Explicating Emotions
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt EXPLICATING EMOTIONS by Andrea Scarantino B.S., Economics, Bocconi University, 1994 M.S., Philosophy of the Social Sciences, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1997 Ph.D., Economics, Universita’ Cattolica, 2000 M.A., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, 2005 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Andrea Scarantino It was defended on July 20, 2005 and approved by Paul Griffiths, ARC Federation Fellow and Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Queensland (Co-Director) Peter Machamer, Professor of Philosophy, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh (Co-Director) Bob Brandom, Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Ruth Millikan, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut (Outside Reader) ii Copyright © by Andrea Scarantino 2005 iii EXPLICATING EMOTIONS Andrea Scarantino, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 In the course of their long intellectual history, emotions have been identified with items as diverse as perceptions of bodily changes (feeling tradition), judgments (cognitivist tradition), behavioral predispositions (behaviorist tradition), biologically based solutions to fundamental life tasks (evolutionary tradition), and culturally specific social artifacts (social constructionist tradition). The first objective of my work is to put some order in the mare magnum of theories of emotions. I taxonomize them into families and explore the historical origin and current credentials of the arguments and intuitions supporting them. I then evaluate the methodology of past and present emotion theory, defending a bleak conclusion: a great many emotion theorists ask “What is an emotion?” without a clear understanding of what counts as getting the answer right. I argue that there are two ways of getting the answer right. One is to capture the conditions of application of the folk term "emotion" in ordinary language (Folk Emotion Project), and the other is to formulate a fruitful explication of it (Explicating Emotion Project). Once we get clear on the desiderata of these two projects, we realize that several long-running debates in emotion theory are motivated by methodological confusions. The constructive part of my work is devoted to formulating a new explication of emotion suitable for the theoretical purposes of scientific psychology. At the heart of the Urgency Management System (UMS) theory of emotions I propose is the idea that an “umotion” is a special type of superordinate system which instantiates and manages an urgent action tendency by coordinating the operation of a cluster of cognitive, perceptual and motoric subsystems. Crucially, such superordinate system has a proper function iv by virtue of which it acquires a special kind of intentionality I call pragmatic. I argue that “umotion” is sufficiently similar in use to “emotion” to count as explicating it, it has precise rules of application, and it accommodates a number of central and widely shared intuitions about the emotions. My hope is that future emotion research will demonstrate the heuristic fruitfulness of the “umotion” concept for the sciences of mind. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE...................................................................................................................................... x 1. INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................. 1 1.1. WHAT IS AN EMOTION?............................................................................................ 1 1.2. HISTORY ....................................................................................................................... 3 1.3. METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................... 4 1.4. THEORY CONSTRUCTION........................................................................................ 5 1.5. PLAN .............................................................................................................................. 7 2. EMOTIONS AS FEELINGS ............................................................................................. 12 2.1. FEELINGS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD ................................................................... 13 2.1.1. Aristotle................................................................................................................. 13 2.2. FEELINGS IN THE MODERN WORLD.................................................................... 18 2.2.1. Descartes............................................................................................................... 18 2.2.2. Hume..................................................................................................................... 22 2.3. PHYSIOLOGICAL FEELINGS................................................................................... 29 2.3.1. James and Lange................................................................................................... 29 2.4. CONCLUSION............................................................................................................. 35 3. EMOTIONS AS BEHAVIORS ......................................................................................... 37 3.1. PSYCHOLOGICAL BEHAVIORISM........................................................................ 38 3.1.1. Watson and Skinner .............................................................................................. 38 3.2. PHILOSOPHICAL BEHAVIORISM .......................................................................... 44 3.2.1. Ryle....................................................................................................................... 44 3.3. CONCLUSION............................................................................................................. 49 4. EMOTIONS AS COGNITIONS ....................................................................................... 50 4.1. THE ARGUMENT FROM ABSENT CONSCIOUSNESS......................................... 51 4.1.1. Two Notions of Consciousness............................................................................. 51 4.1.2. Emotions without access-consciousness............................................................... 53 4.1.2.1. The Freudian unconscious ............................................................................ 53 4.1.2.2. The cognitive unconscious............................................................................ 55 4.1.3. Emotions without bodily phenomenology............................................................ 58 4.2. THE ARGUMENT FROM INTENTIONALITY ........................................................ 60 4.2.1. Kenny on formal objects....................................................................................... 61 4.3. THE ARGUMENT FROM DIFFERENTIATION ...................................................... 66 4.4. CONCLUSION............................................................................................................. 70 5. EMOTIONS AS ADAPTATIONS .................................................................................... 71 5.1. EMOTIONS AS SOLUTIONS TO FUNDAMENTAL LIFE TASKS........................ 72 5.1.1. Darwin................................................................................................................... 72 5.1.2. Tomkins ................................................................................................................ 78 vi 5.1.3. Ekman ................................................................................................................... 82 5.2. THE ARGUMENT FROM EVOLUTION................................................................... 86 5.2.1. The pitfalls of adaptationist thinking .................................................................... 86 5.2.2. The neurobiology of emotional appraisal ............................................................. 89 5.2.3. Facial expressions and evolution .......................................................................... 95 5.2.4. Critiques of Darwin’s universality thesis.............................................................. 97 5.3. CONCLUSION........................................................................................................... 104 6. EMOTIONS AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS ............................................................ 105 6.1. WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM?............................................................ 106 6.1.1. Two strands of social constructionism about emotions ...................................... 108 6.2. EMOTIONS AS CULTURALLY SPECIFIC SYNDROMES .................................. 111 6.2.1. Do emotions differ in different cultures?............................................................ 111 6.2.2. Do lexical emotion categories differ in different cultures? ................................ 115 6.2.3. Does cultural variation support social constructionism? .................................... 117 6.3. EMOTIONS AS SOCIAL ROLES AND INTERPERSONAL MOVES .................