The above question is important for clarifying the relation of feelings both to their formal object, when they have one, and to the action that they motivate. In the case of metacognitive feelings (M-feelings), the difficulty is particularly pregnant: it stems from the fact that, if we grant that M-feelings do not require concept possession to be felt, then it is unclear how their formal object should be construed: What are they about? Let us take a feeling of uncertainty, felt while trying to remember a proper name. Is this feeling about a memory state, or about a disposition to retrieve a proper name? If a feeling is about a memorial state or a disposition, its intentional content needs to include concepts of memory, of correctness, and of uncertainty. Empirical evidence, however, demonstrates that animals with no mindreading ability, and hence that are deprived of concepts of perception or of memory, are able to monitor their perception and memory as reliably as humans do.[15] Furthermore, human children, from early on, are sensitive to the contrast between familiar and unfamiliar faces and environments. This supports our claim above: one can feel cold or anxious or uncertain without having the corresponding concepts of those feelings. A propositional format does not seem to apply to feelings in general.[16]
How do feelings fulfill their particular embodied, subjective way of representing—a mode we will call the “expressive mode”? The broadly functional characterization given above provides useful clues. Expressive representations comprise exclusively non-conceptual, perceptual, and evaluative (gradient- and valence-based) elements, which taken together express a subjective relation to the environment (internal or external) and a given tendency to act. It should be emphasized, however, that adult humans can obviously entertain simultaneously expressive and conceptual representations. The present hypothesis, in conformity with the literature on dual-processing, is that the expressive system processes information and influences decisions on the basis of its own narrow range of associations and norms; while the conceptual system takes advantage of background beliefs and inferential reasoning to make decisions in light of a broader set of norms. Let us take the case of an agent feeling joy after having won the lottery. A human adult normally has [lottery] in her conceptual repertoire, along with some of the inferences that can be made on its basis. However, the agent’s reactivity to the winning event falls under the expressive mode of representation, because this is the mode in which evaluation of the opportunities is conducted. This feeling representation presumably enlightens and orients the concept-based reasoning that can be conducted concerning the same event, such as wondering how to spend the money, or whether quitting her job is a good idea. We propose to call “affordance-sensing” the information that a feeling expresses. Affordances are positive or negative opportunities, expressed in feelings: an affordance-sensing swiftly and non-reflectively motivates the agent to act in a particular way. Departing somewhat from Gibson’s use of this term within his ecological theory of perception, “affordance” is used here to refer to a non-conceptual and entirely subjective appraisal of the environment by the agent: an affordance is a perceived utility, which can be positive (something to approach and grasp) or negative (something to avoid and from which to flee).[17]
The corresponding representation has an indexical structure, because it has an essential relation to an occurrent represented property. Indexicality, however, has to be understood here in a non-referential sense. What is indexed is an occurrent (relational) affordance, rather than an individual event or object. Here is our proposal for what a given feeling structure (FS) looks like:
FS Affordancea [Placea=here], [Timea=now/soon], [Valencea=+], [Intensitya=.8 (comparatively specified on a scale 0 to 1)], [motivation to act of degreed according to action programa].
The subscript “a” is meant to indicate that all the elements that have this subscript are representational cues, i.e., ingredients, in present affordance-sensing a. Note that the strength (or degree) of the motivation to act does not depend only on the fitness significance, i.e., on the valence and intensity of the affordance. Other factors, such as the physical condition of the agent and her prior arousal level (her mood) also modulate her motivational level (Schwarz & Clore 2007). The specification of the location of the affordance may vary, depending on the way the feeling was generated, but indexicality and reactivity suggest that the relevant affordance is often sensed to occur where the feeling is experienced. As will be seen later, however, M-feelings do not involve a specification of place.
The feeling structure proposed above includes somatic markers, even if they are not made explicit: these markers are the substrates for the information of valence and intensity. This information is carried by neural activations and associated bodily changes, such as a sudden sensation of pleasant muscle relaxation, or of unpleasant muscle contraction, or of visceral contractions associated with fear. Intensity of affordance, i.e., the arousal produced by a feeling, is also felt through the comparative amount of bodily reactivity to the affordance. These somatic markers, as emphasized above, are themselves part of a monitoring system designed to predict and assess one’s relations to the environment along the relevant dimensions listed above (agency, individual and social well-being, preferences, and metacognition).
Let us consider further how to read the feeling structure given above. It is meant to reflect not only what is presently felt, but also what is stored in memory when a feeling is experienced, what can be imagined, and what can be conveyed to others in expressive behavior. The central idea is that feelings sensitively express a subjective, embodied relation to an opportunity in an input from the environment (understood in a broad sense as including external and bodily properties relevant to well-being). This primitive intentional relation is best captured by the term affordance-sensing. Feelings express this affordance as their focus (or formal object), along with its graded valence—ranging from very unpleasant to very pleasant—and with its intensity gradient, which ranges from small to large.[18]
As often emphasized, reactivity to an affordance occurs very rapidly in a processing sequence—even before the perceptual processing has been completed—and well before a concept-based judgment can be made (see Dolan 2002, p. 1191; Griffiths 1997, pp. 77; LeDoux 1996, pp. 174; Prinz 2004, pp. 60, and Zajonc 1980, pp. 153). This suggests that an alternative, evaluative informational system screens the input with its own independent memorial structures.[19]
An affordance does not need to have an objective counterpart to be sensed, i.e., for a feeling to arise: it is enough that the agent anticipates it (even wrongly), imagines it, or remembers it, for the corresponding feeling to be expressed. A feeling, thus, does not presuppose a conceptual appraisal of the context, but rather it indexes in an embodied way a direct evaluative registration. Given that an affordance does not aim at characterizing the world, one cannot say, when the expressed affordance has no objective counterpart, that a feeling “misrepresents” the world as having a given affordance, or reciprocally that an existing affordance was “missed” by the agent when the latter failed to detect it. For misrepresentation to occur, a system must be equipped to attribute properties to individual objects, that is, it must be able to apply concepts. The expressive system, however, does not refer to objects as independent entities. Hence, affordance is not literally what a feeling is about, because aboutness presupposes that what is represented is independent from the representational system. Being relational, affordances cannot be grasped independently of the experience of a sensitive agent. When saying that a feeling “expresses” an affordance, we mean that it “resonates” to it (or that it monitors it). Resonance is a neural-somatic reactivity: it carries indexical and evaluative information, but it does not refer to the world or attempt to describe it.
It is possible, however, to objectively characterize what a feeling functionally refers to, and to pinpoint cases of misrepresentation, by re-describing the feeling structure above in non-subjective, non-evaluative propositional terms. Taking advantage of her perceptual and background beliefs, the agent can claim to have mistaken a piece of wood for a snake, for example, and to make explicit that there is no reason to be afraid of a piece of wood.
Our analysis of FS helps us to clarify why “feeling one’s keys in one’s pocket” does not belong to reactive feelings. Recognizing through touch the object in one’s pocket as being one’s keys, or merely having a proprioceptive experience in fact caused by one’s keys, are two ways of perceiving one’s keys, involving respectively cognitive and sensory proprioception. But neither needs as such to involve an affordance of a given intensity and valence. In contrast, let us suppose that the perceiver believes wrongly that she has forgotten her home keys, which are in some distant location, and will not be able to get back home. Feeling her keys in her pocket immediately triggers a positive affordance, opening up the field of possible actions.