Topics Mind

Question Is there a clearcut difference between "thought" and "feeling" in the sense that they stem from or appear in different areas of consciousness?

Accepted:
January 30, 2009

Comments

You ask about different areas of consciousness. If you mean different areas of the brain, that is a question that should be answered by neurologists rather than philosophers; and neurologists have tended to think that thought is more correlated with activity in the cerebral cortex while feeling is more correlated with activity in older parts of the brain. All states of consciousness depend on activity in many different parts of the brain, however, so locating any conscious state in just one area of the brain would be simplistic.

Philosophers can address some of the differences between thought and feeling, however, and we can help to clarify ways in which how thoughts (of various sorts) and feelings (of various sorts) are related.

Thoughts involve judgments -- about what is the case, what could be the case, what should be the case, etc. -- and judgments require the application of concepts or the categorization of experience. (There are a number of interesting and important questions about the nature of concepts, and the nature of categorization, but I will ignore those for now.) When you judge that the object before you is a table, it is not necessary to have any particular feeling towards that table. On the other hand, when you judge that a particular food is repulsive, certain feelings seem to be required. (If you said "it's repulsive, but I don't have any feelings about that", we would wonder whether you really do judge it to be repulsive.) Likewise, when you judge a action to be good, certain feelings seem to be required in order for it to be a genuine judgment of goodness. Although we can, in thought, merely 'entertain' possible judgments, without actually endorsing those judgments, even entertaining a possibility involves something more than contemplating a sentence; the sentence will only be meaningful insofar as it activates the relevant concepts or categorizations, and activating concepts or categorizations will often activate feelings as well.

Some feelings are simply sensations -- sensations of pain, or cold, for example; and we can experience sensations without having any thoughts. Emotional feelings, however, are feelings about complex states of affairs and they depend on equally complex thoughts or judgments. A feeling of fear, for example, depends on the judgment that a situation is dangerous, and a judgment about the possibility of escape. (These judgments do not need to be at the forefront of one's mind, and you may not be able to articulate them, but they are part of what makes a feeling an emotion rather than a sensation. (In the absence of such judgments, we would not consider it fear so much as an unpleasant sensation or a mobilizing of instinctual energy.)

Thus, although there do seem to be some cases of pure thought, and some cases of pure feeling, most thoughts are inextricable from related feelings and most feelings are inextricable from related thoughts.

Question Is there a clearcut difference between "thought" and "feeling" in the sense that they stem from or appear in different areas of consciousness? Accepted:January 30, 2009

Question Is there a clearcut difference between "thought" and "feeling" in the sense that they stem from or appear in different areas of consciousness?

Accepted:
January 30, 2009