What Do Emotions Represent

It is widely agreed that emotions have intentional objects. In fact, they are said to represent both formal objects (e.g., fear represents danger) and particular objects (e.g., one might be afraid of a spider or an exam). But there is little agreement about how emotions represent. The challenge of explaining how emotions represent is deepened on theories that associate emotions with somatic states of some kind (e.g., William James’s view that emotions are feelings of bodily change). Emotions represent things outside the body, but somatic states, such as bodily perceptions, are usually thought to represent bodily things. This puzzle (called here the Somantodox) has been addressed in a variety of ways. A number of proposals are reviewed here: embodied appraisal theory, affordances, Sartre’s existential theory, and enactivism. Building on the strengths and weaknesses of these, a new proposal is offered called the embodied imperative theory, according to which the body imparts a sense of to-be-doneness. Rather than saying fear represents danger, it would be more perspicuous, on this proposal, to say fear represents an object or situation as something to-be-escaped. This is termed a core-dynamic theme.