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In Defence of “Emotion”

Critical Notice of:

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Louis C. Charland
Louis C. Charland*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, CanadaN6A 3K7
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Type
Review Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2001 , pp. 133 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2001

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References

1 Gerrans, C. Review of Griffiths, Paul E. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77.4 (1999) 512–15Google Scholar; Sousa, R. de Review of Griffiths, Paul E. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories Dialogue 38.4 (1999) 908–11Google Scholar; Hacking, I. Review of LeDoux, Darwin Griffiths, Paul E. Times Literary Supplement (17 July 1998) 4972Google Scholar; Nussbaum, C. Review of What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories, Philosophical Psychology 12.4 (1999) 546–51Google Scholar; Solomon, R. Review of Griffiths, Paul E. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories, Philosophical Review 108.1 (1999) 131–4Google Scholar

2 In his review of Griffiths’ book, Robert Solomon aptly conveys what this fanfare is all about. He refers to the fact that ‘the book announces itself as a radical demolition job’ (133). He also expresses skepticism about ‘the radical deconstruction job promised by Griffiths and his blurb writer’ (133).

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26 Like other commentators, I will often use the words ‘category’ and ‘kind’ interchangeably. This reflects Griffiths’ view that a category is an aspect of reality (175-6).

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30 De Sousa and Nussbaum take Griffiths to be committed to the view that emotion breaks down into three distinct categories (de Sousa, Review, 910; Nussbaum, Review, 547). However, Robert Solomon argues that ‘we are left, “really,” with two categories’ (Solomon, Review, 133). Ukewise, Gerrans concludes that ‘it looks as if there are at least two categories of emotion’ (Gerrans, Review, 514). Whatever the case may be, what we are talking about here is ‘emotion.’ It is hard to imagine how these points might be stated in a future psychology that has jettisoned the term.

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34 LeDoux's point is framed in terms of there being ‘a single brain system’ (16). However, Griffiths’ argument that there is no natural category that corresponds to the term ‘emotion’ is far more specific. It has to do with there being ‘one kind of process’ (15). This is an even greater oversimplification. Note also that Griffiths’ own affective program homologies cannot possibly satisfy this ‘one process’ criterion for kindhood, which means they cannot count as natural kinds even though he says they do. The ‘one process’ criterion is also incompatible with the claim that categories in the special sciences can sometimes count as natural kinds (5-7).

35 LeDoux argues that fear is mediated by a distinct neurophysiological system. But the situation may be more complicated than that. For example, Jerome Kagan argues that there may in fact be three distinct kinds of fear states, each subsumed by different brain systems (Galen's Prophecy: Temperament and Human Nature [Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1998], 96-112).

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38 There are interesting parallels between debates over the natural kind status of colors and emotions (in the plural) and color and emotion (in the singular). For example, Dennett, Daniel argues that ‘colors are not “natural kinds” precisely because they are the product of biological evolution’ (Consciousness Explained [Boston: little, Brown 1991], 381 n.2)Google Scholar. He writes: ‘if some creature's life depended on lumping together the moon, blue cheese, and bicycles, you can be pretty sure that Mother nature would find a way for it to “see” these as “intuitively just the same kind of thing'” (ibid.). According to him, biological evolution has a ‘tolerance for sloppy boundaries that would horrify any philosopher bent on good clean definitions’ (ibid.). Clearly, ‘sloppy boundaries’ do not bother Griffiths in the case of emotion. There are also interesting analogies between emotion and color. Like emotion, color is arguably an evolutionary category that requires an ecological level of explanation. See Thompson, E. Palacios, A. Varela, F. ‘Ways of Coloring: Comparative Color Vision as a Case Study in Cognitive Science,’ Beluruioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992) 1–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, E. ‘Color Vision, Evolution, and Perceptual Content,’ Synthese 104 (1995) 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Color is also subject to semantic and conceptual cross-cultural vicissitudes, as is emotion. See Dedrick, D. ‘Color Language, Universality, and Evolution: On the Explanation for Basic Color Terms,’ Philosophical Psychology 9.4 (1996) 497–524CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elimination seems implausible in the case of color for just the same reasons it is implausible in the case of emotion. Both terms allow us to group together phenomena which we otherwise might have no reason to do so. And both terms are also currently theoretically productive.