in this way: having lots of good food on the menu is a boon even if it means you can't eat each thing you want. Our objection is that our engaging with Romeo and Juliet involved no such disappointment. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet are not an occasion for any kind of disappointment with the course of the fiction. They are an occasion for a distinctive sort of saddened affect, but they are not an occasion for any kind of aesthetic disappointment – not even aesthetic disappointment that's more than compensated for by aesthetic benefits that couldn't otherwise be achieved. Summing up, both theories we can think of that explain affective responses to fiction just in terms of beliefs and desires founder. The theory in terms of beliefs and desires about, say, Tony or Romeo or Juliet makes us out to be crazy, genuinely believing the content of something we know full well to be fiction. The theory in terms of beliefs and desires about the fiction directs our wants at the wrong thing—the course of the fiction—and, hence, makes certain fictions necessarily disappointing in cases where we have conflicting desires about them.6 So we need to expand our mental architecture beyond beliefs and desires. What if we just add an imagination box to the blueprint, where imagination, like belief, is a cognitive state but in various functional ways is unlike belief?7 Doing so allows for this explanation of affect: Our imagining that Romeo and Juliet are about to kill themselves combines with some genuine desire to produce our anxious affect. Our imagining that Tony is in danger of being captured by the police combines with some desire to produce our anxious affect.8 If you subscribe to this kind of explanation, the boxology might look like this: In one way, this clearly improves on the first belief/desire explanation we considered. This explanation, unlike that one, doesn't have us believing in people we know full well don't exist. But that was only part of the problem with the first belief/desire explanation of affective responses. Like the first belief/desire explanation, this imagination/desire explanation traces those responses to desires that, for reasons we will now explain, it is implausible to attribute to us. There are a few sorts of desires that an advocate of this sort of view might cite as the one that interacts with our imaginings to produce our affective response. The desire might be the de dicto desire that people who meet Tony's description, or that fictional characters meeting Tony's description, escape from the police. You say, "I want Tony to escape" but, on this view, the desire that's really doing the affect-generating work is a desire that people who meet Tony's description—charming, rich, occasionally loving, occasionally loyal, occasionally introspective, delusional, sociopathic, murdering, coercing men—escape. Put that explicitly, it is clear you needn't have such a desire in order to experience anxiety: watching the show, we didn't. We certainly don't desire that actual people who meet Tony's description escape from the police; we didn't desire it while watching The Sopranos. We want those actual mobsters caught. (Tweaking the details of how the description is filled out doesn't seem likely to help.)9 Maybe, instead, what you want is that fictional characters meeting Tony's description escape from police. That is, you want the fictions in which such characters appear to be such that, in the fictions, the characters escape. Again, though, the idea that you need to have a general desire that, in the fictions in which they feature, delusional, murdering sociopaths with great charm escape from the police is hard to believe. We don't have that general desire. And in the Romeo and Juliet case, we certainly don't have the relevant general desire. If we have a general desire about them at all, we desire that fictional characters fitting Romeo's and Juliet's descriptions meet memorably tragic ends. And anyway, if this is the desire about the fiction doing the work, it ought to be interacting with our beliefs about the fiction to produce our affective responses, not with our imaginings, the content of which needn't be that the fiction go any way at all. The other alternative is to say that the relevant desire is a de re desire about Tony, the New Jersey mafia boss. Say, a desire that Tony is safe from the police. That desire, together with an imagining that Tony is in danger, produces our anxiety. Compare: Tyler desires that Andy be safe from the police and imagines they endanger him. So Tyler is anxious. There are two ways to understand this sort of proposal. Neither seems attractive. The desire could be a de re desire about Tony the fictional character, that he escape from the police. But, again, you needn't, and we didn't, have any such desire. Set aside issues about the ontology of fiction, and grant that there is a fictional character, Tony Soprano, to have de re desires about. The best way we can see to understand these sorts of desires about fictional characters is as desires about what the characters are like according to the fiction – that is, as desires about the content of the fiction. And, as discussed above, we don't need to have the relevant desires about the content of the fiction (i.e., that, according to the fiction, Tony escapes) in order to experience anxiety. A bit more carefully: in a case in which you know you are engaging with fiction, having the desire about the fictional character (at least) rationally requires that one have the corresponding desire about the content of the fiction, since, as you well know, the only way for the fictional character to have the property that we desire him to have is for the content of the fiction to make it so. The fictional Tony Soprano can't escape from the police unless, according to the fiction of the Sopranos, Tony escapes from the police. More strongly, what it would be for the fictional character Tony Soprano to escape from the police would be for the content of the fiction to make it so. You know all this. Likewise, Romeo and Juliet can't survive unless, according to the fiction of Romeo and Juliet, they survive. What it is for those fictional characters to survive is just for the fiction to have them survive. You know all this, too. So to have the one desire without the other would be