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Précis
Expressiveness: Perception and Emotions In the Experience of Expressive Objects
Marta Benenti
University of Murcia, ES
Benenti, Marta . 2025. “Précis: Expressiveness: Perception and Emotions In the Experience Of Expressive Objects.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 7, no. 1: 1-5. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.summer.1.
Abstract: This book addresses the philosophical problem of expressiveness, defined as the capacity of objects to convey affective states. Common in both everyday language and artistic contexts, expressive attributions pose significant philosophical questions. The book has a dual aim: to clarify the nature of experiencing objects as expressive and to propose a novel theory of "expressive experience." The first aim involves examining existing attempts to understand expressive experience, identifying misunderstandings about the mental states involved, and specifying the role of emotions. The second aim builds on this clarification, presenting an original theory that synthesizes key insights from previous accounts. While the primary focus is the analytic debate of the past fifty years, the book also incorporates perspectives from phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and ecological psychology. Expressiveness intersects with various philosophical and psychological issues, challenging theories of perception and emotions, and bridging aesthetics with the philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, and cognitive sciences.
Keywords: expression, expressiveness, emotions, phenomenal character, aesthetic properties, core affect.
This book stems from the need to shed light on a problem that has often been discussed by philo- sophers, but which has rarely received a systematic treatment. The problem is that of expressiveness, understood as the capacity of certain objects to express emotional states.
Expressive attributions are extremely common, both in everyday speech, and in artistic domains. We talk of cheerful outfits as well as of melancholy melodies, or mournful landscapes. Many philo- sophers and intellectuals have questioned the notion of expressiveness, wondering how it is possible that we hear, say, music as expressive of despair. Also, how is it that this experience encompasses natural landscapes, atmospheres, but also to colors, sounds, and shapes?
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The main arena of this research is the analytic debate of the last fifty years. However, accounts elaborated within the phenomenological tradition, Gestalt psychology, and ecological psychology play a relevant role as well.
Expressiveness admittedly tackles many philosophical and psychological issues. Questions about the possibility that states such as anxiety, melancholy, sadness, solemnity, or liveliness are ascribed to non-sentient beings like artworks, represents a challenge for theories of perception and of emotions. Moreover, most of these questions lie at the crossroads of aesthetics and the philosophy of mind, bridging philosophy, developmental psycho- logy, and cognitive sciences more generally.
On this background, there exists a long tradition of research on musical expressiveness that, however, tends to neglect visual experiences. Furthermore, many philosophers have dealt with the problem of expression in the visual arts. Yet they have often overlooked the fact that a distinction can be drawn between an artwork being the expression of the artist’s emotion and it being expressive of an emotion. In addition to this, although aesthetic research tends to list expressiveness among aesthetic properties, such an aesthetic status does not seem to exhaust the phenomenon of expressiveness.
On the one hand, the book aims at clarifying the intricate debate about what it is to experience something as expressive of emotions. Several attempts have been made to reply to the question: what does the experience of expressive objects amount to? However, many of these attempts incur mis- understandings about the kind of mental states involved, how (and whether) to distinguish “content” from the related “phenomenal character”, and precisely what role is played by emotions. The book tries to compare available theories of expressiveness to see how they address these questions. This clarificatory work allows me to identify the weaknesses of theories based on illusions, arousal, imagination, and perceptual contours. Bearing them in mind, I elaborate on a view that draws together the key insights of the analyzed accounts and reassesses expressive experience thereof. Expressive experience, I claim, is a fundamentally perceptual experience which represents dynamic properties, whose phenomenal character is permeated by emotion concepts and lends itself to interaction with imagination. Emotion concepts apply metaphorically or quasi-meta- phorically to the resemblances between the perceived contours and typical emotional expressions. When these resemblances lack, as in the case of expressive chords, or of color shades, I suggest to account for expressiveness by resorting to the psychological notion of core affect.
