En este artículo argumentaré que, a diferencia de lo que suele asumirse en el debate sobre las acciones expresivas, no tenemos buenas razones para excluir a las expresiones faciales y corporales de las emociones, como sonreír o fruncir el ceño, de la categoría de acciones. Para ello, compararé las expresiones faciales y corporales de las emociones con acciones expresivas simples como, por ejemplo, saltar de alegría o cubrirse avergonzado la cara. Intentaré mostrar que no puede presentarse a las acciones expresivas simples como acciones y excluir, al mismo tiempo, a las expresiones faciales y corporales de las emociones de esta categoría. Sostendré, por tanto, que, o bien ambos tipos de comportamiento son acciones, o bien ninguno lo es. Esto último, no obstante, resulta bastante problemático, ya que tendríamos que asimilar el saltar de alegría o el cubrirse avergonzado la cara a meros espasmos, lo cual entra en conflicto con la manera en la que nos relacionamos con este tipo de comportamientos. Mi conclusión será entonces que tanto las acciones expresivas simples como las expresiones faciales y corporales de las emociones han de ser incluidas en la categoría de acciones, al menos, dados los presupuestos principales del debate actual sobre acciones expresivas.
In this paper, I will argue that, contrary to what is generally assumed in the debate on expressive action, we do not have good reasons to exclude facial and bodily expressions of emotion such as smiling or frowning from the category of actions. For this purpose, I will compare facial and bodily expressions of emotion with simple expressive actions, such as jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame. I will try to show that simple expressive actions cannot be presented as actions while excluding facial and bodily expressions of emotion from this condition. My contention will then be that either both sorts of behaviour are to be identified as actions or neither is. The latter sounds rather implausible, though, as we would have to assimilate jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame to spasms, which conflicts with the way we relate to such behaviours. My conclusion will then be that both simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion should be included within the category of actions, at least on the basis of the main assumptions in the current debate on expressive action.
Marta Cabrera*
Universitat de València
* Correspondence to: Marta Cabrera. Department of Philosophy, Universitat de València. Avd. Blasco Ibáñez, 30 (46010 València-Spain) – Marta.Cabrera@uv.es – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6702-3707
How to cite: Cabrera, Marta (2022). «Duchenne smiles are actions not mere happenings: lessons from the debate on expressive action»; Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 37(2), 163-179. (https://doi.org/10.1387/theoria.22572).
Received: 2021-03-05; Final version: 2022-04-25.
ISSN 0495-4548 - eISSN 2171-679X / © 2022 UPV/EHU
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In this paper, I will argue that, contrary to what is generally assumed in the debate on expressive action, we do not have good reasons to exclude facial and bodily expressions of emotion such as smiling, frowning, crying, clenching one’s fists or hanging one’s head from the category of actions.
In section 1, I introduce the category of facial and bodily expressions of emotion, together with the reasons why participants in the debate have tended to exclude such behaviours from the category of actions. In section 2, I present the category of simple expressive actions and briefly examine the way such behaviours have been accounted for in the literature. In section 3, I compare simple expressive actions with facial and bodily expressions of emotion and argue that, on the basis of the main assumptions in this debate, either both kinds of expressive behaviour are to be identified as actions or neither is. Since the latter sounds rather implausible —given the way we approach behaviours such as jumping for joy or covering our faces in shame— I conclude that both simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion should be included within the category of actions.
Within the debate on expressive action, there is a wide consensus with respect to the idea that facial and bodily expressions of emotion such as smiling or frowning are not actions of an agent (Hursthouse, 1991; Goldie, 2000; Betzler, 2007; Helm, 2016; Bennett, 2016; Müller & Wong, forthcoming).