irrational like wanting some statue to be moved without wanting its matter to be moved or wanting the Packers to win the football game without wanting them to score more points than their opponents. One needn't be a victim of any sort of irrationality in order to experience the relevant affect and we don't think we were. Hence, if the de re desire that Tony, the fictional character, escape from the police were producing our anxiety, then there would be the accompanying desire that the show go a certain way. And, as we have noted, we lacked such a desire.10 Alternatively, we could understand the proposal that you want Tony to be safe as saying that you have desires about Tony Soprano, the concrete, two-hundred fifty pound mafia boss who lives in our actual New Jersey and who you are currently imagining. But there is no such person, and you are well aware of this. Hence, you have no de re desires about any real-world mafia boss named "Tony Soprano". Compare: you are trying to get a relative to stop bothering you. Wanting to tell him to stop bothering you would make sense. Wanting to move out of the country without telling him would make sense. Wanting Tony Soprano to pay him a visit—not have it be true in a fiction that Tony visits, but have Tony visit—would not make sense. You know Tony doesn't exist. Likewise, we think, it would be crazy, in our cases, to want Tony to escape. And we aren't crazy and needn't be in order to be anxious for Tony to escape. There is an important difference between the desire that Tony be safe and the desire that Tony intimidate your relative. The desire that Tony be safe is a consequence of a desire that Tony be well. The desire that Tony intimidate your relative is an instrumental desire, the desire that Tony be well is an intrinsic desire. Timothy Schroeder pointed this out to us and argued that though it would be crazy to have instrumental desires about Tony, it would not be crazy to have intrinsic desires about him. He suggested that what produces anxiety in our case is desiring that Tony be well and imagining that he is in danger from the police. This begs the question against Schroeder, but our desiring that Tony be well, we think, is just as irrational as our desiring that Tony intimidate your relative. In both the instrumental and intrinsic case, you know that your desire is directed at someone you know does not, maybe could not, exist. That is part of what makes the desire irrational. Compare: you're a Christian. You want God to spare your dog suffering. You want God to be well. You become an atheist. Wanting God to be well, at this point, seems as irrational as wanting God to spare your dog. The intrinsic/instrumental distinction seems to be neither here nor there with respect to the rationality of these divine desires. Also, in both the instrumental and the intrinsic Tony Soprano case, you aren't going to get what you want (can't get what you want). It is unclear what it would take for you to get what you want. Focus on the intrinsic case. What, exactly, would it take to get what you want, if you want Tony to be well? That he be well on the show? If so, does wanting Tony to be well require that you also want it to be true in the fiction that Tony be well? If so, this proposal is subject to the same worry as the proposal that you have a desire about the fiction, The Sopranos. If the wanting doesn't require wanting things to go some way on the show, what would it take to satisfy your desire that Tony be well? Not that actual guys like Tony be well. Not that James Gandolfini, the actor who plays Tony, be well. There doesn't seem to be anything that could satisfy that desire. You know this. So, on pain of irrationality, you don't actually want it because you don't rationally want things you know you cannot have (as opposed to, say, fantasize about them or wish for them). (One of us endorses a stronger claim: if there is no way for things to be that could satisfy your desire that Tony be well, then there is no such desire to have.) First, we tried to limit our boxology to beliefs and desires. When we do so, the best explanation of affect appeals to beliefs and desires about the fiction. No good—it has our responses directed at the fiction rather than characters therein, and saddles us with desires about the course of the fiction that it's not plausible that we have. Next we tried to limit our boxology to beliefs, desires, and imaginings. When we do so, the best explanation of affect appeals to imaginngs and desires about characters. No good—it has us genuinely wanting things about folks we know do not, perhaps cannot exist, wanting things we know will not, perhaps cannot happen. But the nature of the cognitive state seems right and the content of the conative state seems right, too. We propose another candidate explanation: imagination and i-desire. Our imagining that Romeo and Juliet are about to die combines with our i-desire that they not die, and our imagining that Tony is in danger of being captured combines with our i-desire that Tony stay out of police custody, to produce our anxious affect. I-desire? To get a feel for it, consider imagination. Imagining, we think, is a state that is functionally different from belief. But, we think, it is in some ways functionally quite similar to belief. When watching someone being chased, you come to believe they are being chased. When watching a TV show in which someone is being chased, you come to imagine that they are being chased. When you are imagining along with a TV show, your imaginings aim to fit the fictional world just as your beliefs aim to fit the actual world. Also, imagining can combine with a desire-like state to produce motivation just as (at least, very much as) belief combines with desire to produce motivation. Merely believing that there is chocolate in front of you won't motivate you to do anything. Believing that there is chocolate in front of you and wanting to eat some chocolate might move you to eat what is in front of you. Now say you are pretending: combine imagining that there is a chocolate in front of you with some belief-like state that you have some chocolate. This won't incline you to pretend that you eat the chocolate. By contrast, imagining that there is chocolate in front of you and having a desire-like attitude toward eating some chocolate might motivate