CHAPTER SUMMARIES
In the first chapter, the problem of expressiveness is unpacked as a contradiction that most philosophical theories assume more or less explicitly. In short: the capacity of objects to express emotions contradicts their inability to feel emotions (§1.1). Views that theorize this contradiction are so-called theories of the “pathetic fallacy,” according to which expressive experience is just an illusion originated by a malfunction of our perceptual systems when it deals with emotions (§1.2).
This questionable approach provides an excuse to introduce the distinction between expression and expressiveness. Whereas expression refers to the manifestation of emotions, expressiveness points to those perceptual features whose relation to emotions does not require that any emotion is actually felt by anyone (§1.3). This distinction, originally drawn by Alan Tormey, has been formally taken on by most theorists so far. However, the idea that expressive experience consists in a somehow illusory or contradictory phenomenon lies in the background of many accounts. On the contrary, the chapter suggests, the experience of expressiveness can and should better be accounted for as a perceptual experience of properties that do not bear a necessary relation to actually felt emotions. The rest of the book is an attempt to substantiate this claim.
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Given the fundamental disagreement on how to account for the phenomenon of expressiveness, the chapter lists the desiderata that a satisfactory theory of expressive experience should fulfill. In particular, it is claimed, such a theory should be able to account for (i) the phenomenal character, (ii) the representational content, (iii) the relation to emotions, and (iv) the compatibility with empirical results of expressive experiences (§1.4).
Such conceptual greed allows me to examine and criticize competing accounts available on the market. To begin with, the analysis focuses on projectivist theories such as Sartre’s and Wollheim’s. Despite acknowledging that these views correctly seize and describe affective distortions of perceptual patterns, I contend that the fundamental and most mysterious case of expressive experience is the one in which subjects are not feeling the emotion they ascribe to objects (§1.5).
The connection between felt emotions and those ascribed to objects is instead emphasized by so-called arousalism. Arousalists like Derek Matravers explain expressiveness as the capacity of objects to elicit emotions and feelings. Yet, it is shown, this view fails to account for the link between the causal mechanisms allegedly behind expressive experiences and their phenomenology (§1.6).
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Contour Theory does justice to the distinction between expression and expressiveness. In spite of its problematic aspects, its perceptualist approach seems to adequately capture the perceptual nature of expressive experience (§1.7).This overview is completed by theories that ascribe a fundamental role to imagination in expressive experience. Their upholders share the fundamental concern that expressive properties cannot be worldly features, but must depend on the imaginative response of subjects (§1.8).
In the second chapter, the introduced theories are tested against the listed desiderata. While most theories imply or overtly state that expressive experience has a perceptual phenomenal character (§2.1), the crucial disagreement emerges when it comes to assessing the emotional side of this phenomenal character (§2.2). That is, once one acknowledges that expressive experience is pheno- menally perceptual, the question arises about what role is played by emotions in making this experience sui generis.
Notably, some arousal theorists claim that felt emotions are part of the phenomenal character, whereas most other theories deny that this is the case. I address this point by looking at the phenomenology of emotions and showing that felt emotions are not inherent to the phenomenal character of expressive experience (§2.3).
Finally, temporal development of expressive experience, its capacity to elicit bodily movements, and its complexity are evaluated - and then discarded one by one - as what might explain the phenomenal peculiarity of expressiveness (§2.4).
The next task of the book is to examine the content of expressive experience. After briefly framing the problem of content within a representationalist view of perception (§3.1), the third chapter aims at clarifying the role of response-dependence in accounts of expressive properties (§3.2). Paul Noordhof’s appeal to sensuous imagination offers a subtle and paradigmatic example of imaginative approach to expressive experience, according to which expressive properties cannot be “properties of the world”. Rather, they must result from our imaginative responses to certain perceptual stimuli (§3.2.1, §3.2.2).
