Our intentions are sometimes shared. You and I might intend to sing a duet together, to paint the house together, to play basketball together, to have a conversation together. Such shared intentions help to organize and to unify our intentional agency in important ways. Further, as Margaret Gilbert has emphasized, in many cases in which you and I have such a shared intention we see each other as in some ways obligated to each other to play our respective roles.

In “Shared Intention” I sketched an account of the nature of shared intentions of small groups, in the absence of authority relations. With respect to a group consisting of you and me, and concerning joint activity J, my proposal was as follows:

Shared Intention Thesis (SI thesis): We intend to J if and only if

1. (a) I intend that we J and (b) you intend that we J.

2. I intend that we J in accordance with and because of (1)(a), (1)(b), and meshing subplans of (1)(a) and (1)(b); you intend that we J in accordance with and because of (1)(a), (1)(b), and meshing subplans of (1)(a) and (1)(b).

3. (1) and (2) are common knowledge between us.

I argued that such a complex of interlocking intentions of the individuals would play the basic roles characteristic of shared intention, namely, coordinate the intentional conduct and planning of each of us, and structure relevant bargaining between us, in ways that track the goal of our J-ing. My argument for this claim made no explicit appeal to obligations and entitlements that may be generated by such an interlocking web of intentions.

INSTRUMENTALITY RATIONAL PLANNING AGENCY

We frequently settle in advance on prior, partial plans for future action, fill them in as time goes by, and execute them when the time comes. Such planning plays a basic role in our efforts to organize our own activities over time and to coordinate our own activities with those of others. These forms of organization are central to the lives we want to live.

Not all purposive agents are planning agents. Nonhuman animals who pursue their needs and desires in the light of their representations of their world may still not be planning agents. But it is important that we are planning agents. Our capacities for planning are an all purpose means, basic to our abilities to pursue complex projects, both individual and social.

Why do we need to settle on prior plans in the pursuit of organized activity? A first answer is that there are significant limits on the time and attention we have available for reasoning. Such resource limits argue against a strategy of constantly starting from scratch – they argue against a strategy of never treating prior plans as settling a practical question. A second answer is that our pursuit of organization and coordination depends on the predictability to us of our actions. Coordinated, organized activity requires that we be able reliably to predict what we will do; and we need to be able to predict this despite both the complexity of the mechanisms underlying our behavior and our cognitive limitations in understanding those mechanisms.

INTRODUCTION

Are there lawlike generalizations in the social sciences? If not, are we thrown back on mere description and narrative? In my opinion, the answer to both questions is no. The main task of this chapter is to explain and illustrate the idea of a mechanism as intermediate between laws and descriptions. Roughly speaking, mechanisms are frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences. They allow us to explain, but not to predict. An example from George Vaillant gives a flavor of the idea: “Perhaps for every child who becomes alcoholic in response to an alcoholic environment, another eschews alcohol in response to the same environment.” Both reactions embody mechanisms: doing what your parents do and doing the opposite of what they do. We cannot tell ahead of time what will become of the child of an alcoholic, but if he or she turns out either a teetotaler or an alcoholic we may suspect we know why.

Over the years, I have increasingly come to view the ideal of lawlike explanation (“covering-law explanation”) in history and the social sciences as implausible and fragile. Early on, I was struck by Paul Veyne's discussion of the idea of providing a nomological explanation of Louis XIV's unpopularity. Suppose we start from the generalization that “any king imposing excessive taxes becomes unpopular.”

INTRODUCTION

The psychological analysis of the emotions is little more than a hundred years old. Darwin's Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) and William James's “What Is an Emotion” (1884) are the first studies of the emotions using scientific methodology. Over the past century empirical and theoretical studies of the emotions have accumulated at an accelerating rate. In Chapter IV, I draw on these contributions to outline my understanding of what the emotions are and what they do.

In many ways, these modern studies go beyond anything that is found in writers from earlier centuries. The idea of “depressive realism” (IV.3), to cite just one example, was not anticipated in prescientific writings on the emotions. Yet many of the recent insights were already present, often in aphoristic and condensed form, in earlier writers. In II.2 I argue, for instance, that Aristotle anticipated the key elements of the modern theories and, moreover, had important insights that have not yet been rediscovered. I also believe that with respect to an important subset of the emotions we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology. These emotions include regret, relief, hope, disappointment, shame, guilt, pridefulness, pride, hybris, envy, jealousy, malice, pity, indignation, wrath, hatred, contempt, joy, grief, and romantic love. By contrast, the scientific study of the emotions can teach us a great deal about anger, fear, disgust, parental love, surprise, and sexual desire (if we count the last two as emotions).