The clearest statement of the idea that behaviours such as smiling or frowning cannot be seen as actions may be found in Goldie’s description of the category of facial and bodily expressions of emotion:
The idea here is that facial and bodily expressions of emotion are not always performed in view of some particular end – they often simply express or reveal the emotion that someone is feeling, in which case, and for the reasons emphasised above, they cannot be regarded as actions of an agent. When speaking of this kind of behaviour then, we have in mind genuine facial and bodily expressions, and not crocodile tears or the smiles that we perform “in order to give the impression we are glad when we are not” (Goldie, 2000, p. 34)
Goldie adds that we should distinguish such kind of expressive behaviour from what he calls “bodily changes”, that is, those alterations that take place when we experience emotions and that can never be regarded as actions: “autonomic nervous system responses and hormonal changes such as sweating, change of heart-rate, secretion of adrenalin and so forth, and muscular reactions such as trembling, flinching, (...) These changes just happen to us; they are not things which we do or can directly try to do” (2000, p. 26). According to him, then, both bodily changes and facial and bodily expressions of emotion are involuntary reactions (and not responses) that have to be causally explained. The only difference between these two categories seems to be that facial and bodily expressions of emotion are expressions of the emotion while bodily changes are part of the emotion itself. Goldie does not explain, however, how we are to understand such a contrast.
Since our focus in this paper is on facial and bodily expressions of emotion, we will leave bodily changes out of our discussion. We may summarise the reasons for the exclusion of facial and bodily expressions of emotion from the category of actions by reference to Goldie’s first quote (2000, p. 34-5):
In light of these criteria, we may conclude that, from this view, smiling, frowning, crying, laughing, opening one’s eyes, hanging one’s head, clenching or pounding one’s fists, etc. are analogous, in a relevant sense, to spasms and reflexes: they are mere happenings or symptoms disconnected from our agency.
This view, however, seems to raise an important dilemma within the debate on expressive action. As I will try to show, the claim that facial and bodily expressions of emotion are not actions —following C1-C3— conflicts with the claim that simple expressive actions, such as jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame, are actions.
If the arguments that I will present in favour of such view are sound, it seems that participants in the debate on expressive action are faced with an important dilemma: either both sorts of behaviour are to be identified as actions or neither is.
As I will argue in coming sections, the latter sounds rather problematic, as we would have to assimilate simple expressive actions, such as jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame, to spasms, which conflicts with the way we relate to such behaviours. I will conclude, then, that —on the basis of the main assumptions in the current debate— both simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion should be included within the category of actions. Insistence on the idea that facial and bodily expressions of emotion cannot be regarded as actions, would seem to require that new reasons should be provided to help differentiate such pieces of behaviour from simple expressive actions.
However, before we can compare facial and bodily expressions of emotion with simple expressive actions and argue for the idea that they should both be included within the category of actions, we must examine in some detail what simple expressive actions are and the way they have been accounted for in the debate on expressive action.
At first sight, jumping for joy seems like one of the simplest things we can do. Compared to actions such as cooking a meal, writing a novel or building a bridge, happily jumping up and down when receiving good news seems to be an action that does not require from us a too complex analysis. The same goes for something apparently as simple as covering one’s face in shame —when remembering, for instance, a particularly shameful moment— or scratching one’s head in frustration.
Such behaviours, however, as Hursthouse (1991) famously noted, cannot be regarded as actions by the lights of the standard account of agency. According to such account, (1) a behaviour counts as an action if it can be rationalised, and (2) to rationalise an action is to present it as something instrumentally valuable from the perspective of attaining some end. That is, if A is an action performed by subject S, we should be able to explain A by offering a desire-belief pair (D-B) such that satisfying desire D is the aim of S and S has the belief B according to which A allows her to satisfy D.
The standard account of agency, though, was put into question by Hursthouse, who defended the idea that there is a class of actions —arational actions— which are clearly actions despite not being instrumentally rationalisable.
Many have tried, nonetheless, to show that the standard account is immune to Hursthouse’s attack because the class of actions that she presents —or, at least, most of the actions she presents— can be rationalised after all (Smith, 1998; Goldie, 2000; Helm, 2001, 2016; Betzler, 2007, 2009; Döring, 2003; Scarantino & Nielsen, 2015; Bennett, 2016, 2021; Müller & Wong, forthcoming). The shared thought here seems to be that, if some piece of behaviour can be regarded as an action, then such behaviour must be connected to rationality in some sense. From this point of view, then, the idea that there is something like arational actions cannot be correct.
Before examining the way in which some such views have accounted for the behaviours we are interested in —jumping for joy, covering our faces in shame, etc.— we should briefly sketch two crucial features of how the debate has evolved since Hursthouse’s seminal paper. Firstly, the current debate has produced a number of distinctions within the class of so-called arational actions. Although not everyone explicitly agrees in this respect, the common assumption is that not all cases in Hursthouse’s list belong to the same kind (Goldie, 2000; Betzler, 2007, 2009; Scarantino & Nielsen, 2015; Pineda, 2019; Müller & Wong, forthcoming) and should be divided into three types: symbolically displaced actions, radically displaced actions and simple expressive actions.