you to… What it motivates you to do is complicated.11 Our point is that you are motivated to do something when you combine imagination with a desire-like state. Imagining is importantly like believing in its role in producing action. I-desire is the imaginative analogue of desire, in important respects like desire in its ability to motivate and produce affect, and in important respects like desire in the sort of content that it takes. But it's only an analogue. The states aren't the same. Engagedly watching The Sopranos, you imagine what's happening on-screen. If Tony is eating on screen, you imagine that Tony is eating. What you i-desire needn't match what is on the screen. Concerned about Tony's weight, you might well i-desire that he stop eating. Compare: when you watch your brother eat, you believe he's eating but when you watch your brother eat, you needn't desire he eat. You might well desire he stop. (He's about to eat the last of the chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, and you want it.) When you i-desire along with a TV show, what you i-desire needn't aim to fit what is happening on the screen, just as what you desire needn't aim to fit what is going on in your life. In another way, i-desire is unlike desire with respect to content. The content of i-desires is less restricted than the content of desires. You can (rationally) have i-desires towards things you know you can't have: impossible things, things that have already happened, things that don't exist. Such i-desires wouldn't be irrational but desires with such contents would be. I-desire and imagination together produce both affect and motivation. Imagining that a monster is on the loose and i-desiring that it be caught can produce anxiety. The states can produce action, too, like yelps or averting your eyes. As a rule, the affect and motivation produced by i-desire and imagining differ from the affect and motivation produced by beliefs and desires with the same content. The affect is often (though not always) less intense—the anxiety you feel when you believe a monster is on the loose can be much more overpowering than what you feel in a movie theater.12 It can also be less durable—when the scene you are imagining along with shifts from the monster to a party, your anxiety about the monster tends to diminish. When you believe a monster is on the loose, going to a party wouldn't so tend. (The real party would have to be really absorbing. The fictional party less so.) Finally, the affect can be different in kind: imagining that there is a monster on the loose and i-desiring it be caught might produce not anxiety but, rather, excitement. For us, at least, believing there is a monster on the loose and wanting it to be caught wouldn't be exciting at all.13 Likewise, the motivation produced by i-desire/imagining pairs can be less intense than, and quite different from, that produced by belief/desire pairs. Believing there is a monster on the loose and wanting it to be caught wouldn't just move us to yelp or avert our eyes. We would run or call the ASPCA or… And if we did yelp, we'd yelp much louder than we do in a theater.14 So we think when it comes to engaging with fictions, we make use of analogues of beliefs and desires: imagination and i-desire. The imagination-belief-desire theorist, by contrast, offers only an analogue of belief. To be clear, when you i-desire that you eat something, this is not the same thing as imagining that you desire that you eat something.15 That makes i-desiring out to be a state with the functional role of imagining plus a certain sort of content. If so, i-desiring would be a state that we and the imagination-belief-desire theorist agree exists. It isn't. It's a sui generis conative state. Its role in motivating or producing affect differs from the role of imagining. The sort of content it rationally takes is different. I-desires help explain what is going on with you in the Sopranos case in the following way. You are imagining Tony is in danger and feeling anxious about this. We think some desire-like state must help to produce this anxiety. No desire needs to play such a role. In our own cases, none did. What generated the anxiety was our imagining that Tony is in danger along with our i-desire that he be safe. On our view, the Sopranos case is like a case in which you believe a friend is in danger and feel anxious about it. We think a desire-like state is needed to produce the anxiety. That desire, plausibly, has the content that your friend be safe.16 Our view is not subject to the objection we had to the proposal that the anxiety is produced, in part, by a desire that Tony the flesh-and-blood gangster be safe. The objection to your desiring that Tony be safe depended on the claims that you know Tony doesn't exist and don't desire the safety of things you know don't exist. By contrast, it isn't objectionable that you have i-desires about things you know don't exist. Compare: it isn't plausible that you believe that someone you know does not exist – Santa Claus, for example – is standing in front of you. It isn't objectionable that you imagine that someone you know does not exist – for example, Santa Claus – is standing in front of you. The same goes for desires and i-desires.17 Our view is not subject to the objection we had to the proposals according to which the anxiety is produced by a desire that the fiction be such that Tony is safe. This can be seen more clearly if we switch to the Romeo and Juliet example. On the best interpretation of the desire-about-the-fiction view, the Smith/audience member proposal that we have incompatible desires about how fictions go is correct. Our objection to that proposal was that, if the view is true, you can't get everything you want from the fiction – any way that the fiction goes is destined to be in some respect disappointing. With Romeo and Juliet, according to the Smith/audience member view, you want the fiction to be such that Romeo and Juliet survive and want it to be such that they don't. You can't have both. Hence, the fiction is bound to disappoint. We rejected this. It is, however, true on our view that you can't get everything that you something-like-want. You i-desire that Romeo and Juliet be safe. They die, so your i-desire is frustrated. You gen
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