Luciano asked:

Descartes believes that animals have no souls, and presumably no inner lives. Yet one can observe
behavior in animals which seems to suggest that they do in fact experience emotions. How might
Descartes attempt to reconcile his theories about animals with empirical evidence that seems to
refute them? Do you think he could do this successfully?

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I agree that animals do seem to behave in ways that suggest they experience emotions. My dog
certainly appears happy, ashamed, angry. He also twitches and yelps in his sleep, as if dreaming. If
you take a dualist view of mental states, then we are in the same position with regard to animal
mental states as we are to another person's: we may infer that their behaviour is in response to
internal experiences similar to our own, but they might be zombies or, as Descartes said of animals,
automata. Descartes, of course, associated the mind with the immaterial and immortal soul, and this
prejudiced him against animals (also androids and aliens). By definition, there could not be empirical
evidence for the existence of the soul — other than, in the case of our own, our private mental
experience (which is the foundation of all empirical evidence, according to Descartes). I do not know
how Descartes could have made a distinction between inferring other minds from human behaviour
and inferring animal minds from their behaviour.

The mind-brain identity theory is the opposite of Cartesian dualism, but only in some ways. Most
identity theorists and other materialists are, like Descartes, internalists. Internalists hold that mentaL
states are located inside us (in the brain, for example) and are possessed by us in a way that gives
us a direct, privileged access to them. There are many problems associated with this view, some of
which were emphasised by the Behaviourists and by Wittgenstein. Your question implies that you are
thinking of emotions as private, internal experiences.

An alternative view, externalism, holds that the meaning of mental state terms is at least partly
located outside of the person (or animal), in objects in the world around us. If this view is correct, then
when we say a person "experiences an emotion", the phrase indicates more than just a internal
private experience. This mean, amongst other things, that we cannot reduce emotions, and other
mental states, to brain activity (you cannot point to an MRI scan and say "That's anger"), nor to any
kind of internal mechanism, human or otherwise.

We certainly do have subjective experiences. Does my dog? Yes, I think so. To me, he is person-like,
and this means that I credit him with emotions and some at least of the other baggage that goes with
believing that others experience emotions too. It would be hard to separate the external, behavioural,
social and moral elements of emotion concepts from any subjective phenomena there might happen
to be.

Graham Nutbrown