This last strategy, however, seems to have devastating consequences for simple expressive actions, since instrumental explanations of behaviours such as jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame clearly over-intellectualise them. Bennett argues, for instance, that so-called arational actions do have “a purpose —that of doing justice, or giving adequate external form to one’s sense of the situation” (2016, p. 74, emphasis added)— which means that they can be instrumentally rationalised – and that even the “spontaneous case [jumping for joy] is susceptible of a ‘reading’ that might show why it would be appropriate to select [such expressive behaviour] as a fitting vehicle for that emotion if (…) one is in the business of deliberatively selecting a vehicle for one’s emotion” (2016, p. 91-2). The problem is that it does not look like we deliberatively select a vehicle for our joy when we jump for joy.
Smith (1998), on the other hand, does not mention examples of simple expressive actions but assumes that his proposal can explain away all cases presented by Hursthouse. According to him, when a man rolls in grief in the clothes of his dead wife “the man is doing what he is doing because he desires to roll around in his dead wife’s clothes and believes that he can do so by doing just what he is doing: that is, by rolling around in those particular clothes that he is rolling around in” (1998, p. 22). Smith adds that in order to understand the desire of the agent, we must make reference to his emotion, but that the belief-desire pair suffices to rationalise his action. If we turn to the case of jumping for joy, however, it does not seem that one jumps for joy when receiving good news because one desires to jump and believes that one can do so by just doing what one is doing, that is, jumping. Such an explanation does not look like a good description of what goes on in this case.
Given these difficulties, Goldie (2000) and Betzler (2007, 2009) have speculated that, contrary to our intuitions, simple expressive actions might not be actions at all. Goldie says that “jumping for joy, scratching your head in frustration, and punching the air in delight (…) [are] things which one does [that] are unlike the genuine smile in that the latter involves a movement of certain muscles which one cannot directly try to move. But still, surely a genuine spontaneous jump for joy […] no more involves a belief than does the genuine spontaneous smile” (2000, p. 36). In a similar line, and after concluding her alternative account of so-called arational actions, Betzler wonders whether her ideas could be extended to simpler kinds of behaviour:
These ideas, as I noted, are merely speculative and stem from the view that what we have been calling simple expressive actions are residual and problematic cases. Assimilating such behaviours to mere happenings, though, seems to have some rather implausible consequences that should be properly addressed by anyone who wants to defend this view. In particular, if jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame were nothing more than mere happenings —or, in Betzler’s terms, mere bodily movements— we would need an explanation of the way in which we usually approach such behaviours. When we see that someone who has just received some news starts jumping up and down, we immediately understand that the news she has received is good – or, at least, that it is good from the agent’s point of view. This means that we approach her behaviour as a response to something that she evaluates as worth celebrating. Her response, moreover, can be assessed as appropriate or inappropriate, or as proportional or disproportional. In fact, if jumping were, for whatever reasons, inappropriate in the given circumstances, the subject could be blamed for not having waited for a more convenient time to express her happiness. As we can see, though, this is not the way we relate to mere happenings —which are disconnected from our agency— and therefore Goldie’s and Betzler’s suggestions do not seem to provide, in principle, a good explanation of these cases.
To recapitulate, we started by saying that —compared to actions such as cooking a meal, writing a novel or building a bridge— jumping for joy, covering one’s face in shame, punching the air in delight or scratching one’s head in frustration seem to be among the simplest actions we can perform. This intuition, however, seems to be questioned by the standard account of agency, according to which, behaviour that cannot be instrumentally rationalised cannot be regarded as the actions of an agent. Hursthouse’s critique of the standard account, however, allows us to regard such cases as actions, in particular as actions that are disconnected from rationality and that can only be explained by saying that “in the grip of the emotion, the agent just felt like doing them” (1991, p. 61).