As will by now be obvious to the reader, the present book is not organized as a systematic treatise. The individual chapters could, to some extent, stand on their own. At the same time, the numerous cross-references across chapters do make for greater coherence than a mere collection of essays. I now try to pull these cross-references together, by singling out for separate discussion a number of themes that have been recurrent strands throughout the book. I shall also go beyond mere summing up, indicating where more work might be needed or where emphasis might most usefully be placed.

WHY EMOTIONS MATTER

Most simply, emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter. Creatures without emotion would have no reason for living nor, for that matter, for committing suicide. Emotions are the stuff of life.

Subjectively, emotions matter because we feel them so strongly, and because they can be intensely pleasant as well as intensely unpleasant. Because of these properties, emotions can have a compelling urgency that is lacking in most other aspects of human life. To be sure, the euphoria or dysphoria induced by cocaine or abstention from it, and the aversiveness of intense thirst or pain, are as overwhelmingly urgent as any emotional experience can be. Yet these visceral experiences are not to the same degree part of the fabric of social life. Emotions are the most important bond or glue that links us to others.

In this book I return to some of the themes I discussed in Sour Grapes (1983). An equivalent of sour grapes is “sweet lemons,” the transmutation of bitterness into sweetness, analogous to that of base metals into gold. The mental alchemies that I discussed in that earlier book, notably in the title chapter, had a limited range. In particular, they did not have any place for the emotions as fuel, raw material, and final product of these processes. The purpose of the present book is to say something about the role of the emotions in mental life and in the generation of behavior.

In Chapter I I propose an account of explanation in the social sciences that, although less ambitious than nomological explanation, goes beyond mere narrative or description, however “thick.” The central idea is that of a mechanism, a recurring and intelligible causal pattern. The emotional reactions, mental alchemies, and other forms of psychic causality that I discuss elsewhere in the book are instances of mechanisms in this sense.

In Chapter II I discuss some prescientific or, better, extrascientific sources for the study of the emotions. I first consider Aristotle, whose account of emotions in the Rhetoric remains utterly fresh and insightful. Next, I consider the treatment of emotions by the French moralists, from Montaigne to La Bruyère. Finally, I discuss what we can learn about the emotions from a handful of novelists and playwrights: Shakespeare, Racine, Mme de Lafayette, Jane Austen, Stendhal, and George Eliot.

INTRODUCTION

Some emotions are essentially social: They are triggered only by beliefs that make a reference to other people. Nobody feels envious of birds for their ability to fly; “envy occurs only between man and man.” Other emotions are contingently social, in that the beliefs that trigger them may or may not contain a reference to other people. One may be afraid of an avalanche as well as of a bully. In this chapter I discuss some essentially social emotions: shame, envy, and the cluster of emotions related to the pursuit and defense of honor.

Because my aim is to discuss emotional patterns that are related to general features of social life, I try to go beyond individual reactions. I shall not consider idiosyncratic instances of raw emotions that make newspaper headlines, as when a high-school student sues her school for naming another student covaledictorian with herself, a college student disfigures a former roommate out of envy, or a woman solicits a man to kill the mother of her daughter's chief rival for the cheerleading team, hoping that the mother's death will distract the rival from the competition. By contrast, the Jacobins who wanted to destroy the cathedral spires of Chartres and Strasbourg because their “domination over other buildings was contrary to the principles of equality,” acted within a social system with strong norms that make their behavior intelligible.

INTRODUCTION

The present chapter offers a number of applications of the ideas introduced in II.3 and IV.3. The basic argument is simple. When acting, people can have any number of motivations. Often, these motivations can be ranked in terms of how acceptable they are to the actor or to other people. In III.4, for instance, I suggested that among the Greeks justice, revenge, interest, and envy were ranked in that order. To act on a motivation that the actor finds unacceptable is painful. To act on a motivation that other people condemn is also painful. Typically, perhaps, the former pain is that of guilt, the latter that of shame. (Yet as we saw in III.2, people's emotions can make them feel ashamed as well as guilty.) To avoid pain, the actor has an incentive to transform the motivation from a less acceptable to a more acceptable one. The words “transform” and “transformation” are used here as general terms for two distinct species. On the one hand, a motivation may be transmuted into another that is more acceptable to the agent. This is an unconscious mechanism, operating “behind the back” of the person. On the other hand, the agent may consciously misrepresent his motivation to others. These two phenomena are the topics of V.2 and V.3 respectively.

Gricean theory holds that conversational implicatures must be capable of being worked out, which I call the Calculability Assumption. A key premise in the Working-out Schema is that the supposition that S believes p is required to make S's utterance consistent with the Cooperative Principle, which is the determinacy condition. Thus the Calculability Assumption holds only if the determinacy condition does. Grice s Razor entails that conversational implicatures can be derived from Grice's conversational principles. We observed in Chapter 1 that this derivability clause depends on the calculability assumption for sentence implicatures. Determinacy is thus the foundation of Gricean theory. In this chapter, we see that the determinacy condition, and therefore the Calculability Assumption and Grice's Razor, are untenable.

