Iuliia Pliushch presents my view on the role of causal relations in feeling representations as follows: “Due to their non-conceptual monitoring nature, feelings do not convey, but merely approximate a causal relation between internal states and actions” (this collection, p. 2). It may be useful to briefly comment on this summary, in order to clarify the aim of the passage where this question is discussed as follows:
Clearly, FS does not explicitly convey a causal relation between situation, somatic markers and subjective feeling. It carries this causal relation implicitly, however, as a consequence of the control architecture that produces feelings. In an emotional control loop, a perceived affordance causes (not: is represented as causing) its expressive evaluation through its specialized sensory feedback. Emotional awareness expresses this functional relation. (Proust this collection, p. 11)
What is at stake is not the causal relation between internal states and actions, but rather the nature of the causal relation between, on the one hand, the agent's perceptual belief about an external situation ("there is a bear in front of me") and his/her own bodily changes (pounding heart, trembling legs, etc.). According to cognitivists, this causal relation is not only generating a specific emotion, or in my terms, a given feeling, as most theories would accept. It also constitutes in part the intentional content of the experience of fear, or more generally, of an emotional experience. What I object to here is that the representational structure of feelings is not constituted by a conceptual representation of the causal link between an external fact and observed bodily changes. The causal relations are, rather, implicitly represented in a felt affordance through the dynamic relations between the associated, embodied cues for location, valence and intensity and the type of affordance perceived. Perceiving a bear elicits a bear-affordance (i.e., a feeling of fear of this bear). Even though, from an external viewpoint, one might say that identifying an object as dangerous has caused a disposition to act in the agent, from the viewpoint of the engaged agent, no such judgment needs to be formed because the representation of a given affordance includes the relevant "causal" information in its associative dynamic structure. As suggested by Pliushch, being evaluative, feelings predispose to act adaptively. A disposition to act, then, is associated with an affordance, and with the bodily markers for valence and intensity constituting this affordance.