In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions (Routledge Revivals)

And Other Essays in the Philosophy of Education

Israel Scheffler

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136955600
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildung Allgemein

First published in 1991, In Praise of Cognitive Emotions comprises fourteen of Scheffler's most recent essays – all of which challenge contemporary notions of education and rationality. While defending the ideal of rationality, he insists that rationality not be identified with a mental faculty or a mechanism of inference but taken rather as the capactity to grasp principles and purposes and to evaluate them in the light of relevant reasons. Examining a broad range of issues – from computers in school to math education, from metaphor to morality – these essays are unified by Scheffler's conviction of the primacy of critical thought in education.

Scheffler is especially concerned to promote a broad interpretation of rationality to counteract the narrowing of vision accompanying the technological revolution now sweeping education. Addressing three specific areas of curriculum, the work offers a critique of computer applications to education, develops a notion of strategic rationality in understanding mathematical reasoning, and, contrary to prevalent notions of moral education, connects reason with care, thus emphasizing the intimate connection between emotion and reason and challenging the dominant perception of the two as oppositional.

Part I
Human Nature

1
In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions

The mention of cognitive emotions may well evoke emotions of perplexity or incredulity. For cognition and emotion, as everyone knows, are hostile worlds apart. Cognition is sober inspection; it is the scientist’s calm apprehension of fact after fact in his relentless pursuit of Truth. Emotion, on the other hand, is commotion—an unruly inner turbulence fatal to such pursuit but finding its own constructive outlets in aesthetic experience and moral or religious commitment.

Strongly entrenched, this opposition of cognition and emotion must nevertheless be challenged, for it distorts everything it touches: mechanizing science, it sentimentalizes art, while portraying ethics and religion as twin swamps of feeling and unreasoned commitment. Education, meanwhile— that is to say, the development of mind and attitudes in the young—is split into two grotesque parts: unfeeling knowledge and mindless arousal. My purpose here is to help overcome the breach by outlining basic aspects of emotion in the cognitive process.

Some misgivings about this purpose will, I hope, be allayed by a preliminary word. My aim, to begin with, is not reductive; I am concerned neither to reduce emotion to cognition nor cognition to emotion, only to show how cognitive functioning employs and incorporates diverse emotional elements—these elements themselves acquiring cognitive significance thereby. I am emphatically not suggesting that cognitions are essentially emotions, or that emotions are, in reality, only cognitions. Nevertheless, I hold that cognition cannot be cleanly sundered from emotion and assigned to science, while emotion is ceded to the arts, ethics, and religion. All these spheres of life involve both fact and feeling; they relate to sense as well as sensibility.

Second, though applauding the cognitive import of emotions, I do not propose to surrender intellectual controls to wishful thinking, nor shall I portray the heart as giving special access to a higher truth.¹ Control of

Presented as a special lecture in May 1976 at the 129th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Published in Teachers College Record, 79, no. 2 (1977): 171–86.

wishful thinking is utterly essential in cognition; it operates, however, not through an unfeeling faculty of Reason but through the organization of countervailing critical interests in the process of inquiry. These interests of a critical intellect are, in principle, no less emotive in their bearing than those of wayward wish. The heart, in sum, provides no substitute for critical inquiry; it beats in the service of science as well as of private desire.

Finally, I concede it to be undeniable that certain emotional states may be at odds with sound processes of judgment and decision making. Overpowering agitations may derail the course of reasoning; greed, jealousy, or lust may misdirect it; depression or terror may bring it to a total halt. Conversely, the effect of rational judgment may well be to moderate, even wholly to dissipate, certain emotions by falsifying their factual presuppositions: anger fades, for example, when it turns out the injury was accidental or caused by someone other than first supposed; fear evaporates when the menacing figure becomes the tree’s dancing shadow. It does not follow from these cases, however, that emotion as such is uniformly hostile to cognitive endeavors, nor may we properly conclude that cognition is, in general, free of emotional engagement. Indeed, emotion without cognition is blind, and, as I shall hope particularly to show in the sequel, cognition without emotion is vacuous.