BACKGROUND CONSTRAINTS

Taken at face value, the determinacy condition is impossible to satisfy. There are too few constraints for the Cooperative Principle to require any particular beliefs. Unless word meanings are fixed, for example, the Maxim of Quality will not pick out a definite beliefs has to possess for his utterance to be truthful. The most we could say is that if the sentence S uttered means “It is raining,” then S must believe it is raining; if the sentence S uttered means “It is snowing,” then S must believe it is snowing, and so on.

According to Grice's Razor, it is more economical to postulate conversational implicatures than senses, conventional implicatures, or semantic presuppositions. For conversational implicatures can be derived from general psychosocial principles, whereas things like senses require specific linguistic conventions. We have seen that the first premise here must be rejected. Conversational implicatures cannot be derived from the Cooperative Principle, the Maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner, or the Principles of Style, Politeness, or Efficiency. This holds for both sentence implicatures and speaker implicatures.

The evidence we have reviewed also suffices to show that in addition to the conventions assigning meanings and presuppositions to particular words and sentences, there are many conversational implicature conventions, conventional ways of conversationally implicating things. Because a complete explanation of the data involving conversational implicatures requires the postulation of implicature conventions, the theoretical complexity introduced by the postulation of conversational implicatures is of the same order of magnitude as that introduced by senses or conventional implicatures.

The claim that certain conversational implicatures are conventional has at least the air of self-contradiction. For Grice used the term conventional implicature to denote a class of implicatures distinct from the conversational. When Sadock gives Grice's six characteristics of conversational implicatures, he writes,

Conversational implicata are not part of the meaning of the uttered forms.They are NONCONVENTIONAL. (Sadock 1978:284)

We will see that being conventional does not entail being part of the meaning of implicature-bearing sentences, and that the distinction Grice marked with the terms “conversational” and “conventional” is valid even though convention is involved in both.

According to Gricean theory, conversational implicatures depend on what people presume or know about the speaker. For S to implicate p, others must presume that S is observing the Cooperative Principle, and they must know or at least believe that observance of the Cooperative Principle requires S to believe p. I argue here that these clauses in the Theoretical Definition are fundamentally misguided. They are the product of two mistakes: the assimilation of speaker meaning to communication, and of implicature to inference. What a speaker means or implies is determined by what the speaker intends. But one person's intentions do not depend on what others presume, believe, or infer. Conversational principles do play a role in the recognition of implicatures. But implicatures need not be recognized, and their recognition does not depend on any specialized reasoning process. The Cooperative Principle and associated maxims play no role in the generation of implicatures, and they play the same indirect and nonessential role in implicature recognition that known tendencies play in inductive inference generally.

THE COOPERATIVE PRESUMPTION CONDITION

The Theoretical Definition specifies that S conversationally implicates something only if S is presumed to be observing the Cooperative Principle. The Generative Assumption holds further that a conversational implicature exists in part because the speaker is presumed to be observing the Cooperative Principle. This cooperative presumption condition is vague in some respects: it is not clear who it is that is supposed to presume that S is observing the Cooperative Principle.

I have argued that sentence implicatures exist not because conversational implicatures are derivable from conversational principles, but on the contrary because there are conventional ways of conversationally implicating things. Implicature practices are arbitrary to some extent rather than completely determinate. Because the Gricean paradigm is incompatible with their existence, conversational implicature conventions have scarcely been noticed let alone studied in depth. In this chapter, we begin examining the distinctive nature of implicature conventions. We compare and contrast them with more familiar linguistic conventions. I suggest that instead of generating conversational implicatures in any way, the conversational principles of Grice and his followers tell us why implicature practices are socially useful. Although the implicatures of a sentence are not derivable from its meaning, I try to explain why they invariably do bear some relation to its meaning that makes them seem fitting or appropriate. I conclude with an alternative speculation about how some implicature practices came to be nearly universal, a surprising but not unprecedented feature given that they are conventional. We should look to historical rather than theoretical linguistics for the explanation.

FIRST-ORDER VERSUS SECOND-ORDER SEMANTIC CONVENTIONS

Let us say that the conventions giving words, phrases, and sentences their meanings are first-order semantic rules: they assign meanings and implications directly to sound sequences or letter strings. Then conversational implicature conventions are second-order semantic rules: they assign additional implications to linguistic forms only insofar as they have specified meanings by virtue of the first-order semantic rules.