This last idea is nonetheless rejected by many participants in the debate who try to show that the cases presented by Hursthouse can be rationalised and thus be considered actions by the lights of the standard account. As we have seen, however, instrumental explanations of simple expressive actions tend to over-intellectualise them, therefore explanations of this kind do not succeed in showing that jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame are not arational actions. Alternatively, a defendant of instrumental rationality can question whether such behaviours are actions at all —since they do not involve any means-end belief-desire pair— but this leads us to a very difficult position: jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame are assimilated to spasms and reflexes, which conflicts with the way we deal with such behaviours.
It appears, then, that simple expressive actions are still problematic cases for the standard account: we have the intuition that they are actions but they seem to be disconnected from rationality – or, at least, from the kind of rationality presupposed in the discussion so far. As Helm (2001, 2016) and Müller and Wong (forthcoming) have convincingly argued, all previous views assume that rational action is necessarily instrumentally rational action. However, they claim, an alternative conception of rationality is needed if we are to explain the sense in which some expressive behaviours are not a matter of mere accident:
The rejection of instrumentality as a criterion for agency, then, allows us to see a way in which simple expressive actions might be connected to rationality – and are, therefore, not arational actions: “[e]xplanations of this kind articulate a further aspect of our ordinary conception of action: in contrast to mere behaviour, an action is rational in this reason-responsive sense” (Müller & Wong, forthcoming). From this view, Hursthouse’s account of behaviours such as jumping for joy or covering our faces in shame should be rejected on the basis of the following assumption:
This seems to be the reason why it is so hard to view simple expressive actions as analogous to spasms and reflexes. In the latter cases, the agent is clearly not responding to reasons —spasms and reflexes do not have a point—, that is, there is nothing that, from the agent’s point of view, counts in favour of her movements. Although this might not be the only kind of non-instrumental rationality that could explain the sense in which behaviours such as jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame are actions, the proposals of Helm and Müller and Wong seem to have correctly identified that instrumentality is an obstacle for our understanding of an important part of our expressive behaviour.
Once we have made room in the debate for simple expressive actions, I will argue that, on the basis of C1-C3, simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion cannot be classified differently, that is, with the former as actions and the latter as mere happenings. As we have seen, participants in this debate differ with respect to their understanding of simple expressive actions, however, both critics and supporters of the instrumental model of rationality seem to agree that facial and bodily expressions of emotion are different from simple expressive actions and cannot be regarded as actions.
As we saw in section 1, participants in the debate on expressive action tend to exclude facial and bodily expressions of emotion from the category of actions on the basis of the following criteria:
I will now provide three arguments (A1-A3) in favour of the idea that, according to C1-C3, either both simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion are to be identified as actions or neither is. Since the latter sounds rather implausible, given the way we approach simple expressive actions, I will conclude that both simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion should be included within the category of actions. In order to simplify the following discussion, I will mainly compare the case of smiling with the case of jumping for joy.
According to the first criterion, facial and bodily expressions of emotion cannot be regarded as actions because there are no belief-desire combinations that could instrumentally explain why the agent performs them. As we saw, the distinctive feature of genuine smiles is, precisely, that the subject does not smile in view of some end. However, if we accept that smiles are not actions because in order to count as an action a piece of behaviour must be instrumentally rational, then simple expressive actions must also be excluded from the category of actions: as it is assumed in the debate, it does not look like we are trying to instrumentally satisfy an end through our jumping when we jump for joy.
According to the Non-instrumental Rationality Assumption, though, we should resist the idea that jumping for joy or covering our faces in shame are analogous to spasms and reflexes qua mere happenings we undergo, even though we are unable to explain them in instrumental terms. As Helm’s and Müller and Wong’s non-instrumental conception of rationality shows, we seem to have alternative ways of approaching such behaviours as actions. If, following this view, we accept that jumping for joy is an action regardless of its lacking a means-end structure, then we should not exclude smiling from the category of actions just because it lacks a means-end structure.
As we saw before, according to the Non-instrumental Rationality Assumption, simple expressive actions “can have a point which makes them intelligible as reason-responsive, even if we cannot make sense of them as instrumental” (Müller & Wong, forthcoming) and “inasmuch as the performance of certain movements has a point for the agent, it seems not to be a matter of mere accident” (Müller & Wong, forthcoming). Such proposal allows us, then, to regard such behaviours as actions and to rationally explain them.