Emotions in the Service of Cognition

Considering now the various roles of emotion in cognition, I divide the field, for convenience, into two main parts, the first having to do with the organization of emotions generally in the service of critical inquiry, and the second having to do with specifically cognitive emotions. Under the first rubric I shall treat: (a) rational passions,² (b) perceptive feelings, and (c) theoretical imagination. I turn first to the rational passions, that is to say, to the emotions undergirding the life of reason.

Rational Passions

The life of reason is one in which cognitive processes are organized in accord with controlling rational ideals and norms. Such organization involves characteristic patterns of thought, action, and evaluation comprising what may be called rational character. Thus it also requires suitable emotional dispositions. It demands, for example, a love of truth and a contempt for lying, a concern for accuracy in observation and inference, and a corresponding repugnance at error in logic or fact. It demands revulsion at distortion, disgust at evasion, admiration of theoretical achievement, respect for the considered arguments of others. Failing such demands, we incur rational shame; fulfilling them makes for rational self-respect.

Like moral character, rational character requires that the right acts and judgments be habitual; it also requires that the right emotions be attached to the right acts and judgments.³ “A rational man,” says R.S.Peters, “cannot, without some special explanation, slap his sides and roar with laughter or shrug his shoulders with indifference if he is told that what he says is irrelevant, that his thinking is confused and inconsistent or that it flies in the face of the evidence.”⁴ The suitable deployment in conduct of emotional dispositions such as love and hate, contempt and disgust, shame and selfesteem, respect and admiration indeed defines what is meant, quite generally, by the internalization of ideals and principles in character. The wonder is not that rational character is thus related to the emotions but that anyone should ever have supposed it to be an exception to the general rule.

Rational character constitutes an intellectual conscience; it monitors and curbs evasions and distortions; it combats inconsistency, unfairness to the facts, and wishful thinking. In thus exercising control over undesirable impulses, it works for a balance in thought, an epistemic justice, which requires its own special renunciations and develops a characteristic cognitive discipline. There is, however, no question here of the control of impulses through a”bloodless reason,”⁵ as control is exercised through the structuring of emotions themselves. Rationality, as John Dewey put it,

is not a force to evoke against impulse and habit. It is the attainment of a working harmony among diverse desires…. The elaborate systems of science are born not of reason but of impulses at first slight and flickering; impulses to handle, move about, to hunt, to uncover, to mix things separated and divide things combined, to talk and to listen. Method is their effectual organization into continuous dispositions of inquiry, development and testing. It occurs after these acts and because of their consequences. Reason, the rational attitude, is the resulting disposition…Z. The man who would intelligently cultivate intelligence will widen, not narrow, his life of strong impulses while aiming at their happy coincidence in operation.⁶

This coincidence, I emphasize, requires appropriate organization of feelings and sentiments in the interests of intelligent control.

Perceptive Feelings

Having seen the role of emotions in the internalization of rational norms, let us consider now their employment in perception. For they are not only interwoven with our cognitive ideals and evaluative principles; they are also intimately tied to our vision of the external world. Indeed, they help to construct that vision and to define the critical features of that world.

These critical features—however specified—are the objects of our evaluative attitudes, the foci of our appraisals of the environment. Our habits and judgments are keyed in to these appraisals; we define ourselves and orient our actions in the light of our situation as appraised. Characteristic orientations are associated with distinctive emotional dispositions, and both involve seeing the environment in a certain light: is it, for example, beneficial or harmful, promising or threatening, fulfilling or thwarting?⁷ The subtle and intricate web relating adult feeling and orientation to adult perception of the environment is a product of evolutionary development, to be sure, but also of the special circumstances of individual biography. Acquiring human significance through biographical linkage with critical features of the environment, our feelings come indeed to signify—to serve as available cues for interpreting the situation.