In order to question the sub-personal simulation mechanism invoked by the theory (§3.3), I rely on Malcolm Budd’s argument of the “heresy of the separable experience”. In a nutshell, Budd claims that we commit a heresy if we want to account for a property based on an allegedly related experience which, however, can be characterized without any reference to the property itself. Applied to the case at stake, imaginative approaches
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commit the heresy as long as they account for expressive properties by appealing to sub-personal causal mechanisms that, as such, might be triggered by other means (§3.4).
The second half of the chapter offers a way to avoid the heresy. To this aim, it introduces a distinction between three different kinds of expressive experience, based on the role played by resemblances (§3.5). Firstly, there is the case of the weeping willow, the perception of an item as expressive in virtue of its being perceived as similar to emotional expressions (§3.5.1). Secondly, there is the expressive musical gesture, that I try to account for by appealing to a combination of metaphorical perception and seeing-as (§3.5.2). Thirdly, I examine the case of the minor chord. The fact that a minor chord sounds sad is problematic for resemblance-based theories of expressiveness such as contour theory (§3.5.3). The problem is that minor chords (and other simple perceptual stimuli such as colors) do not resemble human expressions.
A positive account for this case is postponed to the last chapter, while the rest of the third chapter examines the kind of properties instantiated by the content of expressive experiences. Adopting a phenomenological and gestaltic approach, I claim that expressive properties are inherently dynamic, low-level perceptual properties whose specificity is well captured by the evocative (though a bit elusive) notion of rythmos (§3.6).
The fourth chapter analyzes the relation between the phenomenal character and the content of expressive experience by assessing the role played by concepts. To do so, I assume that experiencing a property differs from recognising it (§4.1). Whereas the former can occur without conceptual interventions, the latter requires the application of concepts. This distinction is applied to the case of metaphorical description in general (§4.2) and of the use of metaphorical concepts in aesthetic descriptions in particular (§4.3). While allowing for possible conceptual interventions that may shape aesthetic and expressive experiences, I try to preserve the idea that the content of the experience is constituted by low-level dynamic properties. The envisaged solution appeals to weak cognitive penetration, namely the sort of conceptual influence that concerns the phenomenal character of an experience, while letting its content unaltered (§4.4). Recognitional expressive experiences can thus be accounted for in terms of weak cognitive permeation of the phenomenal character by metaphorical concepts (§4.5).
The fifth and last chapter is an attempt to extend this view to the case of the minor chord (§5.1). Emotions are first defined as multi-componential items captured by cluster-concepts (§5.2). This helps account for those cases in which sounds or colors are recognised as expressive in virtue of our capacity to apply emotions concepts with their secondary meaning (§5.3). If cluster concepts and secondary meaning promise to account for recognitional processes of simple expressive properties, non- recognitional perceptual experiences require the introduction of a further notion, namely core affect, borrowed from recent psychological studies. Core affect is defined as a neurophysiological simple and non-reflective feeling blending hedonic (pleasure– displeasure) and arousal (sleepy–activated) values (§5.4). The hypothesis is that, in the case of expressive experience of simple expressive properties, instan- tiated properties share the same dimensional space of core affect. Shades of colors and sounds do not resemble emotional expression; rather, they are perceived as located along the same vectors that structure core affect, namely arousal (dynamism) and valence (potential pleasantness or harm to the organism’s wellbeing) (§5.5). To conclude, the hypothesis is made that we can undergo expressive experiences that do not require any conceptual intervention (§5.6).
While several questions remain open, I trust that this work offers at least good guidance for those interested in the topic of expressiveness. At best, it also manages to put forward an original account that hoards the most convincing insights of already available theories while amending their weaknesses. Further work remains to be done, above all concerning the empirical treatment of the problem relating to its philosophical elaboration. Something I hope this book presents as a worthwhile endeavor.
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References
Benenti, Marta. 2020. Expressiveness. Perception and Emotions in the Experience of Expressive Objects. Berlin, GER/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
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Marta Benenti © 2025
Author email: martabenenti[at]gmail[dot]com