According to Müller and Wong and Helm, however, this is an explanation that does not apply to facial and bodily expressions of emotion: such behaviours are alien to rationality and, therefore, must be causally explained (see also Goldie, 2000). Regarding smiles and frowns, Müller and Wong hold that there are not “any cognized aspects of [the] situation that intelligibly motivate them. Rather, they are simply triggered by those circumstances” (forthcoming). Similarly, Helm claims that
This seems to be Bennett’s view too, in particular, when he says that we should “distinguish the symptoms of some mental state, such as crying or smiling, from those objects (and, I claim, actions) that possess expressive power because they seem to capture or reflect some mental state (or the content thereof)” (2016, p. 84) and that only the latter raise “issues of adequacy, appropriateness and inappropriateness that ground normative assessment of different forms of expression” (2016, p. 84).
These proposals seem to be based on the idea that examples of behaviour that are mere happenings we undergo, such as spasms or reflexes, are not subject to rational standards. That is, such behaviours cannot be evaluated as good or bad responses to the situation in which a subject finds herself. This seems to be clearly correct in the case of spasms: we can see how the subject’s bodily movements have nothing to do with her evaluative perspective on the situation – consequently, her movements cannot be intelligibly evaluated as a good or bad response to her situation. Think of someone who is pathologically laughing all the time or someone who, due to a paralysis of some facial muscles, has a permanent smile on her face. Such movements just happen, indiscriminately – they are not responsive to anything and, thus, neither proportional or disproportional, appropriate or inappropriate. This is the reason why such behaviour can only be causally explained.
The question we may ask ourselves now is whether facial and bodily expressions of emotion are analogous to spasms in this respect, as suggested by the previous authors. For this purpose, let us introduce an example about smiles. Imagine a child who is playing with her toys, supervised perhaps by some family member, when her mother walks into the room after returning from work. Imagine the way the child turns to her mother with a beaming smile on her face and how the mother smiles with joy and love at the sight of her child. This smile is the kind of smile that the child, as she grows older, will continue to seek from her mother.
What can we say about the smiles in this example? According to the view we are examining, smiles are mere happenings we undergo, so the way we approach smiles —as well as the rest of our facial and bodily expressions of emotion—
Moreover, and connected to the previous point, (b) we regard facial and bodily expressions of emotion as revealing of the subject’s evaluative perspective on the situation.
Relatedly, there seem to be (c) moral considerations that regulate our smiles. When we say things like “your smile was quite insensitive” or “why don’t you smile? Don’t you see how important this is to her?” we seem to be blaming the subject in a different way in which we would blame someone for having a spasm or a reflex. The most we could say to someone who has undergone a spasm in a very inappropriate moment —imagine that this person suffers from a nervous disorder— is that she should not have put herself in a situation in which this was likely to happen. Smiles, however, seem to be subject to a different kind of considerations: if the mother in our example had not smiled at the smile of her child —if, stressed and exhausted from work, she had turned away from her— it seems like the child would have had a claim on her, that is, a claim to be seen and acknowledged by her as someone worthy of love and attention. It is from this last point of view, moreover, that we can understand the sense in which the child may continue to seek her mother’s smile through the years. Furthermore, (d) smiles seem to be open to education: we are educated at what to smile and how we smile.
This way of approaching smiles, however, seems to be at odds with the idea that they are mere happenings that are disconnected from rationality.
The idea that facial and bodily expressions of emotion are responses to a situation that a subject apprehends from a certain evaluative perspective and that can be assessed as appropriate or inappropriate, proportional or disproportional, casts doubt on the claim that such behaviours are disconnected from rationality. In fact, without committing ourselves to the proposals of Helm and Müller and Wong, we can ask ourselves whether the explanation they provide of simple expressive actions could also be applied to facial and bodily expressions of emotion. And, intuitively, it seems that we can say that such behaviours also have a point: smiling out of joy can be seen as celebrating or rejoicing (which is rational because joy apprehends its object as worth celebrating), frowning in disappointment can be seen as disapproving (which is rational because disappointment apprehends its object as worthy of disapproval), hanging one’s head in dejection can be seen as surrendering (which is rational because dejection apprehends its object as worth surrendering to), crying out of sadness can be seen as mourning (which is rational because sadness apprehends its object as worthy of grieving), laughing out of amusement can be seen as rejoicing or enjoying (which is rational because amusement apprehends its object as worthy of amusement), etc.