Fear of a particular person, for example, presupposes that that person is regarded as dangerous—danger being a critical feature of the environment calling for a special orientation in response. There need, however, be no independent evidence, in every case, of the threat we sense: the characteristic feeling that has become associated for us with past dangers itself serves us as a cue. Interpreting that feeling as fear, we at once characterize our own state and ascribe danger to the environment. Indeed, we may thence proceed to an explicit attribution of danger, prompted by cues of feeling. Pursuing a more abstract direction in forming our cognitive concepts, we may, further, come to describe a certain situation as terrifying, ascribing to it, independently of our own state, the capacity to arouse fear. Thus employing the emotions as parameters, we gain enormous new powers of fundamental description, while abstracting from actual conditions of feeling.

The notion that aesthetic experience, for example, is peculiarly and purely a matter of emotion ignores such manifold connections of feeling and fact— both fact as embodied in the art work and fact as represented therein. Relative to the latter, H.D.Aiken writes:

Just as in ordinary circumstances an emotional response is the product of a perceived situation which is apprehended by the individual as promising or threatening, so the expressiveness of an imaginative work arises, at least in part, from the fact that it provides a dramatic representation of an action of which the evoked emotion is the expressive counterpart. And such a representation must be understood as such if the expressive values of the work are to become actual; without it such emotion as the observer might experience would have no ground, and if, by a miracle, it could be sustained, it would still remain the private, dumb, inexpressive importation of the observer himself. As such it would be nothing more than an accidental, adventitious subjective coloring which, having no artistic basis in the thing perceived, would be devoid of aesthetic relevance to it. Aesthetically relevant emotion in art is something which is expressed to us by the action or gesture of the work itself; it is something aroused and sustained by the work as an object for contemplation, and it is found there as a projected quality of the action.⁸

That emotion is thus tied to a representational understanding of the work of art does not imply, however, that this understanding must be antecedently fashioned, in complete isolation from the feelings. This point must be especially emphasized because the familiar notion of the work of art as “an object for contemplation” may carry contrary, and therefore misleading, connotations. In fact, I believe, the very feelings through which we respond to the content of a work serve us also in interpreting this content. Reading our feelings and reading the work are, in general, virtually inseparable processes.

The cognitive role of the emotions in aesthetic contexts has been emphasized by Nelson Goodman in a recent discussion. He writes:

The work of art is apprehended through the feelings as well as through the senses. Emotional numbness disables here as definitely if not as completely as blindness or deafness. Nor are the feelings used exclusively for exploring the emotional content of a work. To some extent, we may feel how a painting looks as we may see how it feels. The actor or dancer—or the spectator—sometimes notes and remembers the feeling of a movement rather than its pattern, insofar as the two can be distinguished at all. Emotion in aesthetic experience is a means of discerning what properties a work has and expresses.⁹

The general point is, of course, not limited to the aesthetic realm for, as I have emphasized earlier, the emotions intimately mesh with all critical appraisals of the environment: the flow of feeling thus provides us with a continuous stream of cues significant for orientation to our changing contexts. Indeed, as Goodman remarks:

In daily life, classification of things by feeling is often more vital than classification by other properties: we are likely to be better off if we are skilled in fearing, wanting, braving, or distrusting the right things, animate or inanimate, than if we perceive only their shapes, sizes, weights, etc. And the importance of discernment by feeling does not vanish when the motivation becomes theoretic rather than practical…. Indeed, in any science, while the requisite objectivity forbids wishful thinking, prejudicial reading of evidence, rejection of unwanted results, avoidance of ominous lines of inquiry, it does not forbid use of feeling in exploration and discovery, the impetus of inspiration and curiosity, or the cues given by excitement over intriguing problems and promising hypotheses.¹⁰

Theoretical Imagination

Mention of the context of theory brings us to the third role of emotions in the service of cognition, that of stimulus to the scientific imagination. This role is virtually ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Human Nature
• Part II Symbolism
• Part III Curriculum
• Part IV Education
• Part V Pragmatic Perspectives
• Index