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Bird Brains and Aggro Apes: Questioning the Use of Animals in the Affect Program Theory of Emotion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Chuck Stieg
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Abstract

It is a common assumption amongst theorists that the phenomenon of animal emotion supports the affect program theory of emotion. I argue that this assumption is mistaken by exploring two cases of animal emotion from studies in ethology: aggression in chimpanzees and fear in piping plovers. While the affect program theory fails to account for the cognitive complexity involved in each case, I do not argue for a cognitive theory of emotion. Instead, I suggest that paying attention to animal emotions helps the emotion theorist avoid the dichotomy between the extreme versions of the affect program theory and cognitive theories.

Type
Philosophy of Psychology
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 74 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2006 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers. Edited by Cristina Bicchieri and Jason Alexander , December 2007 , pp. 895 - 905
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

My thanks to Bart Moffatt, Ben Schulz, Jessica Slind, Katie Plasiance, Ken Waters, Mark Borrello, Susan Hawthorne, and Toben Lafrancois for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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