If this is plausible, then, it does not seem like there is a relevant difference between jumping for joy and smiling with respect to rationality: in both cases, we seem to be dealing with non-instrumental behaviours that are, nonetheless, rational responses to a situation given the way in which the emotion of the subject apprehends such a situation. Therefore, it does not seem that facial and bodily expressions of emotion can be excluded from the category of actions just because they are disconnected from rationality. If simple expressive actions are regarded as actions by virtue of their being rational responses, then so should facial and bodily expressions of emotion.
As we saw in previous sections, the claim that simple expressive actions are actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion are mere happenings also appears to be grounded in a difference in the control that an agent may have over her bodily movements. The assumption underlying this claim is that, when performing an action, we have control over the muscles involved, that is, we are capable of moving our bodies in the way we do and to do so directly. Goldie’s example of the Duchenne smile —which, according to him, is not in any sense an action— is aimed at showing precisely this (2000, p. 35). When our smile is genuine, the muscles we employ are different from those we use when we move our faces on purpose to form a smile. So, the divide between an action and a mere happening is thus defined by our capacity to have a direct control over the musculature in virtue of which a certain bodily change takes place.
However, consider now the action of running away in fear, full of adrenaline. Imagine that you are walking through a forest and that a bear suddenly appears. You are scared, want to protect yourself and believe that running through the space between two trees further to your right is the best way to escape, since the bear will not fit between them. So, this is what you do and your action is properly rationalised by the desires and beliefs described in the previous sentence. Now, as you perform this action, you run faster and jump higher than you are able to in normal circumstances, since you are full of adrenaline. You might even use muscles that you are unable to employ when, for instance, going for a jog. In fact, if asked later to replicate your running away at will, your body would not move in the same way – you would not be in a state in which, due to the adrenaline in your system, you are able to move your body in the way you did when running away in fear. This fact, however, does not prevent us from considering that your running away in fear was an action of yours. Hence, it seems that the inability to directly control all the muscles involved in our movements does not suffice to discard that facial and bodily expressions of emotion could count as actions.
According to A1-A3, then, C1-C3 do not justify classifying facial and bodily expressions of emotion and simple expressive actions differently, for:
Consequently, either both sorts of behaviour are to be identified as actions or neither is. The latter, as we saw, seems rather implausible given the way we relate to behaviours such as jumping for joy or covering our faces in shame. Therefore, we may conclude that both facial and bodily expressions of emotion and simple expressive actions should be included within the category of actions. As previously stated, if someone wants to insist on the idea that facial and bodily expressions of emotion are not actions, she should provide new reasons that could help differentiate such behaviours from simple expressive actions.
I started by introducing the category of facial and bodily expressions of emotion, as well as the reasons that several philosophers have provided in favour of their exclusion from the category of actions. As we have seen, in the current debate on expressive action, behaviours such as smiling, frowning or crying are regarded as mere happenings we undergo because they are thought to be neither instrumental nor rational nor voluntary. I then presented the category of simple expressive actions and the various ways in which they have been accounted for in the literature. The main claim I have argued for —through A1-A3— is that simple expressive actions cannot be presented as actions while excluding facial and bodily expressions of emotion from this condition: neither of these two kinds of expressive behaviour can be instrumentally explained, both can be rationally explained and both can involve muscles we cannot directly control.
As a result, I have concluded that, on the basis of the main assumptions in the current debate on expressive actions, simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion cannot be classified differently: either both sorts of behaviour are to be identified as actions or neither is. Classifying behaviours such as jumping for joy or covering one’s face in shame as happenings, however, conflicts with the way we relate to such behaviours. Therefore, I have concluded that both simple expressive actions and facial and bodily expressions of emotion should be included within the category of actions.
I am very grateful to Josep Corbí, Jordi Valor, Christopher Bennett, Jonathan Mitchell, Pia Campeggiani, Carlos Moya and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also indebted to the audiences in the Valencia Colloquium in Philosophy and the 2nd VLC Philosophy Workshop: Sharing Reasons.
This work has been supported by the research projects PID2019-106420GA-I00 and PID2020-119588GB-I00 and by the grant BES-2017-081537 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and “ESF Investing in your future”.
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